In 1999, I was named in the Wales preliminary World Cup rugby squad. I was at the peak of my physical career when a car accident changed the trajectory of everything. While I managed to rehab and play on for another five seasons, I was never the same athlete. My career didn't end in a dramatic flash—it petered out quietly, which in many ways is a far harder thing to make peace with.
When the sports contracts dried up, the real drift began. I spent three years bouncing between roles, completely lost without the identity and structure of professional sport. Eventually, I decided that freedom lay in working for myself. But wanting a business is very different from knowing how to run one safely.
Over the next ten years, I started and completely failed at four different businesses. I didn't fail due to a lack of effort—I failed because I fell headfirst into the classic solopreneur traps. I outworked every problem until I was burnt out, undercut my rates out of fear during slow months, and carried the crushing mental load of every structural decision completely alone.
In 2019, I started my digital marketing agency, Yap Digital. It has now run successfully for seven years. The turning point wasn't finding a magical marketing channel or landing a whale client—it was realizing that running a business alone requires an entirely different set of control systems than a traditional company. I stopped trying to be a hero and started building frameworks around my cash flow, my pricing, and my energy limits.
Solo and Solvent exists because nobody handed me these systems when I was checking my Stripe account at 2 AM with a pit in my stomach. If the pressure loop sounds exactly like your current day-to-day life, I built this framework for you.