Sparking smart habits: Six lessons on doing business for 2026

It is a new calendar year and soon a new year under the Chinese Zodiac: The Year of the Fire Horse. In Chinese culture, the horse symbolises loyalty, speed and strength, and when paired with the fire element (a combination which occurs only once every 60 years) it represents passion, transformation and leadership. Many view the Fire Horse year as a time to take action and implement change. But, every year’s qualities also have a downside. Such an intense period could also lead to burnout. As with all things in life, the key is to maintain balance.

Go slow, and then go slower some more (minimise cognitive load) 
In the first year of establishing a business, there can be an urge to run fast. Running fast after new business, building systems and infrastructure and even staff development. Because we wanted to deliberately pursue creative work (it requires space!) and work-life balance, we often had to go slower than we had hoped to.  Related to this, we also realised that everything takes longer than you think it will, one conversation may lead to a proposal in 3 months’ time, and may perhaps turn into work in 6 months’ time. 

Experiment, iterate and re-iterate (experimentation and feedback loops) 
We decided upfront to treat work as a mode of learning and experimentation, rather than just execution. We shifted from focusing solely on deadlines to increasing the insights we could gain about the way we do business along the way. This included saying yes to smaller projects outside our comfort zones, using them as rapid opportunities to reflect and bringing these insights back to our future work. You may recognise some of these ideas from The Lean Start-Up by Eric Ries. 

Focus on the work and not the vanity projects (salience and opportunity cost) 
Often, some of our most valuable lessons came from smaller, unexpected projects that weren’t necessarily on our vision board to begin with. Similarly, while we’ve created a website, LinkedIn page, an Instagram account and newsletter, we regularly remind ourselves that our work is not about website hits or social media likes. 

Explore non-time-based sources of revenue 
Being conscious of offering a balanced view, we are sharing our most painful lesson learnt during 2025. If you are a service business, your value offering and therefore income is highly dependent on the team’s time. The team’s availability can become the main constraint to growth, unless you are willing to grow your staff numbers. To grow and scale revenue (untied to staff numbers), you need other non-time-dependent sources of revenue. So, we’ve started to explore more steady, recurrent income sources. We will continue to ruminate on this lesson during 2026… 

Celebrate the big and small milestones along the way (positive reinforcement) 
Achieving success can feel amazing, but it’s the steps to a milestone that matter just as much as the actual achievement. We learnt that positively reinforcing each step in the right direction made our good results repeatable across different areas. To highlight our progress we consciously discuss small milestones. This time a year ago, we didn’t even have a bank account. 

Allow yourself the space to pivot or change your mind 
You don’t have to be tied to your particular business model if you see it isn’t working. Business frameworks can evolve and strategies can be adjusted. There would be no value in learning lessons or gaining insights if they didn’t lead to change.  

We want to end this newsletter with a book recommendation.  

We started 2026 reading Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg which explores behaviour change and the strategies that lead to lasting results. In the book, Fogg cracks the code on mastering new habits, explaining that real progress is made in small steps instead of dramatic changes.