Becky Benfield-Humberstone Business Coaching

Herb salt. Who knew. It’s my latest exploration into seeing what I can do with produce from my garden.
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Sage, oregano, basil, each one dried from the garden, ground with salt into something that looks deceptively simple sitting in a jar and tastes completely extraordinary the moment it touches food.
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A pinch of sage salt on roasted potatoes. A jar of basil salt next to the tomatoes. Oregano salt on almost everything else, I suspect, once I've worked out what it loves best.
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I'm still testing. Still figuring out which recipe unlocks each one. That's half the joy of it, the curiosity of not quite knowing yet, the small experiments, the moment something lands and you think, yes, that's the one.
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I know the family will be getting a pot each at Christmas. The real one, in December (not June!!). A small jar of something made from this specific summer, from this specific garden, that will taste like August long after August has gone.
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It's the tiny things that transform everything. A pinch of something you made yourself, added to something ordinary, and suddenly it's completely different.
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That's the whole principle, really, in the kitchen and everywhere else.
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Stay curious. Keep experimenting. The best discoveries are almost always hiding in the smallest things, including your business.

Setting up a business can take minutes. My personal record is 10 minutes flat.
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The company name, the domain, the bank account, all the mechanics of starting are genuinely that simple. And yet most founders spend years feeling like they're doing it wrong, because the hard part was never the starting. It was figuring out how to build it the way they actually wanted to build it, rather than the way everyone kept telling them to.
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Most business advice isn't bad advice. It's just advice built for a specific kind of business, one that scales, has tiers, grows a team and maximises revenue and follows the prescribed model from start to exit.
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And if that's not the business you want to build, the advice doesn't just not fit.
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It pushes you in entirely the wrong direction, firmly and persistently, until you're building something that works on paper and feels wrong in practice.
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The business you actually want — the one that changes your corner of the world, on your own terms, in a way that fits your life rather than consuming it — isn't built by following someone else's blueprint.
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It's built by finding yours.

If it's quiet at the moment — in your business, on your feed, in your own head — I want you to know something.
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It's not a failure. It's an inhale.
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Summertime is in full swing. People are on holiday, homes have become childcare, people are making memories and business has taken a back seat.
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It's what happens every summer, every year. It doesn't mean it's wrong.
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We've been taught to associate silence with stagnation, to read a quiet spell as a sign that something has gone wrong, that we're behind, that everyone else is moving and we've somehow stopped. And so we push through the quiet, filling it with content and activity and the performance of progress, because stopping feels dangerous.
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But some of the most important work happens in the quiet.
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The thinking that can't happen when you're always producing. The recalibrating that only comes when you stop long enough to see where you actually are. The finding of what you want to say next, rather than what you feel you should be saying.
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The quiet spell is a gift. A chance to breathe, to look around, to take stock of how far you've come and where you want to go next.
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It doesn't mean you're failing. It doesn't mean you're behind. It doesn't mean the business isn't working.
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It just means you're between chapters.
And the next one is coming.

Every founder I've ever worked with had a different problem AND the same one.
A tech founder who had forgotten to ask whether anyone actually wanted what they were building.
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An AI founder waiting for clients who weren't coming, with no clear plan for how to find them.
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A branding agency doing brilliant work that could have belonged to anyone.

Different industries. Different stages. Different challenges on the surface.

But underneath all three, it was the same thing.
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A vision that hadn't been made specific enough yet to make the right decisions from.
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That's what I've found across every founder I've worked with.
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The surface problem is rarely the real problem.
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The branding isn't working because the vision underneath it isn't clear enough.
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The clients aren't coming because the offer isn't specific enough.
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The app isn't solving anything because nobody stopped to ask what the problem actually was.
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The real work is never the tweak. It's the thing underneath the tweak.
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And when that's clear, when you know exactly what corner of the world you're here to change and why it matters, everything else has something solid to stand on.
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That's where we start.

Fake it until you make it never sat right with me. And I think for a lot of founders, it doesn't sit right with them either.
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Not because confidence isn't important — it is — but because faking something implies performing a version of yourself that doesn't exist yet, and for a founder trying to build something genuinely, specifically theirs, that performance is exhausting before you've even started.
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You're spending energy on the act of appearing ready instead of the act of actually beginning.
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What I believe is that you don't need to fake anything. You need to do the thing.
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Confidence doesn't arrive before you start. It arrives because you started. The skills you're waiting for, the answers you think you need before you can begin, the questions you're trying to prepare for — you can't prepare for questions you don't know yet. And waiting doesn't bring them any closer.
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The only way to find out what you actually need is to move and figure it out on route. The gaps become visible once you're moving. The questions reveal themselves in the doing. The skills arrive through the specific, real, sometimes messy experience of building the thing.
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They were never going to arrive before it.
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Do it until you make it. That's not a compromise on fake it, but a completely different philosophy.

I write in longhand before I ever touch a keyboard.
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It’s always in a sketchbook I use like a notebook (thank you The Works) and always with the same fountain pen, a leaving gift from my team at IWM Duxford when I left in 2020. It’s one of the most used things I own.
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There's something that happens in the hand that doesn't happen on a screen.
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The thinking is slower, which sounds like a disadvantage until you realise that slower thinking is often better thinking.
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Ideas arrive sideways, through the act of writing rather than before it. The hand follows the thought rather than racing ahead of it, and the pen never deletes what it's just written, which means nothing gets lost before it's had a chance to become something.
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The keyboard edits as it goes whereas notebook just listens.
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I love it most for planning, the drawing of boxes, the arrows connecting things, the visual map of an idea that you can see and feel all at once on a single page. No scrolling, no tabs, no version history. Just the thing, in front of you, exactly as you made it.
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Writing researchers have found that the hand accesses different parts of the brain than the keyboard does. I don't know the neuroscience well enough to explain it precisely, but I feel it every time I open the notebook, something arrives that wouldn't have arrived otherwise.
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Finding the process that's actually yours, rather than the one everyone else uses, can change what you produce.
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The notebook and the fountain pen are mine. What's yours?

You can do it all, despite what everyone tells you.
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The key is not doing it all at once.
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Most founders I work with aren't short of ideas but they're short of a way to choose between them, one that doesn't feel like a coin flip or a compromise.
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Which one do I start with? What happens to the others? What if I choose wrong?
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On 29th July I'm running a free 90-minute workshop called: "You Can Do It All: How to Choose Where to Start" and we're going to answer all of those questions.
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You'll leave with every idea mapped out and visible, a clear framework for choosing between them, and a decision as to which one goes first and what the first move looks like.
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The others don't disappear. They just find their place in the sequence.
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So if you're trying to figure out how to do it all, join us here: https://www.beckybenfieldhumberstone.com/workshop

See you there (or be square!)

"I don't have time" is one of the most common things I hear from founders.
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And I understand it completely.
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Your days are full, your to-do list is long and the emails keep coming. There is genuinely nowhere to put anything else.
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What I know is that the founders who feel like they have no time are almost always the busiest ones, but busy isn't the same thing as moving forward.
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Busy on the wrong things is just circling. It feels like progress because it fills the day. It looks like hard work because it is hard work. But at the end of the week, nothing has actually moved. The thing you actually want to build is still exactly where you left it.
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"I don't have time" isn't a fact about your week. It's a fact about what's sitting at the top of your priority list, and what isn't.
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Nobody finds time. They make it, for the things that feel real and specific and genuinely theirs. When you're clear on what you're actually building and why it matters, the right things become obvious.
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And the wrong things — the ones filling your days and making you feel busy without making you feel like you're going anywhere — start to fall away.
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It's not about finding time.
It's about getting clear enough that you stop losing it.

Writing fiction taught me something that coaching couldn't.
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That we are all, always, telling ourselves stories.
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Some of them are useful, like the story that says you're capable of building something remarkable. or the one that says the corner of the world you're here to change is real and worth changing.
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And some of them aren't. The story that says you're not ready or the timing is wrong or that someone else could do this better.
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What writing fiction taught me about those stories is that you wrote them, which means you can write different ones too.
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In fiction, the author decides what's true. For example, which version of events matters, which story gets told and which one gets left on the cutting room floor.
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The characters don't get to override that. The author does.
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You are the author of the stories you tell about your business. The ones that drive you forward and the ones that hold you back. The ones you inherited from someone else and never thought to question. The ones you wrote so long ago they feel like facts now.
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They're not facts but stories.
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The most important work any founder can do, before any of it, is to figure out which stories are worth keeping and which ones were never really yours to carry.
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That's what changing your corner of the world actually requires: a new story.