A book for business owners
You know that feeling.
It has a name.
The 3am thoughts. The Sunday evening dread. The hum that never quite switches off, even when things are going fine. The weight every business owner carries and almost nobody talks about.
Does this sound familiar?
You’re doing well. And something still isn’t right.
You’re lying awake at three in the morning running numbers that won’t come out right. You’re on holiday but never really away. You’re saying “fine” when someone asks how the business is going, because the real answer would take too long and you’d probably cry.
You’ve built something real. You have clients, revenue, a team, probably. But somewhere along the way, the business stopped feeling like something you built and started feeling like something you can’t get out from under.
Your identity, your income, your relationships, and your sense of worth are all living in the same building. And that building is the business you built. When it wobbles, you wobble. When it thrives, you briefly feel fine. And then Monday comes around again.
That’s not a character flaw. It’s not weak thinking. It’s Big Tom. And almost every business owner you’ve ever met is carrying him.
Meet him properly
Big Tom stands for something.
Business Is Getting on Top Of Me.
Not a diagnosis. A description. The honest, unvarnished answer to the question most business owners are actually asking, even when they phrase it as “I think I just need to get more organised” or “I’m just a bit tired.”
Big Tom is the tomcat nobody invited in and almost everyone ends up with. He’s the weight that follows you to bed. He’s the one who shows up at Sunday dinner and sits there quietly making everything feel heavier. He’s the one no business book has ever quite described, because most business books don’t understand what it’s actually like from the inside.
This one does. Because it was written by someone who lived with him for years before she understood what he was.
Who this book is for
For the business owner who is close to where they want to be and can’t quite see it from the inside.
This book is for you if you’ve been running your own business for more than a few years and you’ve built something real, but it’s started to feel like it’s running on you rather than with you.
It’s for the husband-and-wife team whose business stress and relationship stress have become the same stress, and they can’t work out where one ends and the other begins. It’s for the founder who can’t step back without the whole thing wobbling. It’s for the person who has a comfortable number and a quiet growing sense that comfortable isn’t quite cutting it any more.
It’s for anyone who suspects that what they need isn’t more motivation or a better system. That what they actually need is someone to name what’s going on, and tell them what to do about it.
What’s inside
The book goes looking for Big Tom in all the places he hides.
The people problem. The money conversation most business owners avoid having with themselves. The growth trap that keeps you either running too fast or standing perfectly still. The time pressure that turns busyness into a substitute for progress. And the identity question underneath all of it: who are you if the business goes wrong?
Running alongside all of it is Vicki’s own story. The parts most people don’t tell. Ten years in property development. Losing everything. Bankruptcy. A mental health collapse that reached the point of suicidal crisis. And then, slowly and messily, building something better on the other side.
The book doesn’t look away from any of it. Because looking away is exactly what keeps business owners stuck.
Each chapter ends with reflection questions and practical starting points. Not homework. Real prompts that work.
The framework
It’s not just a story. There’s a science behind it.
The approach running through this book is grounded in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, one of the most rigorously researched psychological frameworks for stress reduction and lasting behaviour change.
Most approaches try to fix the thought. Reframe it, challenge it, replace it with something more positive. ACT doesn’t bother with that. ACT operates on the basis that the thought isn’t the problem. What you do with it is.
The core concept is psychological flexibility: the ability to hold difficult thoughts and feelings without being controlled by them, while still moving toward what actually matters to you. For a business owner, that’s a fundamentally different proposition from being told to think more positively.
The 3 am worry doesn’t disappear because you’ve reframed it. But it can stop running the show. You can act from your values rather than your fear, and make clear decisions while it’s making noise in the background.
The research base is substantial. Psychological flexibility has been consistently linked to lower anxiety, better performance under pressure, and significantly less burnout. Not as a side effect. As the actual mechanism of change.
About the author
Vicki LaBouchardiere
Vicki spent ten years building a property development business. Then she lost it. Not just the business. The money, the identity, and for a period, her own mental health.
What followed was a long, messy, occasionally undignified climb back. She trained as a clinical hypnotherapist, retrained as a business coach, and spent the years since working with hundreds of small business owners who were carrying the same weight she’d once carried without a name for it.
Big Tom is that name.
Vicki holds a Hypnotherapy Practitioner Diploma, is an NLP practitioner, and is a member of the National Council for Hypnotherapy. She presented at the UK Hypnosis Convention in November 2025. She runs Venture Coaching from Gillingham, North Dorset, with her partner Kev Whitehouse.
Ready to meet him properly?
Big Tom is available in print. Order your copy and it will be posted to you directly. If you’d like to find out more about working with Vicki and Kev, you’ll find them at venture-coaching.com.
Big Tom © Vicki LaBouchardiere. All rights reserved.