I Didn’t Set Out to Become a Small Business Owner

By Zahra Henry, Founder of ZLH Careers®

(small.news) — In early 2022, I arrived in Barcelona carrying far more uncertainty than luggage.

From the outside, it might have looked like I was chasing a European adventure… I wasn’t. I was coming out of one of the most uncertain periods of my professional life. All of my professional contracts had come to an end, and once again, I found myself wondering what came next.

For the first time, I began to question whether other people’s decisions would always shape my career.

I remember making a quiet promise to myself as I settled into life in Spain.

My story wasn’t going to stop here.

At the time, I didn’t know exactly what that meant. I certainly didn’t think it would lead me toward running my own business. In many ways, I still imagined a future in international development or public service. But that decision to keep moving forward quietly changed how I began to think about work, opportunity, and the kind of future I wanted to build.

The Plan Stopped Making Sense

My degree in International Development Studies, followed by postgraduate study in Social Policy, naturally pointed towards government, international organizations, and development institutions. Much of my family had dedicated their careers to public service, and I assumed I would do the same.

In many ways, I did. Working in Jamaica’s Culture Ministry confirmed how much I enjoyed helping people, organizations, and ideas grow. Whether supporting artists, developing programs, or contributing to public policy, I found myself drawn to work that built capacity and expanded opportunity.

I wasn’t searching for business. I was searching for meaningful work.

What I hadn’t anticipated was how often meaningful work would also be temporary. Projects ended. Contracts concluded. Each transition taught me something valuable, but each one also reminded me how much of my professional life depended on decisions I couldn’t control.

I wasn’t simply navigating different jobs. I was beginning to confront a deeper question: How much of my future was actually in my own hands?

There were also moments when other people recognized something in me before I recognized it myself. While working at the Culture Ministry, I was asked by several recording artists to manage their careers. Me? At twenty-two years old? The idea felt absurd… I was flattered, but politely declined. Years later, I realized that it wasn’t about the music. They had recognized an instinct that would quietly shape my career: helping people develop, connect opportunities, and move forward.

It would take a few more years before I understood exactly what those moments were trying to teach me. Barcelona gave me the space to pause. I enrolled in a postgraduate program in strategic management, found part-time work teaching English to Spanish students outside the city, and embraced the opportunity to experience a different way of living. The distance from home also created space from my assumptions about success.

I stopped asking, “Who might hire me next?” Instead, another question slowly began to emerge: What value could I create myself?

When I Realized I Didn’t Have to Wait

Long before I committed to my business full-time, I had already started building it.

In 2018, I launched a small education business called ZLH Français, offering French lessons in Kingston, Jamaica. It wasn’t born from a lifelong ambition to become a small business owner. It came from asking a practical question: What can I offer that people would genuinely pay for?

The answer was language. French eventually became Spanish as demand grew. Later, while living in Barcelona, I found myself teaching English to Spanish children. Without planning it, I had spent several years teaching three different languages in two different countries.

Along the way, I discovered something that surprised me. Working a handful of hours each day, I was earning more than I had in my previous full-time role. It wasn’t simply the income that stayed with me. It was what the experience represented. For the first time, I realized I didn’t have to wait for someone else to create an opportunity before I could create one myself.

Another lesson was unfolding that I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. People weren’t choosing me simply because I could teach French or Spanish. There were plenty of capable language teachers. They were choosing someone they knew and trusted.

That lesson would quietly shape every chapter of my business that followed.

Returning from postgraduate study, I found myself thinking less about careers and more about potential. As ZLH evolved, career coaching became my way of exploring those questions one conversation at a time. What began as guiding individuals through career transitions gradually expanded to include helping them navigate postgraduate study, entrepreneurship, and long-term professional direction. Every coaching relationship was different, but the purpose remained the same: helping people think more clearly, make more informed decisions, and move forward with greater confidence.

Clients who trusted me with their careers gradually began asking for help building businesses. Businesses then began asking for strategic planning. Strategic planning naturally led into management consulting, program development, and organizational advisory work.

The pattern repeated itself. I was helping organizations think strategically before I introduced myself as a management consultant. I was writing successful grant applications before I thought of grant consulting as one of my services. I found myself facilitating strategic planning long before I realized strategy itself was becoming one of the defining pillars of my work.

Again and again, capability arrived before identity.

What entrepreneurship kept teaching me was that sometimes the work comes first. The title catches up later.

I Finally Had a Name for It

Barcelona didn’t just give me distance from Jamaica. It gave me tools.

Years earlier, while helping improve operations in my father’s business, I had wanted to think more strategically about growth. I remember searching online for strategic planning templates, convinced there had to be a better way to connect vision, people, operations, and execution. I knew what I wanted to achieve.

I didn’t have the framework yet. During my postgraduate studies in Strategic Management, those frameworks finally began to click.

Whenever possible, I asked my lecturers if I could analyze my own business instead of someone else’s case study. Rather than writing assignments on multinational corporations, I wanted every project to strengthen something I could apply at ZLH or to organizations I hoped to support in the future.

Looking back, I wasn’t simply completing assignments. I was quietly building the foundations of the consulting practice I have today.

One assignment in my strategic management program asked us to map three possible futures for our careers. The first felt familiar. The second felt plausible. The third, pursuing ZLH full-time, was the option I hoped I would never have to choose.

I genuinely wanted one of the other paths to work. Life had other ideas.

By the end of 2023, after another contract had ended, I decided to pursue ZLH full-time. Today, I smile whenever I think about that assignment.

The option I had hoped I would never need became the one that gave me the greatest freedom. Earlier this year, I was named among Businessuite’s 2026 Power & Influence 100 Women in Jamaica, alongside CEOs, senior executives, public sector leaders and small business owners whose work I have admired. More than the recognition itself, what stayed with me was the reminder that careers rarely unfold the way we imagine. Sometimes the path that feels uncertain while you’re living it becomes the one that makes the most sense in hindsight.

When I committed to building ZLH full-time, I thought I was choosing to build something of my own. Now, I realize I was choosing something much deeper. I wasn’t really searching for a business at all. I was searching for the ability to shape my own future. Years later, I finally had a name for it—economic agency.

It isn’t simply about earning an income or owning a business. It’s about building enough capability that your future becomes increasingly shaped by your own choices rather than entirely by someone else’s decisions. And suddenly, everything made sense.

Teaching wasn’t just about language classes. Coaching wasn’t simply about helping people navigate their careers. Strategic planning wasn’t only about helping organizations clarify their direction.

Each experience had been about helping people, businesses, and institutions develop greater capacity to create opportunities, navigate change, and make better decisions about their own futures.

Somewhere along the way, the business I had built to create more agency for myself had become a vehicle to help others build more agency, too.

Though career coaching, management consulting, and international program development appeared to be different services, they were simply different expressions of the same instinct – helping people move from reacting to circumstances… to shaping them.

Building Agency Means Protecting It

Building agency is one thing. Keeping it is another.

One of the biggest surprises of running my own business wasn’t discovering opportunities. It was learning how deliberately they need to be protected.

Early on, I assumed growth meant adding more people. Over time, I realized it meant building more capability. Systems before scale. Clarity before expansion. Alignment before saying yes.

Contracts stopped feeling like administrative paperwork and started feeling like tools that protected relationships. Clear expectations created trust. Just as importantly, I learned that not every client, partnership, or opportunity belonged in ZLH’s future. The question was no longer: Can this become work? It became Should it?

I also came to appreciate that growth depends as much on understanding ecosystems as it does on finding clients. Some of the most meaningful opportunities in my business have come through long-term relationships, trusted introductions, and communities that took years to understand before they produced visible results.

In hindsight, those lessons all point to the same idea. Agency isn’t built through independence alone. It’s built on capability, strengthened by good decisions, and sustained by relationships.

I never found the career I imagined as a young graduate. Instead, I found something I didn’t know I was searching for: the ability to shape my own future.

Whether you build a business, pursue a profession, or lead an institution, keep building the capabilities that give you choices. Careers evolve, markets shift, and circumstances change. The more capability you build, the more freedom you’ll have to keep writing the next chapter of your own story. When all is said and done, that’s what matters.

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