Almost three decades have passed since I founded my own business - an urban planning consultancy - and began navigating the cycles that come with it: phases of growth and expansion, periods of decline or contraction, and stretches of gradual stabilisation. This trajectory has given me a concrete sense of what entrepreneurial life can look like when the initial excitement becomes everyday work, and how stress, uncertainty, and responsibility accompany decisions whose effects extend beyond one’s own life.

Entrepreneurial work is often associated with creativity, autonomy, and a certain degree of freedom, while at the same time involving uneven income, changing client flows, administrative demands, and decisions that are difficult to delegate. These decisions touch not only clients and collaborators, but also coworkers whose livelihoods and working conditions depend on how the business is organised. Stress, fatigue, and doubt appear as recurring elements in this landscape and become experiences that need to be recognised, interpreted, and integrated into the way one works.

When people speak of an “entrepreneurial mindset”, I prefer to understand it in a broad and realistic way. It involves perceiving connections between needs in the world and possible forms of response through a business or organisation, and engaging with risk and ambiguity in ways that keep movement possible. It includes testing ideas in practice, learning from feedback, and paying attention to how one’s own health, relationships, and environment are affected by business decisions. It is less a fixed personality type and more a set of orientations and skills that can be cultivated over time.

These orientations and skills can be learned and refined. People can become more familiar with uncertainty, more realistic in planning, more attentive to pacing, and more able to read setbacks as information about the situation rather than final judgments on their abilities. Practices such as establishing boundaries around work, organising routines that support rest, developing a workable financial structure, and building supportive relationships are not innate characteristics. They are elements that can be built, tested, and revised as experience accumulates. In coaching, such elements can be brought into view and discussed explicitly, instead of remaining in the background as vague ideals.

Ethical questions are present in this field from the beginning. Every decision about pricing, hiring, collaboration, communication, and growth shapes how workers are treated, how clients are supported or pressured, how communities are affected, and how ecological systems are used or protected. For me, ethics belongs to the core design of a business and influences which services are offered, how they are delivered, under what conditions people work together, and how responsibilities are distributed. A realistic view of entrepreneurship therefore includes attention to fairness, responsibility, and long‑term impact, rather than treating business decisions as exclusively technical.

This is one reason why I am drawn to the idea of a social economy. In that field, economic activity is oriented toward social and ecological wellbeing alongside financial viability, and organisations experiment with forms of ownership, governance, and distribution that foreground solidarity, equity, and care for environments. These experiments offer reference points for coachees who want to create something that participates in economic life while remaining accountable to the broader social and ecological world.

Coaching with coachees who are considering founding a business takes place within this landscape. Some arrive with a defined project, others with a more diffuse sense that they want to create something without yet knowing its form. In these conversations, my experience as an entrepreneur serves mainly as a resource for asking questions that open the situation rather than for giving advice or prescribing a path. We explore motivation, values, and hoped‑for effects through questions such as “Why this business?” “For whom?” and “Under which conditions?” We also map practical foundations: available time, financial runway, support networks, personal limits, and existing obligations, and we consider how small, low‑risk experiments might test parts of the idea before larger commitments.

My background in systemic thinking and geography/urban planning leads me to see businesses as embedded in wider structures rather than as separate, self‑contained projects. A business is situated within local economies, communities, and institutional environments; it occupies physical spaces and participates in ecological contexts. In coaching, this perspective supports coachees in considering how their business will interact with these systems, who is affected by their activity, how resources and responsibilities flow, and which patterns their business may reinforce or transform. The questions I ask are oriented toward clarifying these relations, so that coachees can make decisions that are more aligned with their own ethics and with the kind of social world they wish to contribute to.

I work from a combined position as coach and entrepreneur, but my task in these conversations is not to offer answers, but to create a space in which coachees can think through their situation with more precision, test their ideas against reality, and develop an entrepreneurial practice that is attentive to ethics, oriented toward the social world, and compatible with their own wellbeing.