I built About Air Pollution the way most founders build their companies – by showing up, doing the work, and earning trust one client at a time, one project at a time, over decades.
The business worked. Clients trusted me. And for a long time, that was success to me.
But there is a version of success that nobody warns you about – the version where everything depends on you. Every contract. Every referral. Every new opportunity. All of it flowing through one person, one set of hands, one name.
Mine.
Decades of early mornings, late nights, and work that never really switched off. I am proud of what I built.
Every relationship I forged, every project I delivered, every client who came back – that was decades of showing up and doing the work.
But pride and exhaustion are not opposites. They live side by side. And after enough years of being the one the phone always rang for, you start to notice the weight of it in ways you did not expect.
Referrals arrived – but unpredictably. New contracts came in – but only because I personally went out and won them. The business grew, but so did the truth that nobody wanted to say out loud: remove me from the equation, and the pipeline does not slow down. It disappears.
That is not a comfortable thing to admit when you have spent your entire career being the person who makes it all work.
The question that keeps you up at night
There comes a moment where the challenge stops being about revenue or operations and becomes something far more personal.
For me, that question was simple – and it terrified me: how do you hand someone a business that only runs on your energy?
My son, Dewan, was ready. I could see it.
He was not waiting in the wings hoping for a turn. He was already in the thick of it – serving as Fabrications Director, deeply embedded in the day-to-day operations, carrying real responsibility and earning real respect from the people around him.
He didn’t want to inherit the business. He wanted to earn it. And that made the question even harder – because he deserved something better than a machine that only works when his father is operating it.
The moment we started building together
The shift did not happen overnight. It started with a decision – a decision to stop carrying everything alone and to start connecting the pieces so that the business could grow beyond me.
Dewan began working with Crowded Igloo on our digital presence – making sure the right people could find us without relying entirely on my personal network and effort to keep the pipeline alive.
That was not easy for me. I have been in this industry a long time. I have seen plenty of promises come and go. But watching Dewan take ownership of that process – asking the right questions and bringing his own intensity to a side of the business I had never properly tackled – that changed something in me.
It was the first time I looked at the business and saw something that could grow without me standing at the centre of every single thing.
From carrying to building
I still show up every day. That has not changed. What has changed is that I am no longer the only one carrying the weight.
Dewan is beside me now – not as an observer, not as someone learning from the sidelines, but as a builder. Someone who is shaping the future of this business with his own hands, executing our shared vision and standards.
We have a long journey ahead of us. But for the first time in decades, I am not building alone.
And that changes everything – not just for the business, but for me.
If you are a founder reading this and you recognise that weight – the pride and the exhaustion living side by side – then hear me when I say this: the answer might already be closer than you think.
