I Run Four Businesses That Have Nothing to Do With Each Other. On Purpose.

People ask why I run four businesses that have nothing to do with each other. A credit-rating platform for small businesses. A pet-nutrition brand. A physiotherapy clinic. An advisory firm. The polite version of the question is “isn't that unfocused?” The honest version is “shouldn't you pick one and go all in?”

Here's my answer: it isn't a lack of focus. It's a portfolio — and I built it the way I'd build a loan book.

Spend twenty years in credit risk and one idea gets burned into you: the danger isn't any single exposure. It's correlation. A book full of brilliant loans that all default in the same quarter will sink you faster than a mediocre book that doesn't. Diversification isn't about owning more things. It's about owning things that fail at different times.

So I apply the same test to what I build. These four businesses don't rise and fall together — and that's the entire point.

When credit tightens and lending slows, people don't stop feeding their dogs or fixing their backs. When D2C ad costs spike and customer acquisition turns brutal, the advisory and the clinic don't care. A clinic has its own seasonality; a software platform has none. Each business has a different customer, a different cash-flow rhythm, a different thing that could kill it — and crucially, those failure modes don't line up. The portfolio is steadier than any single bet inside it.

I know the standard objection, because I believe half of it: focus wins. The founder who puts everything into one thing moves faster, goes deeper, and usually builds something bigger than the person splitting their attention. If your goal is the single largest possible outcome, concentration is the correct strategy, and I won't pretend otherwise.

But that was never my goal. I'm not optimizing for the biggest outcome. I'm optimizing for the business still standing in twenty years — for durability over maximum. After enough cycles you learn that the spectacular single bet and the total wipeout are often the same decision seen at two different moments. A diversified, uncorrelated set of smaller businesses will never 100x. It also won't go to zero because one market turned.

There's a quieter benefit, too. Four industries means four vantage points, and the ideas cross-pollinate constantly. The retention problem I obsess over in the clinic is the same problem dressed differently in the credit book. What I learn about trust in a consumer brand sharpens how I think about underwriting. You can't get that view from inside one company.

So no — it isn't a lack of focus. It's a refusal to bet the whole thing on one roll. The same instinct that makes a good lender spread exposure instead of piling it into the borrower who looks most exciting today.

If you're building: are you concentrating because you've decided the focus is worth the risk — or just because everyone says you should?