"It's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur" is a cliché when said from the outside. From the inside, it is just true.
I realised I had a chance at building a business when I saw that AI could work on both sides of it. The software, yes, that was the easy part. But also the pricing, the positioning, the terms of service, the cold-outreach drafts. One ally, working on most of what I need, for the cost of one subscription.
For most of my working life, starting a business meant having the capital to hire the skills you did not have. You needed someone to build the product. Someone to handle the legal work. Someone to do the marketing. If you could not pay those people, you did not start.
The gate has moved. The capital required has collapsed, and the skill required has changed. What you need instead is the ability to work with AI the way you would work with a team. That is a different kind of learning from the one most of us were trained for.
Teammate, not tool
Last week I put BeWell IT through Cyber Essentials, the UK government-backed certification with five technical controls and a formal questionnaire that penalises vagueness. For a one-person company this is usually a few days of auditing what is running, writing policies, mapping controls to reality, and typing careful answers into a form.
I did it in one focused afternoon with Claude as my teammate. Not "Claude did it for me". The distinction matters. Every scope and judgement call was mine: which services are in scope, how business data is isolated and secure, what my actual setup looks like. Claude walked me through the evidence pack I had prepared over several evenings, drafted paste-ready answers in my voice, and suggested improvements in real time. During one question on vulnerability awareness, Claude proposed I subscribe to the NCSC Early Warning service right then. It took 60 seconds and strengthened three later answers. Later in the session, Claude caught an inconsistency in my cloud services list before it landed with the assessor.
It is not prompt-and-regenerate. It is closer to a tight editor-author loop. When I said "the form will not accept semicolons", that rule held across the remaining 40 answers without my asking again. When I replaced my address with "Registered Office", Claude stopped repeating the address everywhere.
The cognitive load got distributed. The authority and truth stayed with me. The output was better than either of us would have produced alone.
The biggest question is you
Even with the gate moved and the teammate in place, the hardest question is not about AI. It is about you.
Is this aligned to your situation? Financial security, working style, the shape of your life. Are you open to constant learning in an environment that keeps shifting? These questions have to be answered before anything else matters.
For me, the biggest piece of the unlearning was the move from being an employee. When you work inside a company, compartmentalisation rules apply. You have a function. You hand things off at the edges. That freedom from the edges was part of what drew me to running my own business. It is also what makes it demanding. As a one-person company, you wear many hats in the same day.
The second piece is admitting that you do not know everything, and you do not need to. As a micro-business owner, I know what I know, what I do not know, and what I need. Advisors fill the gaps. Their role is two-fold: gentle support on the learning trajectory, and encouragement and probing to make things happen. The business exists because of a group of people, not because of one person.
Having a pull
None of this works without a pull. Not a push. A pull.
The intrinsic pull is the wanting to do it, the looking forward to getting up in the morning. Either you have it, or you know you do not. It is not something you can talk yourself into.
The extrinsic pull is quieter. It is the people who trust you to deliver. Eibhlin Johnston is one of mine. So are my advisors: Deepti Behl, Nick Loizos, Gill Johnson, Gayatri Abbott, Urban Nilsson. Supportive cheerleaders, available when I have needed them. Not with answers. With presence. That turns out to be the thing that keeps the work moving.
AI has dramatically lowered the barrier of entry. Now is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be bold and try.
Do you feel both excited and a little scared to try to realise your full potential? If so, do you have a safety net in place? If you do, go for it. Life is too short to leave dreams on the table.