What rebuilding my business taught me about sustainability as a neurodivergent founder

I was recently featured by BusinessWire Essex after Hi This Is Bry was recognised in the UK Small Business Awards, but what I particularly liked about the feature was that it talked about what happened before the awards rather than treating the recognition as if it appeared from nowhere. You can read the full BusinessWire Essex feature here.

The article talks about rebuilding my company around neurodiversity, accessibility and more sustainable ways of working, which is probably one of the most important things I have done since starting Hi This Is Bry.

I had worked in agency and in house creative roles before starting my own business, and breaking into the industry had not always been straightforward. There were parts of working life I found difficult that I did not fully understand at the time, particularly unspoken expectations, office culture, confidence problems and the amount of energy I was using trying to behave in ways that other people seemed to find natural.

Getting my autism diagnosis gave me much more context for that experience, and eventually it also made me question how much of conventional business I actually needed to copy.

What was making traditional ways of working difficult?

A lot of business advice assumes there is one fairly standard person running the business, and that person apparently enjoys networking events, responds instantly to everything, happily jumps on unexpected calls, maintains a perfect routine, posts constantly, works normal office hours and has never once stared at an email for half an hour because they are trying to work out whether the sender is annoyed. I knew I could do the creative and strategic work, but some of the surrounding expectations were taking far more energy than they needed to.

Once I understood myself better, I became much more willing to change those things rather than treating every difficulty as evidence that I needed to become better at behaving like somebody else, that changed the way I communicated with clients, the way I structured projects, the type of work I accepted and how I thought about growth.

What does a sustainable business actually mean to me?

I use the word sustainable here to mean a business you can realistically continue running without repeatedly exhausting yourself to maintain it, that sounds extremely obvious when you put it like that, but plenty of business advice encourages people to build around what they think they should be doing rather than what they can consistently deliver.

For me, creating something more sustainable meant becoming much clearer about how I work, building more structure around projects and giving myself flexibility where it genuinely helped.

It also meant thinking much harder about the services I offered. I did not want growth to depend entirely on saying yes to more work, working longer hours or constantly creating completely bespoke processes from scratch.

That thinking also influences my Brand Discovery Roadmap, where I help founders understand their audience, clarify their positioning and work out how their brand should be marketed and sold. I want those decisions to reflect the business somebody actually wants to run, because building a brand around something you absolutely hate delivering is probably not the best long term plan.

Why did accessibility become such a big part of my business?

Understanding my own needs also made me much more aware of the unnecessary barriers businesses create for other people.

Accessibility means making something usable by people with different needs and abilities, in my work, that can affect everything from the readability of a website to the amount of information somebody receives before they are expected to book something, a customer should not have to work unnecessarily hard to understand what you sell.

That principle benefits far more people than those with a particular diagnosis. Clear service descriptions help somebody who is anxious about spending money, somebody reading quickly on their phone, somebody using English as an additional language or somebody who simply cannot be bothered to decode six paragraphs of marketing waffle to discover how much something costs.

Digital accessibility became particularly important to me because websites and online services are often where somebody first encounters a business, and that means small decisions can determine whether somebody feels able to continue.

It is one of the reasons clarity plays such a large role in my web design and marketing services. A website still needs personality and good creative direction, but people also need to understand where they are and what they are supposed to do next.

Did making the business easier for me make it less ambitious?

No, and this was probably one of the more useful things I had to learn, I think there can be an assumption that making work more manageable means lowering your expectations, but my experience has been almost the opposite. Once less energy was disappearing into ways of working that did not suit me, I had more capacity for the parts of the business I am actually good at.

I could research more deeply, develop stronger strategies, spend more time improving services and take opportunities that genuinely helped the business grow.

The BusinessWire feature was published because that period of rebuilding was followed by my strongest quarter at the time, then recognition in the UK Small Business Awards for both branding and creative work.

I cannot neatly prove that changing one process caused one award, and I would be very suspicious of anyone who tried to sell business growth that way, but I can say that building the company around a way of working I could sustain made it much easier to keep doing good work.

Why do I work with other neurodivergent founders?

One of the things mentioned in the BusinessWire feature is that I work with neurodivergent founders as part of my wider client base, and I think my own experience inevitably affects the way I support them.

I understand why somebody might have a fantastic idea but struggle to organise all the moving pieces around it, why vague advice can be frustrating, and why traditional business environments can sometimes make a perfectly capable person feel as though they are doing everything wrong, I also do not assume every neurodivergent person needs the same things because that would rather defeat the point.

Someone might want more written information before a meeting, another person might process ideas better by talking them through, while somebody else may need help turning approximately 900 ideas into one business people can actually understand.

The useful part is being able to build some flexibility into the process rather than expecting every client to communicate and make decisions in exactly the same way.

Why does this matter beyond neurodivergent businesses?

I think plenty of small business owners could benefit from questioning how much of their business exists because they genuinely chose it.

People copy pricing structures because their competitors use them, offer services because everyone else does, join platforms they hate because somebody said they should be there, and gradually end up maintaining a collection of tasks they never consciously decided were important.

Sometimes those things are necessary, but sometimes they are just habits that have been passed from one business owner to another.

When I work on brand and visibility strategy, I am much more interested in what the business needs to communicate and which ways of reaching people make sense for the person running it. If networking brings in excellent clients and you enjoy it, wonderful. If networking leaves you hiding in the toilets wondering why you paid £25 for this experience, we can look at how your brand can become more visible in ways that suit you better.

What changed after I started working this way?

I became clearer about the type of work I wanted to do, the people I wanted to help and what I wanted the business to represent. Accessibility became part of the work rather than something added afterwards, and my own experience became useful context rather than something I needed to keep separate from my professional life.

That also affected the things I chose to do outside normal client projects. As the BusinessWire feature mentions, I have mentored younger creatives, supported neurodivergent students and contributed to work intended to give underrepresented people more opportunities within creative industries, those things make sense alongside the business I have built because they come from the same reason I wanted to work differently in the first place.

I know what it feels like to wonder whether you are simply bad at an environment that seems much easier for everyone else, and I would quite like fewer people to have to spend years thinking that.

What can another small business take from this?

You do not need to rebuild your entire company because somebody on the internet told you to create a morning routine at 5am and apparently became a millionaire shortly afterwards.

Start by looking at the parts of your business that repeatedly cause problems.

If customers regularly misunderstand an offer, rewrite it. If every project becomes difficult at the same stage, change the process around that stage. If one service takes an enormous amount of your energy but barely contributes to your income, decide whether it still deserves to exist.

You can also look at accessibility in exactly the same practical way. Read your website as though you know nothing about the business, check whether somebody can understand what happens after they enquire, and pay attention when people repeatedly ask you the same question.

The aim is to remove unnecessary difficulty for you and for the people trying to buy from you, that is a much more useful definition of sustainable growth to me than simply trying to do more every year.

FAQs

What is a neurodivergent founder? A neurodivergent founder is a business owner whose brain works differently from what is considered neurologically typical, which can include autistic people and people with ADHD. The term covers a broad range of experiences, so different founders may need completely different ways of working.

Can changing the way you work help a business grow? It can, particularly when existing processes are creating unnecessary work or repeatedly causing burnout. Improving how a business operates can give the owner more capacity to focus on customers, delivery and growth.

What does accessibility mean for a small business? Accessibility means reducing barriers that can make a product, service or communication difficult for somebody to use. For a small business, that could involve clearer website copy, readable design, better information before appointments or offering more than one reasonable way to communicate.

How can neurodivergent founders make business easier to manage? Start by identifying which parts of the business repeatedly require more energy than they should, then investigate whether the process itself can change. A useful business structure should help you deliver good work consistently rather than requiring you to constantly work against yourself.

Why I am glad I rebuilt the business

The BusinessWire feature reminded me that a lot of what has happened with Hi This Is Bry came after I became much more willing to question how I was running it.

Being a neurodivergent founder still comes with difficulties, and having your own business certainly does not make every annoying bit of work disappear, which is deeply inconsiderate of it. What changed was that I stopped assuming every established way of working deserved to stay simply because other businesses used it.

Rebuilding Hi This Is Bry around clearer communication, accessibility and a way of working I could realistically maintain gave me a much stronger business, and it also made the work feel much more like mine.

If you want to look at your own business in the same practical way, my free Business Visibility Playbook helps you assess your branding, website, social media and authority so you can see where something may be making your business harder to notice, understand or trust.