What Running My Own Business Has Taught Me
By Sarah Petty, Founder Olive Business Partners
Two years ago I left a 20-year corporate career to build Olive Business Partners. I had senior finance experience across some of Australia's largest companies, a clear vision for what I wanted to create, and a reasonable amount of confidence that I knew what I was doing.
I knew quite a bit. I also had a lot to learn.
Here is what two years of building Olive has genuinely taught me.
1. It all comes down to relationships
This is the lesson that surprised me most, and the one I keep coming back to.
In a corporate environment, relationships exist inside the structure. You have a team, a peer group, a leadership network. Support is built in. When you step out of that and build something of your own, none of that comes with you. You have to build it from scratch and you have to do it while simultaneously running a business.
What I have learned is that relationships are not just important in small business. They are foundational. Relationships with clients, with strategic partners, with service providers who have expertise you need, with other founders going through the same challenges, with the people who champion your work even when you are not in the room. They drive sales, they open doors, and they are what you lean on when things are hard.
The other thing I have learned is that you have to be resourceful about building them. They do not happen automatically. You have to be deliberate, generous, and genuinely interested in the people around you, as a strategy and as a way of operating. The returns on that approach compound over time in ways that are hard to measure but are definitely felt.
2. You need to articulate your own value
In the early days of Olive, I underpriced my work. I knew my experience was strong, but translating that into a confident conversation about price was harder than I expected.
What changed was shifting from pricing based on time and effort to pricing based on the value delivered to the client. That reframe sounds simple but it’s the most effective change I made early on.
The other thing that sharpened over time was clarity around scope. What is included, what is not, what happens when the work expands beyond the original brief. These conversations feel uncomfortable at first. What I have learned is that the discomfort of having them upfront is nothing compared to the cost of not having them at all, to the client relationship, to the margin, and to the team delivering the work.
3. Build flexibility into your cost model
Olive runs on a flexible team structure. That flexibility has been one of the most important design decisions in the business. It allows me to scale up and down with client demand, access specialist capability when it is needed, and keep the cost base manageable while the business grows.
But flexibility only works if the structure underneath it is honest. Being upfront with team members about the business, about what is happening, about what I expect and what they can expect from me is what makes the model sustainable. People work well inside flexible arrangements when they feel informed and respected. They do not when they feel like just a variable cost.
4. Generosity is a business strategy
I do not hold back in what I give in blog posts, in masterclasses, in conversations with clients and contractors alike. Early on I wondered whether sharing too much would diminish the value of the paid work. The complete opposite has been true.
Generosity builds trust faster than almost anything else. The people who receive it remember it, refer it, and return it. It also reflects the mission behind Olive, that business owners deserve access to the kind of financial thinking that has historically only been available to much larger organisations. Giving that freely, wherever I can, is not a cost to the business. It is the point of it.
5. Running a business provides some of the hardest and most rewarding times
I want to be honest about this, because the founder narrative often skips it.
There have been moments in the last two years that were genuinely difficult. Moments of uncertainty, of self-doubt, of feeling alone in a way that is hard to describe to someone who has not experienced it. In a corporate role, there is always someone else sharing the weight. When it is your business, the weight is yours alone.
But there have also been moments of a different kind, moments where I have watched a client gain clarity over their finances and make a better decision because of it, where I have seen the direct impact of the work in a way that was never possible inside a large organisation. That direct impact, that connection between effort and outcome, is something I did not fully appreciate until I experienced it.
It is what makes this worth building.
The business keeps changing and so do I
Olive in year one looked quite different from Olive today. In the beginning it was largely me, doing most of the work, figuring out the model as I went. Today it is a team, a set of services that have been refined over time, and a clearer sense of where the business is headed.
The evolution has not always been linear. There have been pivots, experiments that did not land, and decisions I would make differently now. But the direction has stayed consistent, to build a firm that gives scaling businesses access to genuine financial expertise, and do it in a way that reflects the values I started with.
As I look ahead to what comes next, the ambition is to continue to grow the reach and the impact. More businesses supported, more owners with the financial clarity they need to build something that works for them.
Two years in, I am more certain than ever that this is the right thing to be building. And I am only getting started!
Sarah Petty is the Founder of Olive Business Partners and has worked with businesses at every stage of growth, from early-stage startups to multi-billion-dollar global organisations. She brings CFO-level thinking to small business owners who want clarity, control and a business that actually makes money. Sarah is known for making finance practical, commercial and also human.