You learn something different about business when you’re close to the ground.

I didn’t learn business through one career, one industry or one particularly neat plan.

A lot of what shaped the way I think today came from moving between places and situations that, at the time, didn’t seem connected at all. I worked different jobs, tried different businesses, lost money, built things that worked and things that didn’t, travelled, met people whose lives looked nothing like mine, and gradually became more interested in understanding why things work the way they do.

Australia was an important part of that.

When I first lived in Sydney, I worked across very different environments. There was a bakery in Punchbowl, where I was exposed to the everyday rhythm of operations and accounts. There were shifts at 7-Eleven, Uber Eats, construction and security. Sometimes several of those things were happening at the same time.

None of it was glamorous, but that was probably what made it useful.

You see the customer who walks through the door, the person serving them, the stock that has to be there before they arrive, the shift that needs covering when somebody doesn’t show up, the supplier, the cash flow and all the small things nobody puts into a strategy presentation but without which there is no business.

Sydney was also comfortable in one important sense. I lived close to my cousin, who is ten years older than me and has always been more like an elder brother. I knew that if something went seriously wrong, there was someone there.

Eventually, I realised I wanted to know what life felt like without that safety net.

So I moved to Melbourne.

Within a week, I had to leave the place I was staying and spent roughly a week living in my car while looking for somewhere else to live. Finding work took longer than expected and whatever money I had disappeared quickly.

I still remember one day looking at what I had left: $4.30.

I needed to continue looking for work, but taking the bus meant spending money I might need for food. So I walked.

There wasn’t some profound business lesson running through my head while I was doing it. I was trying to get through the day.

Then came a call from Fast Communications, a mobile communications business. I got the job. Melbourne eventually became a combination of that work, 7-Eleven and Uber Eats, with a few construction shifts in the period before I found more stable work.

Life moved forward.

What stayed with me wasn’t the hardship itself. It was the understanding that circumstances can change very quickly, and when they do, nobody arrives with a framework telling you what decision to make next. You assess what you have, decide what matters most and keep moving.

I was already experimenting with entrepreneurship during those years. While living in Australia, I started Now Technology back in Pakistan. After returning home, I launched Noralusin, an e-commerce skincare brand, and continued trying things.

There was Bebaak, an attempt at online clothing. There was a crafts and gifting business that I eventually stepped away from and my family continued. There were other products, ideas and experiments along the way; some worked, some didn’t, and some simply taught me enough to move on.

Some survived. Some changed. Some ended.

Now Technology was one of the ones that ended.

COVID arrived at a particularly difficult time, and the financial pressure eventually became severe enough that I sold almost everything of value I had, including my gadgets, simply to keep going.

It was the second time in my life that money became very real to me.

And perhaps that’s why I’ve never been particularly attracted to the version of entrepreneurship where every failure is retrospectively turned into an inspirational story. When you’re inside it, failure isn’t content. Payroll is real. Cash flow is real. A wrong hire is real. Inventory sitting somewhere is real. Money committed to the wrong decision is real.

You don’t experience business as a case study when your own money and future are attached to the decisions.

But those years gave me something else.

I started recognising patterns.

A business would think it had a marketing problem when the real problem was somewhere in the operation. A founder would think they needed more people when nobody had properly decided what the existing people were responsible for. Sales would increase and somehow make the business more difficult rather than less. An opportunity to expand would look exciting until you considered whether the organisation underneath it was capable of carrying the expansion.

The more businesses I encountered, the less interested I became in the problem as it was initially described.

I became more interested in what was underneath it.

That curiosity has never been limited to business.

Photography and videography have been long-standing interests of mine, partly because both require you to notice things. I travel for much the same reason. I’ve travelled through different parts of Australia, the UAE and Thailand, and across much of northern Pakistan: from Swat and Kalam through Naran and Kaghan, along the Karakoram Highway to Gilgit, Hunza, Passu, Skardu and Khunjerab, and through Kashmir as far as Kel.

I tend to observe wherever I go.

Not just landscapes, but people. How they communicate. What they build. How communities function. How people make a living with whatever happens to be available around them.

Hunza left a particular impression on me.

One evening around nine or ten, while staying near the Passu Cones, I went to a small place called Yak Grill. A young woman was looking after the café, communicating with customers and running the place with a level of confidence and independence that caught my attention.

For a moment, it reminded me of being in Sydney.

It wasn’t because the two places looked alike. They obviously didn’t. It was something about the culture around her: the confidence, the participation of women in local businesses, the way people carried themselves.

Kalam made me notice something entirely different.

People were running viable businesses in conditions that would be used elsewhere as reasons why a business couldn’t work: difficult infrastructure, unreliable electricity, harsh winters and limited public facilities. Yet people adapted to what they had, used the environment around them and made businesses work.

Kashmir gave me another kind of observation.

In Keran, there are places where the river is essentially all that separates Pakistan from India. I watched people from both sides acknowledging and talking to one another across it.

It took me back to Australia, where the political distance we grow up hearing about often seemed strangely absent from ordinary life. Pakistanis and Indians worked together, ate together and lived together. For around a year, I shared a home with an Indian family, and we had a genuinely good relationship.

Experiences like these might seem unrelated to business.

I don’t think they are.

Business is ultimately people organising themselves around problems, opportunities and resources. Culture affects how they work. Circumstances affect how they think. Scarcity changes behaviour. Environment creates different kinds of entrepreneurs. Trust changes how people transact. And the same problem can produce completely different solutions depending on where you are standing.

That is probably why I’ve never been particularly interested in becoming a specialist who sees every business through one discipline.

Marketing affects operations. Operations affect customer experience. Hiring affects founder capacity. Founder behaviour affects delegation. Positioning affects pricing. Pricing affects acquisition. Acquisition creates operational pressure. Structure affects the speed and quality of decisions.

Pull one thread and you often discover that it is attached to five others.

Over time, I began to think about expansion differently too.

Expansion is usually presented as getting bigger: more revenue, more employees, more products, another office, another market.

Sometimes that’s exactly what a business should do.

Sometimes it isn’t.

A business may need to become more stable before it becomes larger. A founder may need to remove themselves from everyday decisions. A team may need structure before it needs more people. Operations may need fixing before another rupee goes into marketing. And occasionally the best expansion decision is deciding not to pursue an opportunity at all.

What built the first version of a business isn’t automatically capable of building the next one.

I had seen versions of that problem in other businesses, and I’d lived versions of it in my own.

I also found myself informally helping other people think through their businesses. Sometimes that meant helping someone start something with very little capital, not because we were trying to build the next enormous company, but because a small e-commerce business could become someone’s livelihood. I was particularly interested in helping women find ways to build an income of their own where the opportunity existed.

The scale changed.

The underlying question didn’t:

“Given where you are, what is the right thing to do next?”

Eventually I realised that this was the part of business I was most interested in.

Not necessarily running someone’s marketing campaign, building their technology or doing their accounting. There are people far better suited to each of those things.

I was interested in the decisions sitting between them.

A founder can usually find someone willing to sell them execution. It is considerably harder to find someone who will first ask whether that execution is what the business actually needs.

That’s where US. came from.

I describe what I do today as being an Expansion Partner for Founder-Led Businesses. The title matters less to me than the role behind it: understanding the business closely enough to see what may be difficult to see from inside it, challenging assumptions when necessary, bringing structure to complicated decisions and helping a founder determine where the business should go before deciding how quickly to get there.

US. gave that work a name and a structure.

But the thinking behind it came from much earlier: from shop floors and late shifts, from businesses built and businesses lost, from watching founders, from making my own mistakes, from travelling and observing how differently people solve remarkably similar problems.

I don’t think those experiences gave me all the answers.

They taught me to look harder before assuming I know what the problem is.

And for the work I do today, that distinction matters.