Seven Years of 3 Little Birds Finance: On Milestones, Survival, and Why Comparison Will Steal Your Joy
Seven years ago, I woke up and resigned.
Not a planned career move. I woke up one morning, and I knew something had to change.
My therapist and my doctor had both been telling me that my job was making me worse. I was struggling with depression and an illness that would take years to diagnose properly, masked by what doctors kept dismissing as menstrual issues and eventually labelled as chronic fatigue syndrome. In 2024, after years of being palmed off, I finally got the real answer: colon cancer and adenomyosis. Major surgery followed. I am now recovered 🥳.
But in 2019, I did not know any of that. I just knew I had to leave.
So I did. With no business plan, no financial cushion beyond a mortgage I already had, and enough energy for about two days of work a week, I started 3 Little Birds Finance. Two clients followed me from my previous work, and they became my foundation. I am still grateful for them.
What those first years actually looked like
Flexible days and weeks sound idyllic. The reality was that flexibility was a medical necessity, not a lifestyle choice. I built this business around what my body would allow. There were months where I genuinely wondered whether I would need to go back to employment just to afford to live. I did not have much. I still do not pay myself the salary that would fund a life of luxury. But I built something, slowly, on my own terms.
Then Covid happened. The world stopped, and my business grew. I had joined an online female founder community, and overnight, it felt like everyone needed what I was offering. I had also just separated from my then partner, which meant I had nothing but time and a sofa and a business to build. So I built it.
I was running a growing accountancy practice, supporting clients through one of the most financially frightening periods in living memory, while quietly managing an undiagnosed serious illness that we would not have a name for until five years later.
That is not a detail I share for sympathy. I share it because it matters to what comes next.
Milestones are not what the highlight reel shows you
We live in an age of the curated milestone. The funding round announcement. The six-figure revenue post. The team photo on moving into the office day. Social media has made it very easy to compare our internal experience to everyone else’s external presentation, and to find ourselves falling short.
But milestones are not one size fits all. For some founders, a milestone is hitting a revenue target. For me, in some years, the milestone was simply still being here. Still having clients. Still being able to do work I believed in, on days when my body was fighting me and the diagnosis was still years away.
Those years count. Those quiet survivals count. The problem is we rarely stop to acknowledge them, because we are already looking at what comes next, or worse, at what someone else already has.
Why comparison is the wrong measuring stick
When you compare your journey to someone else’s, you are comparing your whole story to their edited highlights. You do not see the years they nearly quit. You do not see the health battles, the relationship breakdowns, the months where the numbers did not add up. You see the milestone post, not the road that led to it.
Your journey is yours. The milestones that matter are the ones that were hard for you, in your circumstances, with your resources and your particular set of challenges. Surviving a year when survival was genuinely in question is a milestone. Your first client is a milestone. Paying yourself for the first time is a milestone. None of these is less valid because someone else is celebrating something bigger.
Seven years
3 Little Birds Finance was not planned. It was born out of necessity, built on two loyal clients and a lot of stubbornness, grown through a pandemic from a sofa, and sustained through years of illness I did not yet have words for.
It has become something I am genuinely proud of. Not because of any single milestone, but because of what it represents: work that fulfils me, clients I care about, and a community of women I get to be part of. Women building businesses, running charities, supporting others in front of and behind the scenes in film and science, finding their voice and their agency. Women who were anxious and overwhelmed when they found me, and who are a little less so now.
Seven years ago I woke up and resigned. I had no idea what I was starting.
I am so glad I did it. 💜