The great irony of entrepreneurship is that the people who benefit most from small businesses, landlords, local suppliers, tradespeople, councils, are often the ones who create the most friction.
DEATH BY A 1000 CUTS
Chapter 5 – The Road Blocks
Entrepreneurs are rarely built in boardrooms. Most of them begin as idealists, quiet ones, even shy ones, who believe they can make something better than what already exists. Mandy is one of those. A Peter Merrett type, in the Wonderlicious mould (Merrett, P., 2025. Wonderlicious: Bringing wonder back to life, leadership and service. Dean Publishing): obsessed with experience, attentive to detail, believing that the way you made someone feel mattered just as much as the service you delivered.
To her, a clinic wasn’t just a room with a treatment table. It was a refuge. A transition point. A place where people arrived carrying stress and left carrying hope. She wanted that experience to be seamless, comforting, warm, safe… a place designed with intention rather than slapped together because someone said, “That’ll do.”
But the world she had to build this dream in was not made in Merrett’s image.
It was a system built by people far closer to the Trump school of existence, capitalism at its most distilled, most unapologetic, most self-interested, puritanical if you will. The kind of worldview where success is measured not by what you create, but by how many people you can tower over while you take it. Where power isn’t about leadership but leverage. Where the game is only worth playing if someone else loses.
These were people who flexed their position not out of competence, but because making others bend gave them the rush they couldn’t find anywhere else. Small, territorial bullies in big chairs. Gatekeepers who delighted in saying no. People who would tell you, with a straight face, why something can’t be done, but never once offer even a hint of how it might.
They came from a world where every transaction has a winner and a loser, and the only rule is to make sure you’re never the latter. Where money is the scorecard and empathy is a weakness. Where “help” is something you sell, not something you give. Where the dreamer is easy prey and the idealist is a joke.
And into that world walked Mandy, practical, yes, but idealistic in all the ways that make her dangerous to people like them. Because she believes nobody gets left behind. She believes a business can be both profitable and humane. She believes that wellness is not a commodity but a responsibility. She believes in shared success, an idea that pure capitalism, the Trump flavour especially, treats like a punchline.
To the bullies, her worldview looks naïve. To Mandy, theirs looks empty.
Where they see clients, she sees people. Where they see margins, she sees outcomes. Where they chase extraction, she chases transformation.
And that difference, that ideological gulf, becomes its own kind of friction. Because Mandy isn’t just fighting for a business. She’s fighting against an entire philosophy that measures everything she values as worthless.
In their world, only one person wins.
In hers, everyone should. And that clash sits beneath every negotiation, every refusal, every demand for “commercial realism.” It’s not just cost versus cashflow. It’s not just dream versus reality.
It’s worldview versus worldview. Trump’s brand of capitalism versus Mandy’s belief that a rising tide is meant to lift all boats, not capsize the small ones.
This tension is what turns an already hard journey into something far more personal. Because Mandy isn’t trying to become them. She’s trying to build something in spite of them. And the fact they kept telling her it couldn’t be done only made her more determined to prove that it could.
And so, between the concept and the opening day sat an invisible battlefield.
Mandy had her ideal: a business built on care and elevation, on meeting clients with dignity, on crafting a space where the client experience wasn’t an afterthought but the centrepiece.
But standing between her and that vision were the gatekeepers, the permit officers, the landlord’s “project manager” with the ego of a failed game-show host, the tradie who thought intimidation counted as negotiation, the suppliers who responded to firm deadlines with a shrug and a smirk.
If Merrett wrote chapters on wonder, these people wrote footnotes on obstruction. They certainly weren’t in businesses where commercial office towers in London could win the World Customer Service Award two years running.
This wasn’t just the usual difficulty of business. This was a clash of philosophies: customer-first idealism versus ego-driven empire building. And Mandy found herself, again and again, having to justify wanting to do things properly to people whose only interest was asserting dominance.
She thought entrepreneurship would be about building something beautiful. Instead, she discovered it also meant standing up to people who hated that she cared more than they did.
This is where the Rumsfeld unknown unknowns come in, not the technical hurdles, not the structural surprises or the delays. But the psychological ambushes. The pettiness. The power plays. The way small men with clipboards and bigger egos turn straightforward tasks into tests of endurance simply because they can.
Every entrepreneur eventually learns that roadblocks aren’t just physical. They’re human. And some of them delight in being immovable.
Mandy’s journey from concept to opening wasn’t slowed by bad luck. It was hampered, deliberately, repeatedly, and with astonishing creativity, by people who didn’t like the idea of someone trying to build something better than the bare minimum they meant to deliver.
And in that collision, between Merrett’s wonder and Trump’s bluster, Mandy learned her hardest lesson yet: A good idea alone won’t get you there. Not when the road is full of people who believe their job is to make sure you never reach the finish line unless you bow first.
Mandy had always believed that business, at its heart, was an act of service. You created something because you wanted to make life easier, better, or more meaningful for someone else. It wasn’t naïve; it was the quiet backbone of every great brand. Peter Merrett built Wonderlicious on that idea, customer experience first, and it resonated with Mandy long before business ownership felt like a real possibility.
She consumed that philosophy the way some people read sacred texts. She internalised it. She shaped her vision around it. But once she stepped into the arena, she discovered that philosophy alone wasn’t enough to survive.
Because while Mandy was busy designing warmth, other people were designing walls.
The first roadblock didn’t announce itself. None of them did. They slipped in sideways, disguised as routine interactions, emails from landlords, calls from contractors, meetings with suppliers. And in each one, Mandy felt the same unsettling pattern: She cared. They didn’t.
She wanted excellence. They wanted compliance.
She wanted to build something beautiful. They wanted her to stop asking questions.
The clash was immediate and jarring.
The “Merrett mindset,” as Mandy thought of it, assumed everyone around her was working toward the same goal: creating something people would love.
But the “Trump world” she found herself in wasn’t about love; it was about leverage.
She would walk into a meeting ready to discuss the client flow experience, how the lighting should guide a client from the reception to the treatment room, how soundproofing mattered for trust, how scent and colour contribute to healing, and the man across the table would respond with:
“Yeah, but how much you prepared to pay?” Or worse: “You don’t need all that. This is how it’s done.”
It wasn’t advice. It was condescension wrapped in false authority.
They didn’t care about creating an experience. They wanted to assert dominance. Mandy wasn’t a client or a partner to them; she was an inconvenience who needed to be reminded of her place in the food chain.
And nothing inflates a small-time bully like watching someone with a dream try to get something done.
The deeper conflict wasn’t logistical, though those problems were real and endless. It was emotional.
Caring costs energy. And Mandy cared about everything.
She cared about the chairs clients would sit in, whether the curve of the reception desk felt welcoming, whether her equipment created comfort or anxiety, whether her space reflected the dignity she believed every client deserved.
But every act of care demanded another interaction with someone who didn’t.
She wasn’t fighting one roadblock; she was fighting dozens of micro-aggressions disguised as procedure: The contractor who dismissed her as “fussy.” The landlord’s representative who ghosted her for two weeks because she dared to ask for clarity. The bureaucrat who spoke to her like she was imposing by requesting information essential to compliance. The supplier who replied to her detailed order with a two-word email: “We’ll see.”
It was death by a thousand cuts before she even had a door to open.
And floating beneath all of this, pressing, urgent, inescapable, was the real reason she needed this clinic to work: Her children. Her need to build a home for them. A real home. One with permanence, roots, and safety.
That need put steel in her spine, but it also amplified every setback. Every delay wasn’t just a delay; it was a threat to the one thing she was fighting hardest for.
When a bully flexed against her, he wasn’t blocking a business plan. He was blocking a mother. And that transformed the stakes completely.
Here’s the part every entrepreneur eventually learns, usually through bruises rather than lectures: Most obstacles aren’t practical. They’re personal.
Not your personal flaws, their personal failings. Their insecurity. Their ego. Their incompetence. Their delight in being the choke point.
Mandy would present a detailed plan, clear, thoughtful, professional, and be met with a smirk from someone whose only credential was being in the position to say “no.” And that is the great unspoken truth of the Rumsfeld “unknown unknowns”: the worst ones have names.
The plumber who never returned calls. The sparkie who added a zero to the quote because he thought she looked desperate. The permit officer who cared more about being obeyed than being fair. The landlord’s liaison whose job title might as well have been “Dream Extinguisher.”
These were the villains of her early journey, not dramatic enough for a Netflix documentary, but potent enough to threaten the future she was trying to build.
Mandy learned something crucial during this period, something every business owner eventually confronts: You can’t fight bullies with politeness. And you can’t build your dream using someone else’s standards.
The Merrett ethos of delight, care, and customer experience didn’t make her weak.
But it made her vulnerable to people who confuse kindness with surrender.
The turning point, subtle at the time, seismic in retrospect, was the moment she realised she wasn’t just building a clinic.
She was building a shield. Against mediocrity. Against ego. Against the people who wanted her to shrink so they didn’t have to grow. And from that moment, she stopped asking permission. She started demanding results.
Not aggressively. Not cruelly. But with quiet authority, the kind that unnerves bullies because they don’t know how to challenge conviction without theatrics.
For all the pressure Mandy faced, it wasn’t gendered in the stereotypical way people like to frame these things. Nothing about the barriers was uniquely female; it was far more universal and depressingly democratic.
The world doesn’t save its worst behaviour for women. It saves it for anyone who dares try to build something new.
Entrepreneurs of every shape, age, and background run into the same brick wall: the moment you step even slightly outside the role society expects you to occupy, employee, consumer, obedient participant, the system starts treating you like a threat.
And becoming an entrepreneur, even a small one, is an act of deviation. A quiet rebellion. A refusal to stay in your lane.
So the machine responds. Not with overt hostility, but with something subtler and more grinding: suppression. Mandy learned very quickly that the moment you try to stand up a business, even a tiny one, the peripheral business world activates around you like a swarm:
landlords exploiting your desperation; bureaucrats hiding behind process; suppliers using delay as leverage; contractors who treat you as a nuisance rather than a client; “professionals” who gatekeep information as a power play;m advisors who speak in riddles so you remain dependent.
None of this is uniquely aimed at women. It’s aimed at anyone who wants control over their own life.
But being divorced didn’t help. Divorce leaves an invisible residue in the eyes of the world. It shouldn’t. But it does.
There’s an unspoken prejudice in certain corners of business, the assumption that someone who has left, or been left, is somehow vulnerable, unstable, or ripe for exploitation. A person who will accept worse terms because they “need this to work.”
Mandy felt that judgement before anyone said a single word.
She saw it in the landlord’s tight smile when she mentioned she was setting this up alone.
In the contractor’s raised eyebrow when she said her partner wasn’t involved. In the way some men, never the good ones, spoke slower, louder, more deliberately, as if explaining the world to someone who had broken a rule and was now paying penance.
No one ever said, “Oh, you’re divorced, so here’s the inflated quote,” but you could feel it in the subtext, the way they probed her boundaries, tested her patience, and tried to insert themselves into her authority.
Divorce didn’t create the roadblocks. But it magnified the way the world tried to hold the door shut.
Still, none of this was “female-specific.” It was entrepreneur-specific.
You could replace Mandy with a 25-year-old single man, a 60-year-old retiree, or a father of four changing careers, and the same walls would appear. The same egos. The same obstructors. The same sinkholes of time and money.
The system is not built to encourage people to build things. It’s built to make them think twice. Because the people who keep the gears moving, landlords, gatekeepers, minor officials, mediocre contractors, rely on one thing above all: predictability.
Entrepreneurs are not predictable. They question things. They push. They imagine better ways of doing the very tasks these gatekeepers have made a living from performing poorly.
And that makes them dangerous.
So the suppression begins, not maliciously, not even consciously, but instinctively. A defensive reflex. And Mandy hit that reflex head-on.
What made it harder for her wasn’t being female, or divorced, or idealistic. It was being alone in the ring.
Every obstruction she faced required a decision she had to make herself. Every delay cost money she alone was responsible for finding. Every misstep was hers to absorb. Every bully was hers to neutralise.
When you’re part of a couple, people assume there’s someone else behind the scenes absorbing shock. When you’re alone, they assume you’re breakable. And some of them,
those in the Trump-end of the behaviour spectrum, want to see you crack.
Not because they have any stake in your failure, but because it reassures them that their own small lives remain intact.
The great irony of entrepreneurship is that the people who benefit most from small businesses, landlords, local suppliers, tradespeople, councils, are often the ones who create the most friction. They should be your ecosystem. Your support. Your local network.
Instead, they’re often the first group to make sure you learn your place. And the place they want you in is never above them.
At some point in this early journey, no single moment, just an accumulation, Mandy realised she wasn’t just fighting for a clinic.
She was fighting back against a system that: tolerates mediocrity, resists enthusiasm, despises high standards, and punishes anyone who tries to do things properly.
That’s the real shape of the “Roadblocks.”
Not the walls, the pipes, the wiring, the permits. But the people standing in the shadows of those things. Not out of malice, but because your success threatens the slow, comfortable gravity they’ve built their lives around.
Author
