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We crossed £100,000 in three months. Before it, my entire income was two consulting clients.
They both ended in the same week. The work was finished on both, signed off on both, invoiced on both, and neither one paid. That was not a bad month. That was everything I earned, gone inside seven days.
That is the point where the sensible move is to go and get a job. I sat with it for a while.
Instead we bought a van.
One van, a phone number, and a list of postcodes across West Yorkshire. No clients, no pipeline, no evidence at all that anyone in Leeds wanted what we were about to sell them. The first few weeks were quiet enough to be frightening, which is the bit that never makes it into the version of this story people tell afterwards.
Three months on from properly launching, Kruze has taken over 1,000 leads, crossed £100,000 in revenue, and gone from that one van to a fleet.
Here is the part I did not see coming.
Losing both clients in a week was the worst thing that had happened to me professionally. It is also the only reason Kruze exists. If either of them had paid on time, I would still be doing that work, I would have called it a good year, and there would be no vans.
I am not going to dress that up as a lesson about gratitude, because at the time it was just a bad week and a spreadsheet that did not work. But it is worth being precise about what actually got lost and what actually got in the way.
The money was gone in a week. Money is recoverable and it is also, oddly, the easy part. You can go and earn money.
What takes months to come back is the nerve. After something like that, every decision gets an extra layer of second-guessing bolted onto it. Every prospect looks slightly like the last two. You start writing contracts defensively instead of writing them quickly. You hedge, you delay, you keep the option open a bit longer than the option deserves. None of that feels like fear at the time. It feels like being sensible, having learned your lesson.
And that is the thing that decides whether there is a next business, not the bank balance. Plenty of people have the money to start something and do not, because the last thing cost them their appetite for risk and nobody sends you an invoice for that.
The only useful thing I did was act before the nerve had fully gone. Not bravely, and not because I had a plan. Mostly because standing still was unbearable and buying a van was something concrete I could do that week.
We are not finished. Taxi and cargo are both next.