I called the company Probably Brilliant because I wasn’t sure I was

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I named my company Probably Brilliant because I genuinely didn’t know if I was any good. That sounds like false modesty. It’s not.

I’d spent 18 years inside a Fortune 500—built brand systems across 50,000 employees, led a global rebrand, worked to scale a 55-person offshore creative hub, got featured in an Adobe Customer Success Story. On paper, the evidence was overwhelming.

In my head, I was still the kid from New Zealand who’d somehow blagged her way into rooms she wasn’t sure she belonged in.

Kiwis have a word for this. We call it being “self-deprecating.” Australians call it “tall poppy syndrome.” Psychologists call it imposter syndrome. I call it being a woman in enterprise for nearly two decades and slowly, imperceptibly, forgetting that the things you built were yours.

Here’s what 18 years inside a large organisation gives you that you can’t get any other way: pattern recognition at scale. You learn what happens when 50,000 people try to use a brand system that was designed by twelve. You learn that governance isn’t a dirty word—it’s the only thing standing between coherence and chaos when you operate across numerous countries. You learn to read a room of C-suite executives and translate “we need to be more innovative” into a brief that actually means something. You learn that the real problem is almost never the problem you were asked to solve.

You also learn patience. Enterprise moves slowly and for good reason—the decisions affect thousands of people. A brand refresh that’s too fast breaks trust. A template system that’s too rigid gets ignored. Everything is a negotiation between what’s ideal and what’s survivable.

I use all of that now. Every client conversation I have, I’m drawing on patterns I saw play out over nearly two decades. That’s the asset. It’s irreplaceable.

Enterprise also, quietly, over years: it makes you an instrument of someone else’s strategy.

You get brilliant at executing within constraints. You get promoted for delivering outcomes inside a structure someone else defined. The wins are real, but they’re always framed by the organisation’s story, not yours. After long enough, you stop distinguishing between the two.

The more senior you get, the more your job becomes protecting the strategy rather than questioning it. You get very good at translating other people’s decisions into workable outcomes—and somewhere in that translation work, you stop asking whether the decisions themselves were right.

And if you’re a woman who’s spent years proving she belongs at the table, you learn to pick your battles so carefully that eventually you stop picking them at all.

When I left, I didn’t have a plan. I had a loose idea that I was good at brand systems and that organisations needed help with them. I also had a daughter who’s neurodivergent, and I’d just finished a Certificate in Education focused on autism studies. I had a growing conviction that the way most systems are designed—brand systems, education systems, workplace systems—excludes the people who need clarity most.

The first three months were terrifying. Not financially—I’d planned for that. Existentially. When you’ve been defined by an organisation for 18 years, removing the organisation doesn’t just remove the job. It removes the structure that told you who you were, what you were worth, and what to do on Tuesday.

I filled that gap with study, with building, and with a frankly irresponsible amount of AI exploration. My family has opinions about this.

I started vibe coding at midnight. I taught myself LoRA training. I wrote eight books, which is either evidence of creative momentum or a sleep disorder—I haven’t decided. I built a personalised children’s publishing platform from scratch—Together Better Books—because my daughter deserved stories that understood her, and I now had the time and tools to make them.

There’s a specific feeling that comes from working at 3am on something you chose to build. It’s different from working at 3am on a deadline someone else set. Both are exhausting. Only one is exhilarating.

I’m not sleeping enough. My Apple Watch is very concerned. I am less concerned than my Apple Watch.

But I’m building a LoRA model trained on a local illustrator’s style to generate thousands of personalised children’s book illustrations. I’m advising leadership teams on brand architecture. I’m writing about design systems with a perspective that only comes from having built them, broken them, and rebuilt them at scale. I’m studying. I’m vibe coding tools I need because the tools I want don’t exist yet. I’m working when I can, instead of when the work week tells me I should be.

Some days that means a deep strategy session at 6am before my small people wake up. Some days it means nothing productive until 9pm because my daughter needed me present, not distracted. The flexibility is the point.

I spent 18 years being available for an organisation’s schedule. Now I’m available for hers.

I championed AI-enabled creative workflows inside a Fortune 500 before most enterprise teams had heard of Firefly. I integrated Adobe Express and Firefly into production systems across a global organisation. That experience is now my unfair advantage as a solo operator.

The tools I spent years implementing for teams of hundreds, I now use as a team of one. I can produce brand strategy artefacts, visual systems, content frameworks, and client deliverables at a speed that would have required a four-person team three years ago. I’m prototyping ideas in hours that would have taken weeks inside enterprise. I’m building things—actual products, actual platforms—that would have been a six-month business case and a twelve-month implementation inside a large organisation.

The irony isn’t lost on me. The AI capability I spent years pushing into enterprise workflows is what makes a one-person advisory studio viable. The systems thinker became the system.

If I could go back and talk to the version of me sitting in that leadership meeting, not sharing my thoughts and strong opinions, I’d tell her two things.

First: you are that good. The evidence isn’t ambiguous. You built things that work at a scale most people never touch. The self-doubt is a feature of being a woman in a system that rewards confidence over competence, and you confused the two for too long.

Second: the skills you’re building right now—the pattern recognition, the systems thinking, the ability to translate complexity into clarity—those are yours. They go with you. The organisation will continue without you. You’ll continue without it. And the work you do next will be the work that actually sounds like you.

I called the company Probably Brilliant because I wasn’t sure. I’m sure now. I was always going to be.

Still called it Probably Brilliant though. Just in case.