A year-in-review assumes you know when the year started. While no entrepreneurial journey has a clean start, mine is the day I left my last W-2.
Today, June 30, 2026, is the official anniversary of my entrepreneurial story. But Saorsa is really closer to two years old. It started in April 2024, when I started advising a friend’s business. Or maybe in June of 2024 when, I moved back to California with a decision that was certain and an uncertain career path alongside a folder of half-formed ideas, an unbuilt brand, and the sureness that I’d eventually work for myself. So, we can treat “one year” as a convenient fiction.
I’ve spent the past decade doing my best to walk through doors that open onto hallways with more doors. Ever since choosing to study economics over business every room I’ve entered has had more exits than entrances. Right now, I’m standing in the longest hallway I’ve ever seen, with more open doors in front of me than at any point in my career. Many founders to work alongside, problems to solve, a business to scale, or not scale, a Substack following I couldn’t have imagined, and I feel like I’m facing a problem that nobody warns you about. The reward for a good first year isn’t clarity. It’s optionality, and optionality at volume is its own kind of weight. It is exhilarating and faintly paralyzing in the same breath.
To explain where I am, and reflect on the lessons from this past year, I wanted to share my first year as an entrepreneur in enough detail to be useful for the aspiring or the veteran entrepreneurs in my audience.
The leap I tried not to take
Here’s the part of the founder story that usually gets overlooked: I really didn’t want to do it the hard way. (And I’ve come to really appreciate the elegance of employment allowing me to not do everything on my own)
After about 6 months working for a large energy research firm in sales, I was starting to get bored of the corporate life and wanted to start working with companies like I had done back at the investment firm. By early 2025, I started to do the preparation. I’d built a first draft of the website and brand, set up an email, and started networking again in earnest. I sent my first proposal that February. It went nowhere. Then in March, at a solo networking event during what was supposed to be a vacation, I got an offer to join a finance firm — and I took it, fast. I was genuinely excited to get back to working with business owners, and I was hungry for the mentorship I assumed would come from the founder. I told myself: this will solve it. The job would scratch the itch and I could shelve the entrepreneurial ambition.
It didn’t, and I couldn’t. Within about three months it was clear the firm wasn’t for me, and the mentorship I’d hoped for never really materialized. Then the tell arrived from an unlikely place. A prospect I’d pitched back in February — the one who’d passed — rejected the firm’s sales pitch but said, more or less, I’d still go for that proposal you sent me earlier this year.
That was the moment. FP&A and accounting are critical work, but I wasn’t being true to what I was actually capable of. I had a choice: reissue that proposal under someone else’s roof, or under my own. I chose mine and left on good terms — keeping a few billable hours on a contract I was already ramped up on, at friendly pricing, hoping to save the bridge by leaving a friendly arbitrage opportunity for them on my way out the door.
The lesson I’d offer anyone five years from their own leap: the comfortable detour is not a failure, but don’t mistake it for the answer. The job that “solves it” usually just reveals, more expensively and at risk of hurting relationships, what you already knew.
The luck I won’t take full credit for
I’ll say this plainly: I had a ridiculously lucky first year. I’d braced for several months of negative cashflow. Instead, nearly every probability landed in my favor. Hitting cashflow positive in month 1. Almost every prospect I had at the start became a client. I went from $0 to $165,000 in twelve months with nothing but my cost of living as capex.
But “lucky” still requires setting up the opportunities to get lucky. The dice landed well — after I’d spent a year loading them. I had primed the pipeline through months of networking I wasn’t getting paid for. I had a year of cash on hand, which let me price for relationships instead of for survival. I had near-immediate proof of revenue because I’d already done the unglamorous work of staying in front of the right people.
Consulting is capital-light, which is the massive structural gift here: my biggest input cost was time, and I’d been investing that time before there was any revenue to show for it. So, when people call a fast ramp lucky, I’d push back gently. Luck is what you call preparation when you don’t want to admit how much of the outcome you set up months earlier. The leap looked clean. The runway underneath it took two years to build.
The receipts
A year in, here’s what I can actually point to:
Four recurring clients, and recurring revenue north of $150,000 in year one from a standing start.
I helped a client work their way out of trouble with the bank on a revolving line of credit. This is the kind of problem where the work is the difference between a tough year and a closed business.
I helped another client find a genuinely more effective business model, not just a cleaner spreadsheet, they are now proudly on the verge of cashflow breakeven!
I signed a lease alongside one of my equity-based partners to open a manufacturing facility, skin in the game, not just advice from the sideline.
But the number I’m proudest of isn’t on that list. It’s retention. Coming into year two, I’m realizing that the easiest client I ever landed is the one I already have. In a business model built on multi-year relationships, the renewal is the whole game, and the fact that the work keeps compounding inside existing accounts is the strongest signal I have that the value is real. But like all stories, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.
The client I lost
The low point was losing my first retainer client at six months.
I’d started them at too low a price — a mistake of my own desire to win the deal — and their books simply weren’t strong enough to support the work I was trying to do. You cannot build rigorous financial analysis on top of weak accounting; the foundation won’t hold the weight. So, when I proposed bringing in a fractional controller to fix the underlying books and raising my fee to match a scope that kept expanding, the honest answer was that it wasn’t the right time for them. We parted on good terms.
It stung more than the math justified, because my whole model aspires to multi-year relationships, and a six-month churn was nowhere in the plan. But the more I sat with it, the more it read as a standards problem rather than a service failure. I wasn’t willing to keep performing analysis the data couldn’t support, or to undercharge for an expanding scope just to keep a logo. Walking away from work you can’t do well is, eventually, what protects the work you can. I’d rather lose a client at month six than deliver something I don’t believe in for three more years.
The pitch I had completely wrong
If I could mail one page back to myself on day one, it would be about the pitch — because mine was weaker than I thought, and arguably still is.
I came in leaning on trust and breadth, partially biased from my early warm pipeline. I want to add value in your business using finance or I’ll build you a financial model. Both sound reasonable. Both, it turns out, are weak. They ask the founder to take a leap of faith on a vague promise, and they lead with the deliverable instead of the problem.
What actually works best is the opposite. One broad service that solves many problems is a far worse pitch than I can solve your specific problem right now — and if we work well together, the next one too. Founders don’t buy a methodology. They buy relief from the thing keeping them up at night, and then they keep you around for the thing that comes after. I happen to thrive on flexible scope like this, on pointing all of my attention at the single sharpest problem in front of a business. It took me most of a year to realize that the thing I was best at was also the thing that sold. Lead with the problem. The relationship earns you the breadth later. The pitch that wins your first client is rarely the one that wins your tenth.
The hallway ahead
So where does that leave me, twelve months on?
Financially, almost exactly where I started: about the same W-2 paycheck and a similar cushion of cash, which is its own small victory given I expected to burn through a chunk of it. But I’m far more confident in the service I deliver and far more willing to price it at what it’s worth. I have ownership over my work, and the freedom to prioritize it to match my preferences, whether that’s because a friend needs help with a financial model or because a client needs the extra hours this week for an angel investor pitch.
The one thing that’s gotten harder: the low-hanging fruit is picked. My early pipeline was a lightly-dusted set of warm referrals, and I’ve now leveraged most of it. The next year isn’t about proving I can do the work. It’s about building a real sales channel for a business that, until now, has grown mostly on reputation and luck, leaning more into systematic channels and less into relational chance, mainly to find out whether I have a real business here or just a well-paid series of jobs.
But that framing assumes the only answer is “more clients,” and the doors in front of me aren’t all the same kind. Some extend the business I’ve built, this gets at the same repetition process efficiencies and scale that my previous article discussed. I could keep finding clients the way I always have, through aggressive networking and events, or I could lean into digital marketing and confront the question directly: if growth isn’t systematic, is it really a business?
Other doors don’t concentrate the business, instead widening it. Instead of adding clients, I could pour those same hours into a single bet: accelerating growth at the equity-partner client where I already have skin in the game, or backing a friend’s promising SaaS startup, or treating Conduit of Value as more than a calling card and building it into a real media presence with its own revenue. Each of these means trading depth for breadth, and the optionality of many small relationships for the conviction of one.
And then there are the doors that lead out of services entirely, toward deploying capital and the kind of problem that outlasts a client engagement. Starting a membership-based investment club or angel group to underwrite deals and land more capital locally. Raising a small fund to lend to and invest in the small businesses I already understand. Or doing something real in housing development — a genuinely important problem in the community I live in here in San Francisco. These are not the same magnitude of choice as “attend more events.” They’re a different life.
That range is exactly the weight I started this essay describing. The hallway isn’t just crowded. The doors open onto different lives, and you can’t tell from the threshold which rooms are worth the walk. But that is the fun of entrepreneurship, isn’t it.
Which brings me back to the doors. The first year was about getting one open and walking through it. The second is about choosing which of the many doors are worth it. That’s a better problem than the one I had two years ago, staring at a single uncertain door wondering if it would open at all.
I don’t have this hallway figured out yet. But I’ve learned that the work isn’t finding the door. It’s having the nerve to keep walking when every room you enter just reveals more of them. Onward.