The loneliest job and the club changing that

Arthur Colquhoun moved to London looking for his people (entrepreneurs). He found a lot of networking events instead. So he built something better.

Here is something nobody tells you before you start a business. The early days are not just hard. They are quietly, persistently lonely.

You are making decisions nobody else fully understands. You are carrying a version of the future in your head that you cannot quite explain yet. And in a city like London, surrounded by millions of people, it is entirely possible to feel like the only person in the room who is building something from nothing.

Arthur Colquhoun knows that feeling well. He moved to London wanting to meet other ambitious people, to find the kinds of conversations that actually go somewhere. He tried the networking events. He went to more than a few of them.

"A lot of them were pretty underwhelming," he says. "They felt quite transactional, quite awkward. A bit performative."

After enough of those evenings, a different question started forming. Not "why are these events bad?" but "what would a good one actually look like?"

The answer became YES Club.

The name has a dual life. On the surface it carries the mindset Arthur wanted to build around, that founders disposition of stepping forward, saying yes to the uncomfortable thing, doing the thing that scares you a little. That spirit is embedded in what YES Club does.

But the literal meaning? Young Entrepreneur Supper Club. An acronym that even most of YES Club's own members do not know.

"I told a few of my community members the other day and they were like,  what? No way," Arthur says, laughing.

The supper club element is not incidental. It is the design. Founders come together around a table, not a stage. The format creates the conditions for something rarer than a business card exchange, an actual conversation between people who are genuinely in it.

Every YES Club event is curated with a precision that is unusual in a world of automated invitations and templated follow-ups. Each guest receives a handwritten invitation. Arthur personally jumps on a call with most of the people attending. The handwritten touches continue throughout the experience itself.

"The whole idea is to create an experience that really feels different to how automated the vast majority of business touch points are right now," he explains.

That intention shows up in the feedback. It also shows up in a harder truth: curation at that level does not scale easily, especially when it is largely one person doing the work.

"My event schedule this year is probably the max I could do by myself," Arthur admits. "So it's looking at how I can bring on extra support."

His current thinking involves appointing community leads within YES Club's emerging chapters. Health and wellness, sustainability and climate, food and beverage. Founders within those communities who take a more active role in running their chapter, with the right incentives in place. A model that lets YES Club grow without losing the thing that makes it work.

Beyond the community chair model, 2026 holds one more significant move: a paid membership tier. At present, YES Club runs on sponsorship and ticket revenue. Arthur wants to build in recurring income for those who are genuinely embedded in the community, while keeping an open door for founders who simply want to drop in when they can.

"For people that really are bought in and are coming to quite a lot of events, I want it to be valuable to have a membership," he says. "But for people that are super busy and want to keep coming to the occasional one, there's also the option to stay part of the community as a non-paying member."

It is a structure built around the reality of the founder life. Not everyone has the same bandwidth. Not everyone is at the same stage. YES Club makes room for both.

When asked for advice for a UK founder sitting on the edge of starting a business, Arthur doesn’t reach for tactics or frameworks.

"Being around the right people is one of the biggest differentiators between those that make it through the early stages and those that don't," he says. "It's incredibly difficult to build a business, and it's even more difficult if you're juggling all of that completely by yourself."

That early network, people to bounce ideas off, people who catch you in the harder moments, is not a nice-to-have. In Arthur's experience, it is closer to essential.

"You're not alone. There are other people navigating those really early stages. Go and find them. Because it can make a huge difference."

YES Club and Beany have come together as strategic partners in the UK,  both committed to giving early-stage founders access to the support that actually moves the needle.

For Arthur, the alignment was immediate. "It felt very aligned in terms of your accountancy packages and them being affordable," he says. "For the type of founder I've got in my community and where they're at in their business journey, the support that Beany is offering could be really valuable."

Accounting is one of those things that founders at the early stage know they need to sort, and keep putting off. The combination of YES Club's community and Beany's expertise means that one fewer thing has to sit on the to-do list any longer.

YES Club features in this Beany Business Spotlight. Celebrating the businesses that know where they've come from and where they're going.