Start With Yourself: Business Lessons from Emma Grede at Selfridges
At Selfridges: A Reset in How We Think About Business
I attended the business and fashion event at Selfridges because I wanted to step outside of day-to-day coaching conversations and immerse myself in how high-growth founders and creatives are currently thinking about scale, identity, and leadership. As Complicated Coach, I’m often working with early-stage entrepreneurs who are deep in execution mode, so being in a room like this offered a valuable pause point to observe what’s shifting at a higher level.
The event itself wasn’t positioned as a traditional talk. It felt more like a strategic reset—less about surface-level inspiration and more about how founders actually build something that lasts in an increasingly noisy, fast-moving market.
Led by Emma Grede—co-founder of Good American and founding partner of SKIMS—the conversation centred around her book Start With Yourself. From a business coaching perspective, the core message couldn’t be more relevant right now: sustainable success doesn’t begin outside of you. It begins internally, with how you think, decide, and operate under pressure.
In coaching small business owners, one pattern shows up repeatedly: people look for external answers before addressing internal clarity.
Emma’s philosophy flips that entirely.
Success doesn’t start with your product, your marketing, or your network. It starts with you.
That means:
Building confidence in your own decision-making
Understanding where you’re strong—and where you’re not
Creating opportunities instead of waiting for them
In today’s digital economy, where comparison is constant and noise is unavoidable, this becomes even more important. Intentional growth will always outperform reactive hustle—but only if the founder is willing to slow down long enough to see clearly.
The Question No One Else Asked
In a room full of entrepreneurs, I was the only one who put a hand up. I wanted to move beyond polished advice and get to something more direct and usable.
I asked Emma:
“You said you don’t enjoy the performative notion of women supporting women, you want the real stuff—when you say you want the real stuff, what’s your one piece of advice you would give?”
Emma’s response wasn’t abstract or motivational. It was grounded in clarity, accountability, and ownership. She spoke about stripping away performance and focusing only on what actually drives results.
“Enterprise mentality” advice
Here is Emma Grede’s response:
I love the fact that you know what your runway is because most people get to the end of their runway and they have no idea so the very fact that you say we've got a year tells me you're going to be successful. You've got your eyes on the prize, you've got your eyes on the right data and the right metrics. What I would do is ignore anything that isn't pointing directly to the business. What I mean by that is that we get so sidetracked by anything that feels pretty and glamorous and and serves our ego as opposed to what serves the business.
From a coaching standpoint, this is where many founders get stuck. They confuse movement with progress. Being “busy” feels like momentum, but without clear feedback loops, it’s just activity—not growth.
The real work is learning to measure reality honestly and adjust quickly.
Stop Chasing Perfect, Start Managing Reality
“Work-life balance” is one of the most searched and discussed topics among entrepreneurs—and also one of the most misunderstood.
Emma reframed it in a way that removes the pressure of perfection entirely.
Balance isn’t fixed. It’s fluid.
Depending on your stage of business and life:
Sometimes work will require full focus
Sometimes life will need to take priority
And often, those shifts will happen without warning
Trying to force both to exist in equal measure at all times creates unnecessary pressure and often leads to burnout.
In practice, this is where many founders start to struggle—not because they are doing too much, but because they are holding themselves to an impossible standard of consistency across every area of life.
A more useful approach is self-awareness over symmetry. Understanding what the business needs from you right now, and what you need from yourself to stay effective long-term.
What This Means for Founders in Practice
Emma’s perspective isn’t just philosophical—it’s highly operational when applied correctly.
First, it means founders need to stop outsourcing clarity. If you don’t understand your own decision-making patterns, no amount of external advice will stabilise your business. The internal foundation has to come first, otherwise everything built on top remains reactive.
Second, it means building a faster feedback loop with yourself and your business. Not every decision will be right, but slow decision-making is often more costly than imperfect action. The goal is not certainty—it’s responsiveness.
Third, it reframes success as a standards issue rather than a strategy issue. Many founders focus heavily on tactics—branding, marketing, scaling—but overlook the internal standards they’re operating from. Those standards quietly determine everything: consistency, resilience, and ultimately, outcomes.
Final Thought: Build From Within
Events like this can easily become a collection of quotes and short-lived inspiration. But the real value comes from application—what changes after you leave the room.
What Emma Grede reinforced is something every founder eventually has to confront:
Your business outcomes reflect your internal standards.
Not your intentions.
Not your effort.
Your standards.
Because in the end, success isn’t just about what you build externally.
It starts with you.
Ready to Apply This in Your Own Business?
If you’re a founder navigating this kind of clarity—where you know something needs to shift internally before things can scale externally—we can work through that together.
Explore more about how we support founders here: