--- title: "Ed Gossage: You have to get comfortable being uncomfortable - 17 years building a business" url: https://sam-page.com/thinking/ed-gossage-you-have-to-get-comfortable-being-uncomfortable-17-years-building-a-b date: 2026-10-02 author: Sam Page type: The Friday Takeaway edition categories: [The Friday Takeaway] reading_time: 11 min summary: "We recorded this one outside with a pint each, because today is 17 years to the day since Ed and I started 7DOTS." takeaway: "Ed's, and he freely admits he's stealing it, because it's been doing the rounds and it's probably been embellished along the way." first_published: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ed-gossage-you-have-get-comfortable-being-17-years-building-page-1f7me --- # Ed Gossage: You have to get comfortable being uncomfortable - 17 years building a business YouTube video: Spotify episode: ### TL;DR - Episode nine, my second guest, and it's Ed Gossage, who I started 7DOTS with 17 years ago today. - How Ed got from mechanical engineering and diesel engines to building websites in Notepad. - What 17 years of running a business has actually taught him, starting with getting comfortable being uncomfortable. - Why we have never written a business plan, and why that isn't the same as not having one. - His take on AI as the next internet, and why investors don't see what we see. - His Friday takeaway, via Roger Federer, about not chasing the next thing. We recorded this one outside with a pint each, because today is 17 years to the day since Ed and I started 7DOTS. We met nearly 20 years ago. Ed interviewed me for my first job in London, we ended up getting very drunk in a hotel in Berlin, and we ultimately decided to start a company together. A year later, on we went. There's a whole separate post on this story here: ### Shakespeare's school, diesel engines and HTML for Dummies Ed was born in Birmingham and ditched the accent quite quickly. He grew up in Henley-in-Arden, just outside Stratford-upon-Avon, where he went to Shakespeare's school and got Shakespeare rammed down his throat. He did his GCSEs and A levels in a very old room that's now part of the museum. He took his kids there a few years ago and said it was very bizarre walking around it. He did maths, physics and art at A level, which as he put it, gives you a measure of him. Then mechanical engineering at Loughborough, because he'd fallen in love with cars and loved taking things apart and working out how things worked. He ended up at Perkins, making engines for tractors and diggers. He'd gone into it thinking you'd be inventing stuff all the time, and realised you're mostly refining things. In reception they had Frank Perkins' first diesel engine on display, and Ed remembers looking at it one day in the late nineties and thinking it hadn't really changed that much. He drives an electric car now, which he admits is ironic. Then the millennium, the internet boom, and the realisation that what had actually excited him was coding. He went travelling with his girlfriend, now partner, came back without much of a plan, built a few websites for her father's company, and got his foot in the door at an agency. A few agencies later, we met at Base One in Teddington. He taught himself from a book. HTML for Dummies, written in Notepad, no colour coding, and definitely no ChatGPT. What he liked was that it was the maths, physics and art thing all at once: something that needed a bit of a maths brain, with a front end he could shape. And after engineering projects that wouldn't see the light of day for five years, he could build something in a few days. It was all tables back then. Ed was building our email signature for the new brand the other day, and that's still all tables. Old school. ### Getting comfortable being uncomfortable We're always very modest about the company, but it is a multi-million pound business now. So I asked Ed what it's actually like to start, run and grow something for 17 years. He went straight to having children. First time round, the baby arrives, you've got to look after it, and you're petrified you're going to kill the thing. No manual, seat of the pants, winging it. Second child comes along and he felt much more comfortable with the fact that he hadn't got a clue. > "You're constantly having things thrown at you that you've got no clue about, and you kind of have to get comfortable being uncomfortable." I speak to a lot of people who are starting companies, and there's a perception that there's a cheat sheet, or that you can shortcut it and it'll be fine. Looking back at everything we've had to lean into and figure out, you have to do a lot of it properly. Ed's version of that is you've got to be able to turn your hand to anything. We're now in the fortunate position of employing people who are better at the individual tasks than we are, but there's no single task we couldn't have a crack at, because at some point we've had to. ### Money in, money out In the first year, before we had accountants, all the accounting was done in spreadsheets. That's where Ed landed on the fundamental. > "It's money in, money out. You need more in than goes out. And if your head goes up your own a\*\*e too much with it, the business is going to fail." The other thing I keep coming back to is the small stuff you can't shortcut. We had a structured filing system from day one, and it's pretty much the same one now. Every time you create a document, file a document or look for a document, you find it slightly quicker. You don't notice it, because we did it from the start. His big lessons from 17 years: it is hard work, but it takes smart work. Focus on the things that are important. Keep the client happy, which sounds trite, but it's a symbiotic relationship and it's where the next piece of work comes from. And keep the money in greater than the money out, otherwise you're not supporting anybody's mortgages, let alone your own. ### We've never written a business plan Somebody asked me about business plans this week, and it made me realise we've never had one written down. Not in 17 years. Probably shouldn't admit that on camera, given the size of the company we now run. Every business textbook says the first thing you need is a business plan, and then you need to stick to it. So I asked Ed why he thinks we've done alright without one. > "It's very easy to equate we don't have a business plan with we don't have a plan." We're constantly thinking strategically about the business, we've just never sat down and written the plan. Ed's view is that one of the worst interview questions is where do you see yourself in five years, because he's never once been able to answer it. He's never really content. Today was a good example. He found it really quite emotional, and didn't come in expecting that at all. It was his daughter who said they've got to celebrate, and we're going for food with our families later (photo below). Neither of us had thought of it. We're constantly striving, and we forget to stop and say, well done, we've done a good job here. ![Dinner out with the family after recording the episode](https://sam-page.com/img/thinking/ed-gossage-you-have-to-get-comfortable-being-uncomfortable-1-1.webp) *Dinner out with the family after recording the episode* What we have instead of a plan is something David Thomas gave us before we even started: zoom in, zoom out. The ability to see the big picture and then go right down to a line of code. Ed can look at clients we've had for ten years and point to the decision we made in a room at a particular moment that's the reason they stayed. A lot of that is being willing to give clients the right advice even when they can't see it yet. Someone we know very well once told us we were the first agency they'd ever had that said no. ### The next internet Ed's point on AI is that he's looking forward to a world where we don't lead with it. We've had machine learning for a long time. Generative AI is the new part, and the adoption with everybody rather than just the military or whoever. He read something that stuck with him: when the internet came along there were loads of internet companies, and then the internet just became a tool. He thinks AI is the next internet. He started building websites around the first bubble in 2000, we started 7DOTS just after the 2008 crash, and this feels like another one of those inflection points. In a few years we'll just be talking about the thing itself. He's weirdly confident we won't see a repeat of the dot com bust, but we both expect some devaluation of the likes of OpenAI. The worry is that a lot of investors are never going to understand the technology. We're working with this stuff and stress testing it on a daily basis, so we know how brilliant it is, but we know the limitations as well. That's the bit I think puts us in a good place to help people. We talk a lot about human in the loop, and there's been plenty in the news lately about AI going off and doing things it shouldn't. > "To do something well, you need to understand how to do it badly" Ed's take on using it well is that to do something well, you need to understand how to do it badly. Someone who understands code will get it to code things. Someone who doesn't ends up with a half-baked house of cards. As Paul Laroy, our technical director, puts it, it's like having a fairly junior developer. Faster, but not quite right. ### Allen keys and U-bends Ed looks after all operations at 7DOTS, which some people won't know, and he says his role now is so mixed that it's almost like day five in the office when we were doing everything ourselves. This week: a big office overhaul with building work going on, and the legals that come with it, which are less exciting. The end of our financial year, where we've hit target by a whisker. Organising a team trip, where everyone knows we're going somewhere and nobody knows where. And dismantling desks with an Allen key for the office shuffle. He's unblocked a few toilets and changed a few U-bends over the years too. The glamorous life of running a business. ### Hands behind your back Ed's son has just gone off to Bath University after a gap year that we're all jealous of. His kids are 17 and 19 now, and packing his son off and watching that independence has been on his mind. He described it as holding their hands while they learn, then one day your hands are behind your back and they're flying on their own. His kids are equipped to make their own decisions, and their own mistakes, and that's fine. The lesson he took from it is that you never stop learning, and every chapter is slightly different to the last. Just as you get to grips with a baby's feeding pattern, everything changes. It stays like that. I asked whether the rate of change slows down as they get older, the way it seems to. He doesn't think it does. We put big milestones in place, first laugh, first crawl, first steps, and if you're not careful you miss all the little changes that are just as big. He made the same point about the business. In 17 years we've had eight prime ministers. His father had six in an entire working career. Add in phones, mental health, and everything else that didn't exist when we were young, and it keeps accelerating. Which brings me back to the business plan. Written or not, you're trying to plan for the future in an environment that's been anything but stable. ### The Friday Takeaway Ed's, and he freely admits he's stealing it, because it's been doing the rounds and it's probably been embellished along the way. Roger Federer was asked years ago what his secret to success was. Everyone expected the usual answer about being first on court and last off it. What he described instead was getting up, cooking breakfast for the kids, sending them off to school, hitting a tennis ball around for a few hours, having lunch with his wife, going back on court, coming home for dinner with the family, putting the kids to bed, and lying there thinking that was the perfect day. > "Don't be chasing the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, and not see what you've got right now." It reminded me of the book Range, which uses Federer as an example of the best sports people having done loads of other things first. It's the same idea from a different angle. If you get too obsessed, too focused on any one thing, you'll grow less as a person. You'll be a better businessman, and a better human being, for having more than one thing. Thank you to Ed for 17 years, and for coming on. Happy birthday, mate. Until next week... Please do ask questions below and like / follow if any of this is interesting!