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Join for freePosted: Mon 19th Oct 2026
When you run a small business, there is always more you could do than you have time, money or capacity for.
Should you hire, spend on marketing, increase stock, launch something new or keep the cash?
Those choices can determine whether you unlock more revenue, avoid unnecessary costs, or make decisions that put the business at risk.
In this practical webinar, Rosebud Anwuri, founder of The Hyphen Lab, shares a simple framework for deciding what deserves your resources now.
Learn how to work out what really matters, find better ways forward, weigh up what each option could cost or earn you, and make a move without putting the health of the business at risk.
Work out what you’re actually investing for
Spot what could hold growth back before you spend
Choose where your money is most likely to pay off
Rosebud Anwuri is the founder of The Hyphen Lab, where she helps founders make better high-stakes business decisions using a scientific approach.
She has over a decade of experience across data science and consulting, including senior roles at Meta. Through The Hyphen Lab, she helps business owners decide where to focus their limited time, money and people in pursuit of the business they want to build.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Caitriona O'Connor: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Caitriona and I'll be your host. For those of you attending for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.
I'm pleased to introduce Rosebud, founder of the Hyphen Lab. In this session, she will discuss how to work out what really matters, find better ways forward, weigh up what each option could cost or earn you, and make a move without putting the health of the business at risk.
If you have any questions, please post them in the chat and we'll do our best to answer them at the end. Today's webinar is being recorded, and we will email you the recording and further resources later today. Over to you, Rosebud.
Rosebud Anwuri: Hi, everyone. I've been in analytics and consulting for over a decade and have worked in multiple Fortune 500 companies. Now I'm passionate about helping small businesses make better decisions without guesswork.
Today's topic is probably top of mind for many small businesses. You have limited time and limited resources, and there are so many things you could do with them, so how do you know which is best to invest in? These seven key questions will help you think about how to invest your time, money and resources.
The goal isn't to make you a maths expert. There might be some numbers, but it's more about having the right framework for how you invest your time and money.
The first thing to recognise is that more money creates more problems – or rather, more options. You could hire more people, spend more on marketing, increase your inventory, or launch new products in a new market. But money doesn't automatically create better decisions.
Let's say you have £10,000 to put back into your business. You could upgrade your website, put £10,000 into ads, or even keep it in the bank for more runway. You may also want to make sure you always have 12 months of runway, meaning enough money to operate for the next 12 months, assuming no revenue, profit or cash comes back in.
So what should you actually do? Many of us ask, "Is this a good idea?" about a single option, such as investing more in ads. The question should be, "Is this the best use of what I have?"
The first step is to define what you want the money to do for you. Rather than simply saying you want to grow revenue or hire someone, ask what this investment will let your business do that it couldn't before. Perhaps it's growing revenue by 30%, reaching £300,000 in the next 12 months without increasing your working hours, or building a sales operation that doesn't need you on every pitch call, five days a week.
The aim is to have clear metrics for judging success, ideally with target levels. Without them, it's very hard to tell when you've succeeded and should invest more, or when you've failed and should pivot. Those metrics could be revenue, the time you spend on the business or the quality of your product, but you need to be honest and clear with yourself about the goal. We call this step defining your goals.
The second step is to understand the options that could get you to that goal. If you want more revenue, you need to understand your customer funnel, from acquisition through to returning and churned customers. A hack I often share with founders is to imagine the top of your funnel doubling tomorrow and ask what breaks next.
For example, if your sales orders double overnight, can you fulfil the stock? Can you keep the same service quality at twice the customer numbers? In some businesses, customers can double and everything will be fine, and that doesn't need to be on the list.
What you want is an exhaustive list of every way you could reach your goal. That could include entering a new market or launching a new product, perhaps one your customers have been asking for. Most importantly, put "do nothing yet" on the list, because sometimes not spending any money is the best option at the time.
At this stage, you're not measuring the options against each other. You're simply listing everything you could potentially spend money on.
Once the options are on the table, the next step is to think about the downsides. Don't get bogged down in numbers; estimates or high, medium and low ratings are fine, as the aim is to compare options with each other. If your goal is to increase revenue without increasing your own time, those are the costs you care about.
For example, a marketing test might cost about £2,000 and three hours of your time per week. Increasing capacity for your bestseller might cost £3,000 and one hour per week. You should also consider how long each option takes to develop and, crucially, what your runway looks like afterwards. In this example, the new product wouldn't let you keep 12 months of runway, so it may not be the best option for now.
Next, think about the upside. If this works, what could it look like? With your bestseller, you know you make 80p in profit on every pound sold. With a marketing test, you'll learn which kinds of ads convert to sales. With freelance operational support, you might get time back, which could be one of your goals as a founder.
The next question is how sure you are, which is very important when choosing between options. If you've sold your bestseller for over a year, you know the demand, the margins and the profits. You may not know exactly how many people will buy, but you have a lot of data behind it.
With a marketing test, if you've never run social media ads before, your confidence is much lower. With a new product or a new market, it's lower still. Being able to estimate your confidence in each option is essential.
The next factor is one founders rarely consider, and I think it's often why businesses make investments that sink them: flexibility, or reversibility. If this option fails, how much future choice can you still preserve? Imagine putting £10,000 into a marketing test versus leasing a new building.
If the marketing test isn't performing after a week, perhaps because the cost of acquiring a customer is too high, you can kill the campaign. If you've leased a new building, reversing the decision is far more expensive because of the contractual obligations and unrecoverable expenses. This doesn't mean low-flexibility options are bad, but it does mean the evidence behind them needs to be stronger.
I was working with a founder who had spent three years trying to raise around $20,000,000 for a brick-and-mortar business that required owning land and physical assets. Nobody was investing, despite a really great idea and a lot of money spent on finance consultants, break-even analysis and customer demographics. When we worked through this framework, we found she was fixated on one very irreversible idea.
We scoped it down to an MVP, and she was able to raise $2,000,000 for that smaller version instead. That has put her on track to earn her way into the bigger business vision she has.
The last step is comparing the options across the benefits, the time they take, all the metrics you care about, your confidence and the flexibility. The biggest takeaway is that, even once you've picked, say, marketing and bestseller inventory, you shouldn't spend the whole £2,000 or £3,000 immediately. You want your estimates and assumptions to hold within a certain boundary before an option deserves more investment.
For example, start by increasing your bestseller inventory by only 10%, which might cost about £1,000. Are people still buying? Are you selling out? Are people joining the waitlist? That tells you whether the demand deserves more.
Do the same with marketing. Put in a little and see how the conversion funnel performs: are people clicking, visiting your website and not buying? Then tweak the whole customer journey so it makes sense for you.
The goal is a sequence of good, small decisions rather than all your investment going in at once. You put a little into marketing and a little into your best-performing inventory, then review whether there's room to accelerate or whether to move to the next best option. In this example, your £10,000 gives you the runway to do that.
To summarise, the framework is define, expand and narrow. Defining is the most important step, because it means really understanding the type of business you're trying to build. It doesn't always have to be about revenue or profit, although that is usually what we care about.
I spoke to a very successful fashion founder who wanted to double her revenue, but I found a big disconnect between what she was doing and what she wanted to do. She has a lot of experience in high fashion and cares deeply about craftsmanship. However, she was spending more time building apparel than teaching younger people in fashion to care about craftsmanship, which she saw as a response to the rise of fast fashion.
She felt she didn't have the time, money or resources to invest in teaching because it felt like charity work. So we developed a plan to make that passion pay for itself, with decision gates to show whether it was a business worth building. That is part of the expand stage.
Narrowing down your options comes through the next five questions: understanding the costs, the upsides, the flexibility, your certainty, and then comparing your options. The goal isn't to make you data-driven, which is a phrase we hear a lot. It's to make you mission-driven.
The centre of all this should be the mission you have for your business, which might not always be profit. Founders are often deep in the weeds without knowing how their work serves their ultimate goal. Being clear about that helps you understand when you're succeeding and when you should stop and pivot.
If you want to work with me, I do one-to-one sessions with founders throughout the week, and you can come with one big decision. My website is here, so you can book some time with me. Thank you very much.
Caitriona: Thanks, Rosebud. If anyone has questions, please pop them into the chat, and do connect with Rosebud using the links I've posted. Scan the QR code too if there's a decision you're stuck on and want to work through.
I have a question here. How can you tell whether your business is ready to invest in growth or whether you should focus on stabilising what you already have?
Rosebud: That's a big question, and it's part of this framework. Remember that I said the best option can sometimes be to do nothing yet, because you're just not ready. It starts with understanding what your business is trying to do.
Say you want to reach your first £100,000 in revenue in 12 months. If you find that, with the money you have to invest, you can't reach £100,000, or you don't have the time or resources, you may need to be in a holding pattern instead. That's why, while listing all these attractive options, you should also include doing nothing yet as a valuable option.
Caitriona: How can business owners identify the real bottleneck preventing growth before spending money to fix it?
Rosebud: It helps to work with someone, and experts in your industry can give you insight too. There are two main approaches, and the first is to look through your entire customer funnel. Most businesses' bottleneck is that they don't have enough customers, so finding customers is usually the biggest priority.
That might be ads, but it might not. I worked with a founder who had a software business and spent heavily on ads, cold emailing and cold calling. We realised he needed to go and find customers where they already are.
In the age of AI, people don't really trust what they see on their screens anymore. So go to meetups where people like your clients gather, and talk more on LinkedIn and in different forums, so people know what business you're building. It might not lead to immediate sales the way a cold email and a 30-minute chat once could, but it builds awareness in your clients' minds.
Acquisition is usually the biggest issue, so think about how to build your acquisition funnel. I worked with a fashion business that ran lots of pop-ups and wanted to double its revenue. Even with 12 pop-ups a year, they could never double it, so they needed another channel, which was online sales, grown through online conversions.
If you're lucky enough to have enough customers, then the question becomes capacity. Do you have enough capacity to meet demand, and the service quality to keep customers who buy for the first time?
Caitriona: We have a question in the chat from KP. They say: "I have a very mission-driven but business-minded venture. The first thing I need to do is raise money for a feasibility study and establish the brand to anchor and convey the concept. It feels a little like a chicken-and-egg situation. Do you have any suggestions?"
Rosebud: If I were working with you, my first question would be why you think that needs to be the first step. Why a feasibility study, and why do you need to raise money for it? I'd really question the decision you're trying to make, and there may be a valid reason that we can work back from.
You may also be thinking further ahead than you need to. There could be steps in between that don't cost money yet but validate, for you and for potential customers, that the business is worth building. The business I mentioned that raised $2,000,000 is mission-driven, a tech events business that wants 70% of its on-the-ground staff to be differently abled, including people with Down syndrome, ADHD and autism.
We worked through the same issue. Social impact investors don't necessarily have $20,000,000 to give you, unlike a VC hearing the next big idea to blow AI out of the water. So we walked back from there to work out what we could do to attract the investor we wanted, and whether there was a middle ground.
Caitriona: How can small businesses test whether a potential solution will work before committing significant resources to it?
Rosebud: It depends on what you're trying to invest in, but I always tell businesses to treat everything as an experiment. If an idea would cost £10,000 to set up, what version of it could cost £2,000 and still give you a proof of concept?
For example, an events business I worked with wanted to buy a $500,000 truck for mobile events. When we worked through the numbers, there wasn't enough proof of concept to justify that purchase. I suggested hiring venues instead, running the same type of events and seeing who comes, whether it sells out and at what capacity.
Once you know the capacity it sells at, you can judge whether the truck is justifiable. So I always ask what smaller version you can build to test the idea first.
Caitriona: How can a business owner decide whether to hire someone, outsource the work or continue managing it themselves?
Rosebud: That also goes back to your goals. If you want to free up your time, you'll definitely want to hire someone, and then you need to decide what you want from that hire. Do you want someone to free up immediate work, or someone with long-term institutional knowledge of what you're building?
Institutional knowledge might not matter much for your business, and you may just need some operational work out of the way. Sometimes a full-time hire is the better option, but sometimes you only need to release extra capacity or hire a contractor for the time being. Again, it comes down to understanding what you're trying to achieve and what your goals are.
Caitriona: Thank you. We're coming towards the end of the session, and I don't see any other questions in the chat, so we'll leave it there. Please do reach out to Rosebud via the booking link and connect on social media.
Thank you so much for joining us. We'll share the recording and further resources in a follow-up email this afternoon.
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