When I was younger, I dropped out of university because I knew it wasn't right for me.

My mum was, unsurprisingly, not delighted. I got a trainee accounting job instead, ended up at KPMG and eventually became one of their youngest managers at the ripe old age of 26. In 2005, whilst living out of the M4J4 Holiday Inn on a Business INterruption claim that had lasted over a year, I rang the KPMG Global Mobility team, found some jobs overseas and moved countries about six weeks later.

Again, my Mum was, unsurprisingly, not delighted. I reminded her on more than one occassion that that's what you get when you tell your daughter to believe in herself and that she can do anything!

When I think back to that time I miss that version of me. There wasn't a 47-page strategy document, I just had a fairly strong sense of where I should go, and what I should do. Some would call it naivety, but I know it wasn't that- it was my intuition screaming louder than my analytical mind would allow.

Somewhere along the way, as careers get bigger and decisions get more expensive and there are investors, boards, regulators, employees and considerably more people available to have opinions about things, it becomes very easy to stop trusting that instinct. I think that you can analyse almost anything until the interesting bit has all but disappeared. And because I used to be a forensic accountant there is actually no end to the analysis by paralysis that I can get myself in to, especially when I'm feeing anxious or worried about upsetting people or making the wrong decision.

Money Sweetspot has reminded me of that repeatedly.

Where did the intuition go?

We started Money Sweetspot with a fairly straightforward idea: high-cost debt is stopping working people from moving forward, so perhaps we could build a better way to refinance it if we also help them understand finance better and incentivse people to do it.

That core idea is alive and well and a Financial Reset, as it's been termed for the past four years, is still the heart of what we do.

But the business has also kept showing us things we weren't originally looking for, or thought they'd be an 'add on' rather than a fundamental learning or issue. For example, we thought

• We were building a lending product and discovered that the customer's story could be as important as the credit data.
• Financial education would be a big collection of useful content and learnt fairly quickly that people who are already overwhelmed do not, in fact, require endless options from another 74,000 things to read.
• How we could lend better and increasingly found ourselves in conversations with employers, advisers, Iwi and other organisations asking a bigger question: could some of what we're learning help other people lend differently too?

The final one has stuck.

The luxury of being small

One of the reasons I left a job I loved with a large finance company back in 2020 was that I didn't subscribe to the 'billion dollar' business type philosophy of growth for growths sake. So it'll come as no surprise that I don't particularly want Money Sweetspot to become a giant finance company for the sake of becoming a giant finance company either.

In fact, one of the reasons we were always called Sweetspot was because I wanted to find the 'node' (if you didn't realise I was neurodiverse with an over indexing to pattern recognition you do now!) that really needed to exist to unlock a sustainable finance ecosystem with people at it's core, rather than numbers.

I want us to help prove that finance can be more human without becoming financially unsustainable, and that understanding somebody's context doesn't mean abandoning risk disciplines or good lending decisions.

And what has emerged is that sometimes the most interesting role for a small company is to show that another way is possible. It means that by surrounding ourselves with the right investors, funders, customers and partners we can try something, discover it doesn't work, and change it.

By doing that, over time, it means that we can also end up build something we thought customers would love, discover they're politely ignoring it, and go back to the drawing board. That's the luxury of being small.

Purpose can lead to paralysis

That being said, because this mission is so personal to me I have tied myself in knots over the last four years.

And if I'm being brutally honest, there are times when I have overthought Money Sweetspot so comprehensively that I've argued myself away from things I probably already knew. And because we're small the cost of that has been, at times, nearly terminal.

Some of my best decisions in life have been made when I've trusted my instinct and then used the evidence to shape the path and some of my worst, and most painful, have come when I've known something deep down and then convened a full internal board meeting inside me head to persuade myself otherwise.

Which is why I started this article with stating that I miss my 25 year old self, some times. That means that for 2026 I'm trying to get better at holding dualities. When I take a step back it makes me feel like I'm a bit slow to the party. I've ALWAYS been about duality- I'm an accountant that loves stories, an extrovert that needs silence, and a raging ADHD'er that needs structure.

For my own sanity, and the wellbeing of my team and our business I'm working on holding:

Curiosity and discipline.

Data and intuition.

Ambition and enough humility to admit when we've got something wrong.

So, if you see me, out and about, not holding to those dualities please call me out on it- future Sasha, and future Money Sweetspot, will thank you for it.

Because I don't think our job is to have all the answers, I think our job is to keep asking better questions, listen properly to what people tell us, and build the next thing from what we learn.

If you care about stories and financial wellbeing as much as I do I'd love to hear from you.

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Sasha

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