What a torn thumb and a wrecked ankle taught me about running a business

I’m currently out of volleyball. Months, not weeks. The injury was completely unremarkable: a drill session, a block at the net, a perfectly normal landing — except I came down on the edge of an opponent’s foot. My right ankle rolled. As I went down I put my left hand out to catch myself and tore something in my thumb. Two injuries in less than a second. The kind of moment that happens to everyone who plays a contact sport eventually.

What’s been less unremarkable is what it’s taught me. Not about volleyball — about the rest of it. The business, the family, the evening routine, the diet, the whole infrastructure of how I’d built my life. Take one piece out of that machine and you find out very quickly which other pieces were depending on it without you realising.

I think a lot of business owners — and a lot of parents — are running their lives the same way I was. Beautifully balanced systems with hidden single points of failure. So this is a piece about what those single points of failure look like, what I’ve changed, and what I’d suggest you check before something forces you to.

The system I’d built

For most of the last decade my evenings were the engine of my week. Volleyball at Basingstoke Volleyball Club, indoor football on Monday nights at 20:15, tennis with my neighbour around 5:30pm when the weather allowed it. That was the spine. Three sessions a week minimum, sometimes four. The business day finished and the body started.

People who train in the mornings will tell you that’s the disciplined way to do it. They’re probably right in principle. In practice, I run a homecare business that doesn’t respect a 9-to-5, has on-call obligations, and produces a steady stream of small fires that need putting out before they become big ones. Evenings were the only window I could genuinely protect. So evenings were the window.

Three children — Sophie, Sara and Frankie — across the teenage and primary years. Anyone with that age range knows the logistics. Two completely different homework rhythms, two completely different bedtimes, two completely different conversations going on in parallel about what’s actually happening in their lives. My wife and I have always run that as a partnership. Sport was the thing I gave back to myself at the end of the day, after work, after the kids, before sleep.

I’d never thought of volleyball as load-bearing in the way I think about leadership rhythms at Blue Angel Care. It was just something I did. Turns out it wasn’t just something I did. It was the thing that regulated my sleep, my mood, my appetite, my ability to switch the business off before I came home — and, though I’d have laughed at this six months ago, my capacity to make good decisions the next morning at work.

What broke first

The first thing that broke wasn’t my mood. It was my evenings.

I’d assumed I knew how to relax. I didn’t. I knew how to play volleyball, which had been doing the relaxing for me. Take volleyball out, and the evening turned into something I hadn’t really had for years: open, unstructured time, with a phone in my pocket. Within a fortnight I was answering emails at 9pm. Then at 10. Things that would absolutely have waited until morning were getting half-thought-through replies at the time of night when nothing good gets decided.

That’s a useful lesson and it’s not just about sport. Most of the structure we’re proud of in our lives is propped up by something else — an activity, a class, a person we don’t want to let down. When that scaffolding goes, the structure often goes with it, and we tell ourselves a story about being busier than usual. We weren’t busier. We lost the thing that was keeping us out of the inbox.

The second thing that broke was my appetite control. I eat reasonably well most of the time. None of it requires willpower when I’m burning a meaningful amount of energy on a court three or four times a week. All of it requires willpower when I’m not. By week three of no training I was reaching for the wrong things in the evening and I had to consciously rebuild a structure I hadn’t realised was being held in place by my exhausting myself on a Monday night.

The third thing that broke was harder to name. It was something like patience. With my team, with my kids, with myself. I’d always thought I was a calm operator. It turns out I was a calm operator who’d been sweating out a meaningful amount of stress on a volleyball court two evenings a week and on a five-a-side pitch every Monday at 20:15. Without those release valves, by Thursday I had a shorter fuse than I was comfortable with. Sophie noticed before I did, which is one of the rougher pieces of feedback you can receive as a parent.

What I’ve changed

I’m still mid-recovery. The ankle is mostly back. The thumb is slower. I’m not allowed contact sport for several more months. So I’ve had to actively rebuild the system rather than wait for volleyball to come back and fix it for me.

A few specific things, in case any of them are useful:

I replaced the volleyball slots with something non-negotiable in the diary. The training nights used to be sacred — there was no question of a 7pm work call on a volleyball night. They’re now a swim, a long walk, or a structured stretching and rehab session. Same time, same priority level, same “I can’t do that meeting then” protection. The activity matters less than the slot. What I’m really protecting is the boundary.

Tennis with my neighbour has gone up in importance, not down. It used to be the bonus session I’d squeeze in around the main commitments. Now it’s one of the most valuable hours in my week — low impact, social, and the only contact-adjacent sport my ankle can currently tolerate. If you’re a business owner reading this, the most underrated form of training is a regular game with one other person who is also too busy. You’ll both turn up because letting the other one down is impossible.

I committed to one sport-thing with each child per week. I’d always done some version of this, but I’d let it become opportunistic — fit it in if the diary allowed. Now it’s in the calendar, ringfenced, and treated like a client meeting. Which it sort of is, if you think about it. The teenagers don’t always want me there, and that’s its own lesson. Show up anyway. It registers, even when the eye-roll is real.

I got specific about food rather than vague about discipline. I used to think I “ate well”. Now I plan the week’s lunches on a Sunday evening, I don’t keep things in the house that I’d rather not be eating in the evening, and I treat hydration through the day as the unglamorous thing it is. The discipline I lost wasn’t really discipline — it was the absence of friction. I added the friction back.

I started saying no to evening work in a way I hadn’t before. When I was training three evenings a week, evening work was already constrained by sheer logistics. With volleyball out, the gravitational pull of the inbox after 8pm was enormous. I’ve held the line — not perfectly, but more deliberately than I would have a year ago. The Monday-night indoor football slot is back, and that helps. Even on a Wednesday with no fixed commitment, I treat the evening as protected by default unless I’ve made a deliberate decision otherwise.

The thesis, if there is one

Most business owners I know would describe themselves as disciplined. Most parents I know would describe themselves as present. Both descriptions are usually accurate when nothing has gone wrong recently. The real test is what happens when one of the supports gets kicked out.

A torn thumb is a small problem. But the way it cascaded through every other part of my week told me something I’d missed: I’d built a life that worked beautifully as long as nothing changed. That’s not the same as a robust life. Robust looks like a system where any one piece can come out for a while without the others collapsing.

For business owners, that’s not a metaphor — it’s exactly the test we apply to our businesses. Single points of failure. Key-person risk. What happens if the registered manager leaves, the biggest client walks, the regulator visits unannounced. We’re rigorous about it at work. Most of us aren’t rigorous about it at home.

I’d suggest the test is worth running on yourself. Pick the thing that holds your week together — for me it was volleyball, for you it might be the morning gym, the school run, a particular dinner ritual, the evening walk with your partner. Now imagine it disappears for six months. What else falls over? That’s where the work is.

The thumb is healing. The ankle is healing. I’ll be back on a court eventually. But the version of me that comes back is going to be running a slightly different system. Less reliant on any one piece. A bit more like the businesses I’m proud of building, and a bit less like the one that got knocked sideways by an unlucky landing.