Coney Street, York
People often assume the hardest part of running a small business is getting started.
In my experience, the more difficult phase comes later, when the business begins
to grow. The Poetry Pharmacy started as a single, experimental shop in a small market
town. I was there every day, talking to customers, prescribing poems, making
products, packing orders, and responding instinctively to what people needed.
Decisions were quick. The feedback loop was immediate. If something worked, I
could feel it. If it didn’t, I adjusted.
Growth changes the nature of decision-making entirely.
Today, the Poetry Pharmacy operates across multiple sites, makes its own products,
supplies stockists, and supports a long-running editorial collaboration with a major
publisher. From the outside, this looks like a straightforward success story. From
the inside, growth has been the most demanding and precarious stage of the
business so far.
The first surprise is financial. Growth requires money long before it generates it.
New premises bring rent and fit-out costs before a single sale is made. Staff need
to be recruited, trained and supported before they can work confidently in a
values-led business. Stock must be produced months ahead, without certainty
about when it will sell. Turnover rises, but margins often tighten. Cash flow
becomes more delicate just as responsibility increases.
This creates a strange contradiction. A business can look healthy on paper while
feeling fragile in practice.
Another reality of growth is how it is financed. For many small businesses,
expansion still relies on founders offering personal guarantees rather than
borrowing being contained within the business itself. That expectation feels very
different in your sixties than it does earlier in life. There are forms of risk I was
once willing to take that no longer feel responsible, particularly when the business
already supports other people’s livelihoods. That reality inevitably shapes how
carefully and deliberately growth must be approached.
The second challenge is systems. What works well in one place does not
automatically scale. Processes that once lived in my head now have to be written
down, shared, and trusted to others. When a business is built around care,
attentiveness and human connection, translating those values into systems takes
time. You are not just passing on tasks. You are trying to pass on some learned wisdom and judgement.
I have been fortunate to be mentored and encouraged by people with far more
experience of scaling values-led businesses, including Mark Constantine at Lush.
That support has been invaluable in showing what it looks like to hold ethics, care
and long-term thinking at scale. At the same time, learning from a much larger
organisation has raised my own standards and expectations. Some of those
practices are deeply aspirational, but also difficult to achieve inside a small business
with limited resources. Working day by day within that gap, between what you believe in and what you can realistically sustain, is another quiet pressure of growth.
At the same time, the founder’s role changes. I can no longer be everywhere or do
everything myself.
Yet I am more responsible than ever. I hold the long-term vision, but together with my partner Jim, we are also responsible for wages, leases, suppliers, and the livelihoods of a growing team. That combination of strategic distance and practical accountability is difficult to explain to people who have not experienced it.
There is also an emotional shift that is rarely acknowledged.
In the early days of a business, uncertainty is expected and often shared. During growth, there is an unspoken assumption that confidence should replace doubt. In reality, the
questions simply become larger and slower to answer. Decisions carry more
weight. The work can feel lonelier, even as the business becomes more visible.
One of the most counterintuitive lessons I have learned is that growth does not
always call for acceleration. Sometimes it calls for restraint.
As we prepare to open a new shop in York, I am confident that the business case is
sound. I believe the shop will pay its way. The real challenge is not long-term
viability, but timing. The first quarter of any new opening is cash-intensive, energy-
heavy, and emotionally demanding. Treating that period as a test of success or
failure would be a mistake. It helps me to understand it as a bridge that needs
supporting while it is crossed.
For a small, values-led business, consolidation is not about retreat. It is about
protecting what already works. It means pausing initiatives that are not revenue-
critical, keeping ranges tight, resisting unnecessary complexity, and allowing a new
site to grow into itself rather than insisting on perfection from day one.
There is a persistent narrative in business culture that growth should feel exciting
and expansive.
When it feels anxious instead, founders often assume something is
wrong. My experience has been that this anxiety often appears when something
meaningful is being built and responsibility increases faster than certainty.
This phase is not failure. It is a transition. The work now is not to grow faster, but
to grow carefully, so that what has been built can last.
Deborah Alma - January 2026