Building a Business with Care: On Accidental Entrepreneurship
I didn’t plan to start a business, and I didn’t set out to become an entrepreneur. There was no grand vision of building a company, no long-term roadmap, no appetite for founder culture.
My undergraduate degree was in design, and I assumed, as most people did, that I would work in a studio. After graduating, I surprised myself by returning to study. I moved back toward the roots of why I had been drawn to creative work in the first place, completing a postgraduate degree in art history and museum curating.
What I didn’t expect was that this way of thinking would eventually take me in a different direction altogether. After a period of working in London as a designer, I found myself increasingly unable to reconcile the work I was doing with the values I wanted to live by. I was burned out, managing chronic illness, and aware that the systems I was working within had very little flexibility or care built into them.
Freelancing began as a way to regain some control over my time, my health, and the kind of work I took on. Only later did it solidify into something more recognizable as a business.
If you arrived here because something about the way work is usually done felt misaligned, rather than because you dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur, this story may feel familiar.
Learning to work with meaning
My early professional work sat across museums, galleries, and heritage sites. Often, it lived at the intersection of research and digital design: immersive, interactive exhibitions that translated physical collections into online experiences.
The work was never about making something louder or more impressive. It was about guiding people through complex topics without overwhelming them. Deciding what to foreground and what to hold back, learning how to create a sense of coherence so that someone could enter unfamiliar territory and feel oriented.
That curatorial way of thinking shaped me deeply. Only much later did I realise how clearly it would surface in my approach to branding and design.
When the expected path no longer fit
Eventually, I moved to London and returned to working as a designer. On paper, it looked like the logical next step. I learned a great deal during that period, both technically and professionally. But I also began to feel a growing sense of misalignment.
Some of the work exposed me to a scale of excess that felt uncomfortable to participate in. Not because of individual clients or personalities, but because of the values being served. The distance between the effort involved and any meaningful impact beyond status or profit felt increasingly stark.
At the same time, I was burned out. London was demanding, and managing chronic illness alongside agency work was exhausting. I felt creatively constrained and ethically uneasy, even if I couldn’t yet imagine what an alternative might look like.
Accidental entrepreneurs don’t begin with ambition
I think this is where accidental entrepreneurship begins. Not with ambition, but with friction.
Many people who end up running businesses did not wake up wanting to “be in business.” They noticed something that didn’t sit right in the world: a gap, inefficiency, or injustice. In short, a misalignment between how the world works and how it could work.
For me, that moment of clarity came during Covid. I was already doing freelance brand work at the time, but suddenly I was meeting so many talented, thoughtful people whose work was constrained by circumstance. People with depth and skill who couldn’t fully share what they were building because professional branding and web design felt financially out of reach.
Mental health. Physical health. Parenthood. Care responsibilities. Precarious income. This was the reality for many of the people doing the most meaningful work I encountered.
From bespoke work to shared resources
That period fundamentally changed how I thought about my role. Up until then, my work had been primarily bespoke: one-to-one services, custom solutions, deeply considered but inherently limited in who they could reach.
Covid made the limitations of that model more visible to me. I didn’t want to stop doing bespoke work, but I did want to lower the barrier to entry for people who couldn’t access it. I wanted to create resources that offered design, thoughtfulness, and structure, without requiring someone to have perfect circumstances or a large budget.
That’s when Studio Founded began to shift from being purely service-based into a growing resource library, with the aim of making professional tools more accessible, and to support people to build businesses around their lives.
What non-business people bring to business
Accidental entrepreneurs often bring a different sensibility to the work. People who come from design, art, education, research, or care professions tend to approach business less as a system to be shaped, and often with care. They are often more attentive to ethics, sustainability, and impact because they didn’t enter business to dominate it.
They ask different questions:
Who does this serve?
Who does it exclude?
What assumptions are built into this model?
What would make this easier, fairer, more humane?
This perspective doesn’t always fit neatly into conventional business narratives, but it produces work with integrity.
Making space for different kinds of contribution
Accidental entrepreneurship has allowed me to hold these concerns together rather than compartmentalise them.
I don’t believe everyone should start a business. And I don’t think accidental entrepreneurs are inherently better than intentional ones.
But I do believe that many people arrive in business because they want to change something they see as broken, and that motivation brings with it a different kind of leadership, rooted in observation, care, and responsibility.
This piece is part of my ongoing exploration into branding as cultural commentary. I’m Hannah Shaw, founder of Studio Founded, a design practice and resource library for founders.
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