Introduction

Most business advice is about getting started. The harder question, and the one Alan and Bhairav dig into here, is what it actually takes to still be standing in twenty years.

In this episode of Real World Entrepreneurship, the two of them step back across their earlier conversations with Richard McCombe, who has run a Glasgow print business for two decades, and use his story to unpack a broader theory of durability. The result is less a recap and more a working map of what a lasting business looks like, and the challenges that quietly try to knock it down.

What You Will Learn From Listening

• Why innovation is a constant habit of small improvements rather than a single flash of genius, and why technology is only ever a tool rather than a strategy.
• Why every durable business is anchored to a real customer problem, and which fundamentals of need, affordability and viability never change.
• Why the breakthroughs that look like luck actually rest on years of foundation, with cash and capability held in reserve for the moment they are needed.
• Why getting clear on what your business genuinely is matters more than endless tinkering, and how the simplest question can reset a company’s direction.
• Why leadership grows lonelier as you scale, and why asking for help is so often mistaken for weakness when it is closer to wisdom.
• How to tell a good advisor from an expensive one, and why people who have never run a business give the most confident advice.
• Why people and values are the asset that compounds over time, and the hidden risk of building everything around a single person.
• Why some things, including human interaction, are best left exactly as they are.

Memorable Quotes

“Tech is just a tool within the toolbox of things that you can do.” (Bhairav)

“It all starts with the customer. Your brilliant idea is utterly irrelevant unless it addresses a problem the customer has.” (Alan)

“As Gary Player said, the harder I practice, the luckier I get.” (Alan)

“I know what I know, I know a lot of what I don’t know, and the really terrifying bit is all that stuff that I don’t know I don’t know.” (Alan)

“With the real advisors, you got something that was full straight away. It wasn’t that you were trying to fill it in, it was already pre-filled.” (Bhairav)

Summary

Richard McCombe has been running Graphic Warehouse for twenty years, and for a meaningful stretch of that, he was doing it alone in the way that matters most: no one to sense-check his decisions, no one to ask why something hadn’t been done, no one removed enough from the business to see it clearly. He’s honest about what that cost him. Firefighting every day. Decisions made under pressure without anyone to push back. A period where the relationships within his own founding team were genuinely strained.

What this conversation explores is the assumption that external support, coaching, or accountability is something you reach for when a business is struggling. Richard and Alan push back hard on that idea. The leaders most likely to resist outside input are often the ones who need it most, and the businesses that build it in early tend to avoid the slow accumulation of bad decisions that comes from going it alone for too long.

The relationship Richard describes with his advisor, running for close to ten years through a Scottish Enterprise programme, isn’t about being told what to do. It’s about accountability in its plainest form: someone asking what you said you’d do, and following up. That shift shows up everywhere in how Richard leads now, from a leadership team that makes its own decisions without him, to a shop floor team in their early twenties who pitched and won the case for a new forklift entirely on their own initiative.

If you’ve ever felt like the only person in the business who can see the whole picture, or wondered whether asking for help is something you do only when things go wrong, this conversation will likely change how you think about it.