Six things you won’t give a sh*t about in five years

When things go wrong in your business, it can feel like the world is ending. I’ve been there many times over. The C-suite that knocked your socks off at interview who already looks like they need a training course to turn their laptop on? The client you bent over backwards for who is now ghosting you? Your main competitor who just announced a funding round that’s twice the size of your entire business?

There’s only one thing to do. Panic.

Not really. It stings at first, of course. But trust me. Five years from now, you won’t even remember half the stuff that’s currently contributing towards your first stomach ulcer. 

Why? Because perspective is a marvellous antidote to drama. Once you’ve been around the block a few times (that makes me experienced, not old, by the way) you start to realise that most ‘disasters’ are speed bumps. Painful at the time, irrelevant later.

So humour me. Fast forward five years. And calm the f*ck down.

Here are six things that, if they’re happening to you right now, probably feel huge – and why you won’t give a toss about them by 2030.

1: The critical hire who didn’t work out

Remember that “game-changing” senior hire you brought in to turn around a crucial business function, confident you’d found the missing piece of a particularly tricky puzzle? Well, you just walked past them in the corridor and the expression on their face was that of panic more suited to a squirrel in a room full of rocking chairs.

Making a bad senior hire feels like an absolute catastrophe. You pinned your hopes on them and they have belly-flopped from the top diving board. It can get worse though – I’ve worked with companies who have made three bad hires in a row into the same role.

The result is often the belief that you’ll never find ANYONE who can do that particular role for your company. That is, in no uncertain terms, utter bollocks.

It’s not that hiring doesn’t work – it’s probably because your hiring system isn’t up to scratch. If you’re winging it, relying on gut instinct, hoping the next hire will be better, then you’ve got a golden opportunity to fix that before you try and hire again. Failing to do so is like burning your toast and blaming the bread.

However, even with solid systems and processes, everyone screws up hiring sometimes. I certainly have. If you’ve got a donkey in a party hat masquerading as a unicorn then I promise you, you’re not alone.

The really good news? A bad hire is fixable – but to make sure you don’t give a sh*t about this problem in five years, you have to be bold, cut your losses, learn the lesson and move on. If you’re still looking at the same problem hire across the office in five years, you have only yourself to blame.

It’s never nice to let someone go, but in five years, you’ll be well and truly over it. You’ll wonder why you lost so much sleep over making the call – even more so when 2030 you is surrounded by A-players.

2: That big customer you lost

There’s nothing quite like the sickening silence of a customer relationship hitting the wall. Maybe a big client went belly-up, or a project went so far south it’s in Antarctica. 

In any case, the customer has disappeared in a puff of smoke, and taken all that lovely revenue with them. At the time, it feels like a public execution. Morale down, revenue down. Maybe a scathing review on the way out the door. At the time, all you can think is – this is the disaster that everyone will remember. But will you remember it in five years? Bet you don’t.

The fact is that things go wrong. Sometimes it’s your fault, something you can learn from. Sometimes there’s no reason for it – a big client goes under, or changes to a rival company for reasons you simply can’t control. There have been times in my career where I’ve felt like Sod’s Law had me on speed dial. It’s just how things go.

What matters, what defines you, and what people WILL remember is never the failure – it’s the response. Crisis is where culture earns its keep. Will you hide, blame others, spiral? Or will you roll up your sleeves, find out what’s fixable and do what needs to be done?

That’s the real test. The best teams don’t just survive hard times – they use them as fuel. A fiasco can break you or improve you – and you get to choose which.

Five years from now, you won’t be losing sleep over that lost customer or the flaming mess that drove them away. What’ll stay with you is how you handled it. Did you front up, fix what you could, and keep your head? Or did everyone scatter?

That’s the stuff that sticks – pride if you held your values, regret if you didn’t. The client name, the details, the drama – they all fade. Eventually it’s just another war story you wheel out over a pint, if you remember it at all.

3: Comparing yourself to other companies or founders

Ah, the comparison trap. You’re constantly peeking over the fence at the competition. That founder runs a bigger company. This startup raised £10 million and is all over the news. Meanwhile, you’re here questioning your life choices because someone else’s grass looks neon green. 

Stop it. Now.

Half of those rocket ships you’re comparing yourself to will be smoking wrecks in five years. Markets turn, fashions fade, and founders burn out. Today’s golden child is tomorrow’s LinkedIn ghost. Remember BlackBerry? MySpace? Exactly.

Business isn’t a sprint – it’s snakes and ladders. Some days you climb, some days you slide, and the board keeps changing anyway. The smart ones don’t stare at the next player’s dice roll – they focus on playing their own game better.

So pour that nervous energy back into something useful. Make your product sharper. Your customers happier. Your business stronger. Because five years from now, you won’t give a toss about who looked flashier in 2025 – you’ll be too busy enjoying your successes while they’ve quietly disappeared.

4: Customers you shouldn’t have chased

Every founder’s got a few of these. The deals you knew in your gut were a bad fit, but you chased them anyway. The logo you just had to land. The prospect who treated you like a servant, not a partner. You told yourself it was strategic – really, it was ego.

And yes, maybe you got the deal. Then came the joyless grind: low margin, endless drama, no gratitude. You spend more time managing them than serving your best customers, and you hate yourself for it.

In five years, you’ll barely remember their name. You’ll just shake your head at how desperate you once were for validation.

Bad-fit customers are poison. They eat profit, morale, and weekends. The sooner you stop chasing anyone with a pulse and a purchase order, the sooner your business starts to breathe.

Over time, you get sharper. You figure out who your real customers are – the ones who value what you do and don’t haggle you into misery. Everyone else either drifts away or gets quietly shown the door.

You can even speed that up a bit – put your prices up for the customers that are pains to deal with and you don’t make much profit from. That way, if they do stay, at least you feel you’re being rewarded for it.

Five years from now, you’ll care about one thing: working with customers who make you money and make you smile. The rest? You’ll wish you’d fired them sooner.

5: The resignations that rocked your world

Early on, every resignation feels personal. That first team member who quits – you take it as betrayal. You start catastrophising: If Jane from marketing’s gone, who might be next? Is the whole thing unravelling?

It hurts. Of course it does. You’ve been in the trenches together. But here’s the truth – in a few years, you probably won’t even remember Jane’s surname.

People leave, especially in startups. Sometimes they outgrow the role. Sometimes the company outgrows them. Sometimes you hired badly and their exit’s the best thing that could’ve happened.

It feels massive now because every departure in a small team hits hard. But as you grow, you’ll see it differently. People come, people go – what matters is the culture that stays.

When I was at Rackspace, our staff attrition rate was around 25%, because we hired a lot of graduates and many of them found that the role wasn’t for them. That didn’t bother me, because the decisions were made quickly and everyone can move on.

At Peer 1, I even used to offer a £2k leaving bonus for staff who quit in the first month. Seriously. If they realised they had made a bad choice as soon as they started, I wanted them to leave quickly instead of loitering in a position they didn’t like because that breeds unhappiness. We never had to pay out on the ‘Foxtrot Oscar’ bonus, but it landed us a lot of publicity and actually probably helped us attract the right people to start with.

Fast-forward five years and you’ll laugh about the panic you feel when people leave. You’ll think: “Remember that bloke who left and I thought the sky would fall? What was his name again?” Exactly. The real story isn’t who left – it’s how quickly you rebuilt, and how much stronger the team became after.

6: How busy you looked

In the early days, you are the business. CEO stands for Chief Everything Officer. Eighty-hour weeks. Fixing every problem yourself because no one else can do it properly. It’s a rush – and, for a while, it’s necessary.

As the business starts to scale, however, that attitude stops being a booster rocket and turns into a handbrake. You’re not meant to be on the tools anymore – you should be drawing the blueprint, not swinging the hammer.

I see it all the time. Founders clinging to their calendars like badges of honour. Endless meetings, answering emails to the ‘info@’ mailbox, running flat out. And for what? To prove you’re busy? But shouldn’t you be busy making a difference, instead of signing off annual leave?

The goal is simple – make yourself unnecessary in day-to-day operations. Build the team, set the direction, and get out of the way. When I coach CEOs, I push them to get their operational load down to two days a week. One founder I worked with realised 80% of his tasks were things someone else could easily handle. He was using his superpowers to tick boxes.

You need to shift from warrior to architect, as Rachel Turner succinctly puts it. The warrior fights every fire. The architect designs a system so fires don’t start. The best CEOs I know lead like orchestra conductors – they set the tempo, cue the sections, then let the music play without having to pick up an instrument themselves.

Five years from now, you won’t be bragging about 80-hour weeks. You’ll be laughing at how long it took you to stop playing superhero and start running a proper business.

That’s not to say long weeks aren’t needed at the start – they absolutely are; you have to grind as you get things moving. Once you’re up and running though, it has to be sustainable. You have to find a way that your job will still make you smile in five, ten, twenty years’ time. Working yourself into the ground for that length of time isn’t sustainable, so making that shift is a big part of your business – and you – growing up.

You’ll remember what matters

Most of the stuff you’re sweating about today won’t even register in a few years. Not because it wasn’t painful, but because it just won’t matter. What will matter is the culture you’ve built, the quality of your people, and the depth of your customer relationships. You’ll care that the business runs on values, not heroics. That great work gets done without you sticking your fingers in every pie. So breathe. The chaos, the panic, the ego bruises – they’re just noise. Build something solid, something that lasts, and you’ll enjoy the ride a hell of a lot more – as will your friends and family. It’s always nice when the kids remember what you look like.

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Written by business coach and leadership coaching expert Dominic Monkhouse. You can order your free copy of his new book, Mind Your F**king Business here.