The Business of Bouncing Back: Matt Haycox on Why Resilience Is Every Entrepreneur’s Real Advantage

Entrepreneur and investor Matt Haycox says that, despite the way the word gets thrown around on social media, resilience isn’t just a buzzword, it’s the most valuable skill in business. As small firms face another stretch of rough economic weather, Haycox argues that staying power matters more than ever. After more than two decades building companies across finance, hospitality and media, he’s seen how quickly success can turn and how strong you can become when it does. More about his ventures, mentoring philosophy and investment work can be found on Matt Haycox’s official website. ‘It’s the main difference between entrepreneurs who last and those who don’t, when you find out what you’re really made of and how much you can actually endure.’For Haycox, that lesson didn’t come from textbooks. ‘You can learn from other people’s successes and strategies,’ he says, ‘but you’ll never really understand their ability to keep going when things get hard. You have to live it to know how much fight you’ve actually got.’ Haycox, 44, hosts the long-running Stripping Off with Matt Haycox and No Bollocks with Matt Haycox podcasts. A mix of candid, occasionally chaotic conversations with guests such as Ant Middleton and Jean-Christophe Novelli. The stories he hears echo a familiar truth: behind every success are the knock-backs most people never see. He thinks the obsession with ‘overnight success’ has twisted how founders view progress. ‘People see the highlight reel,’ he says. ‘They don’t see the years of mistakes, the lessons, the rebuilds that made it possible.’Recent research among small-business owners regularly lists resilience as the number-one trait for sustainable growth, a finding Haycox says fits with what he’s seen first-hand. Through mentoring and investing, he’s watched adaptable leaders turn adversity into advantage. He breaks it down into three areas: - Decision-making under pressure: ‘When you’ve been through tough times before, you make decisions from experience, not fear.’ - Relationships: ‘Hard times reveal character. You learn who’s genuine and who’s just there for the good days.’ - Perspective: ‘Once you’ve rebuilt, you stop chasing quick wins. You focus on building things that last.’ In his twenties, Haycox admits that he chased growth without thinking about how fast the world can change. By his forties, he’d learned to balance ambition with discipline. ‘Experience makes you measured, not cautious,’ he says. ‘It gives you calm when everyone else is panicking.’That shift now shapes how he advises founders. ‘When people hit problems, they think they’re failing,’ he says. ‘But challenges are the reality of it. Every mistake or setback is a chance to come back better and stronger.’ That same honesty drives his podcast, which features the likes of Katie Price, Levi Roots and Tom Skinner and pulls around 200,000 downloads a month. Listeners, he says, come for the unfiltered mix of humour, lessons and truth. ‘People are tired of perfect success stories,’ he says. ‘Everyone, at every level, has bad days, bad months, even bad years. We all mess things up. That’s real life.’ Earlier in his career, he cared too much about perception. ‘I used to worry about looking successful instead of actually learning,’ he admits. ‘Now I just focus on the work and keep people around me who’ll tell me the truth.’For Haycox, resilience isn’t about pretending things don’t hurt; it’s about recovery speed. ‘You can’t rebuild everything overnight,’ he says. ‘Start small. Fix one thing a day. The little wins add up.’ Outside work, he channels that same mindset into physical challenges. For example, he climbed Mount Everest early in 2025. ‘If you can’t take the bad days,’ he says, ‘you’re not going to last in business. You’ve got to enjoy the problem-solving and not get overwhelmed. It’s all part of the game.’ It’s an approach that’s turned hard-won lessons into a blueprint for calmer, more confident leadership, a mindset, he says, any entrepreneur can build. He now shares that mindset with founders and executives through his private coaching programmes, designed to help leaders strengthen resilience and decision-making under pressure.