Bad luck is usually just poor planning in disguise.
When something goes wrong in a business, the first place we look is outside it. The market shifted. The regulation changed. The timing was off. All of that is easier to sit with than the harder question: what did I fail to prepare for that I could have?
I have run a business through good years and difficult ones. I have had the moments where it genuinely felt like the ground moved without warning. Looking back, the warning was usually there. I just had not built the habit of looking for it.
This piece is about a different kind of luck — the kind you can quietly weight in your favour over time, through the way you run the place.
Growth is found in the friction, not around it
Scaling a business does not happen by accident. It tends to happen in exactly the places founders try to avoid: the awkward conversation, the process that needs rebuilding, the client who keeps causing the same problem. The friction is not in the way of the growth. Often it is the growth.
When a founder tells me they have had a run of bad luck, I ask what the pattern is. Not the individual events — the pattern underneath them. More often than not, the same kind of thing has gone wrong more than once. And the second time is rarely luck. It is a signal that something structural has been left unaddressed, and the cost of leaving it there has finally arrived.
The founders who scale well have learned to read friction rather than swerve it. A difficult client tells you something about how you onboard. A deal that falls through at the last minute tells you something about how you qualify. Handled that way, friction stops being something that happens to you and becomes something you learn from.
Regulation is a moat, if you let it be
Regulation is the setback people love to blame. A new rule lands, costs go up, and it feels like the system is working against you.
But every rule that applies to you applies to your competitors too. The ones who treat it as a burden do the minimum and move on, grumbling. The ones who treat it as a standard build it into how they operate — and put quiet distance between themselves and everyone still complaining about it.
The rule you resent this year can be the reason a client chooses you next year. That is not spin. It is what happens when you decide to be genuinely good at the thing your competitors find annoying. What looked like bad luck becomes a position nobody else wanted to earn.
Organisation is your best defence against bad luck
Years ago, when I was doing IT Consultancy work, I got oddly good at predicting what kind of person I was about to meet before I met them. I could tell from the shelf.
If the files were neatly labelled, all matching, everything in its place, I would walk into the back office and meet someone calm. On top of things. Pleased to see me.
If the files were a mess — different folders, sticky notes, paper sticking out — I would meet someone stressed, a little panicked, firefighting.
The files were never really the point. They were the signal. The way a business handles its small, boring things sets the standard for everything else. We call them organisations because they are meant to be organised. It is not rocket science. It just gets forgotten when everyone is busy.
The businesses that seem to get lucky are usually the ones organised enough to catch an opportunity when it arrives, and steady enough to survive the thing that goes wrong. Luck favours the prepared because preparation is what turns a chance event into something you can actually use.
Document your unlucky moments
Here is the practice I would give any founder. When something goes wrong, write it down — to find the pattern, not to dwell on it.
It is easy to carry setbacks as a series of one-offs. Each one felt unique at the time. But lay six of them next to each other and a shape usually appears: the same gap, the same delayed decision, the same corner cut under pressure.
That shape is the useful thing. It tells you where your business is genuinely exposed, which is worth far more than another story about bad timing. Examined honestly, bad luck is often just the learning you needed and had been avoiding.
So the next time something goes against you, the more useful question than ‘whose fault was it?’ is whether you are paying enough attention to your own setbacks to catch the pattern before it repeats.
What is one ‘unlucky’ moment from the last year that, looking back, you could have seen coming?
