Building a business is about stamina. The kind that carries you through late nights, financial curveballs, and the moments when quitting feels like the easier option. And now, we’re getting real about what resilience looks like when things get tough.
Fuel for the Journey: Cultivating Grit and Resilience as an Entrepreneur brings together five people who have lived it, and built entire careers on it. They’ll make you rethink how you prepare for the hardest part of the founder journey: the stuff you can’t plan for.

Take Lottie Whyte. When she walked into the Dragons’ Den, most people expected a typical pitch. What they got instead was a masterclass in conviction. Her sharp, unwavering response to Steven Bartlett went viral, racking up over 15 million views and winning her the backing of Gary Neville and Sara Davies. Before the cameras, Lottie was building MyoMaster, a health and wellness brand that scaled to a £5 million run rate in just three years. And she did it on principles that cut through start-up noise: know your numbers, confront brutal facts, and be ruthless about focus. January 2025 saw MyoMaster hit its first six-figure profit month, a incredible milestone for most start-ups. For Lottie, resilience is clarity, discipline, and making hard calls when everything tells you to chase the shiny thing.
Then there’s Simon Bateman, who knows what happens when you measure success the wrong way. For years, he was the guy doing everything “right”. On paper, it looked like winning. Inside, he was running on empty. It took everything collapsing and a three-year deep dive into plant medicine for Simon to find a new definition of success. Out of that came Flow Brew, a functional mushroom brand created from a need to heal. Bootstrapped from day one, Simon has packed every order, fought through setbacks (including getting kicked off Amazon), and built a brand that’s as much about community and purpose as it is about product. His mission is to help people find balance, clarity, and energy without burning themselves out. His story is a reminder that resilience is not only grit. It’s awareness, the ability to stop, reset, and build from a place of purpose, not force.