In Arduis Fidelis

What “Faithful in Adversity” Taught Me About Building, Scaling, and Letting Go of a Business

Jay Allen - Scale & Exit Mentor is a former Rapid Deployment Combat Medic in the British Armed Forces. Here is a picture of him carrying a stretcher from the helicopter to a combat wheeled ambulance

There’s a moment every Combat Medic remembers. It isn’t the training. It isn’t even the first casualty. It’s the first time you understand, properly understand, that the badge on your beret isn’t decoration.

Mine sat an inch above my left eye — a serpent wound round a rod, framed in laurel, a crown above it, and beneath it all, a scroll carrying three words: In Arduis Fidelis. Faithful in Adversity.

I didn’t choose that motto. The Royal Army Medical Corps had been carrying it since 1898. By the time it landed on my cap, it had already outlived two World Wars, twenty-seven Victoria Crosses (and 2 Bars), and more forward patrols than anyone could count. I didn’t know any of that history before I joined the Army, but I knew much of it by the time I left training to join my first Regiment. By then, I knew what it meant when things went wrong: you don’t leave. You stay faithful to the task, and to the people relying on you, precisely when adversity makes that hardest to do.

Like Captain Noel Godfrey Chavasse, who was awarded his first VC for extraordinary bravery during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. He earned his second (a Bar to the VC) in 1917 at the Battle of Passchendaele, where he continued to treat and rescue wounded men for two days despite suffering severe, ultimately fatal wounds himself.

I’ve spent the better part of two decades since discovering that this motto doesn’t retire when the uniform comes off. It just changes battlefields.

The Rod, the Serpent, and the Real Meaning Underneath

The symbol on that badge — the Rod and serpent coiled around a staff — traces back to the ancient Greek god of healing. It’s the same emblem the World Health Organisation uses today. It’s older than any army, older than any empire, and it exists for one reason: to mark out the people who stay when everyone else has permission to run.

That’s the part people miss when they hear “faithful in adversity” and file it away as a nice bit of Latin on a museum badge. It isn’t a statement about loyalty in comfortable conditions. Loyalty is easy when nothing is on fire. The motto exists specifically for the moment when everything is on fire — when the plan has failed, the position is compromised, resources are gone, and the only thing left standing between chaos and control is whether you hold your ground.

As a Combat Medic, I learned that lesson long before I fully understood it intellectually. You learn it in your hands first. The moment training stops being theory and becomes instinct is the moment “faithful in adversity” stops being a motto and becomes a nervous system response.

It was actually in exactly that kind of moment — waiting ahead of a forward patrol, running through worst-case scenarios in my head because that’s what you do when the stakes are real — that I first sketched out what would eventually become one of the psychological frameworks I still use with business owners today. I wasn’t thinking about business. I was thinking about threats, weaknesses, opportunities, and strengths under pressure — a version of TOWS analysis built not in a boardroom but in the field, because when adversity is genuinely arduous, you don’t have the luxury of getting the order of operations wrong. Threats and weaknesses first. Then, and only then, opportunities and strengths. That sequencing has stayed with me for over twenty years, and it still shapes how I think about strategy for the founders I work with now. One of the many ways this segments me from any other business coach/mentor.consultant.

When the Deployment Ends Early

Here’s the part of my story that doesn’t fit neatly into a highlight reel: I didn’t get to finish on my own terms. A medical discharge ended my service earlier than I’d planned, earlier than I wanted, and earlier than felt fair. There is a particular kind of grief in that — not the grief of loss through failure, but the grief of a chapter closing while you’re still mid-sentence.

If you’ve built a business you didn’t intend to build this big, this fast, or this complicated — you might recognise that feeling. It’s not the grief of failure. It’s the disorientation of whatever is next arriving on a timeline you didn’t choose, while you’re still holding the plan you had for how it was supposed to go.

I didn’t get to choose when my service ended. But I did get to choose what I did with the years that followed. I retrained — change management and blue ocean strategy — because if the operational theatre I knew was closed to me, I was going to understand the theatre I was moving into with the same seriousness I’d applied to the last one. Adversity doesn’t ask permission before it arrives. But it does leave you a choice about what you build in the space it clears.

Corporate, and the Itch That Wouldn’t Settle

I spent three or four years in corporate life after that. It taught me things I still use — structure, process, the discipline of scale done properly rather than accidentally. But it also taught me something about myself: I am not built to be faithful to a system I don’t believe in. I can be faithful in adversity. I cannot be faithful to mediocrity dressed up as strategy.

So I left, and I became a business owner instead.

Buying, Building, and Losing — the Adversity Didn’t Stop

Since then, I’ve bought, grown, and scaled two businesses successfully. I’ve also lost one — not through poor decision-making, not through lack of graft, but to Brexit, when a European supplier relationship that the business depended on simply ceased to be viable overnight. No warning system built by any consultant could have fully protected against a geopolitical shift of that scale. I’d put serious preparation into that business. It didn’t matter. The supply chain was gone, and so, eventually, was the business built on top of it.

I want to be honest about that loss rather than skip past it, because I think too much business content pretends that the founders writing it never actually lost anything.

I did.

And the motto that got me through a medical discharge is the same one that got me through the most challenging times in my past businesses – my third, watching a business I’d built with real care become unviable through no fault of my own: stay faithful to the work, even when the outcome you wanted is no longer available to you.

That’s not resilience as a personality trait. That’s resilience as a discipline you were trained into, and were willing to die on a hill to uphold, long before you needed it for anything as ordinary as commerce.

What “Accidentally Successful” Actually Means

This is where the motto stops being autobiography and starts being relevant to you.

I work with a very specific kind of business owner. Not the founder who set out with a five-year exit plan and a private equity roadmap. The one who set up a business, was good at what they do, got busy, hired in some help — and woke up one day to discover they’d built something considerably bigger than they first intended.

If that’s you, you’ll recognise one of two positions.

Either you’re trapped in the centre of it. Every decision still runs through you. You’ve built a team, but somehow you’re still the bottleneck, still fielding the questions that should never have reached your desk, still the one who has to sign off on things that a competent operations lead should be handling without you. You’ve built a business, but you haven’t built a business that can run without you standing directly underneath it holding the whole structure up.

Or you’ve done the harder work — you’ve built the team, the processes, the systems — and you still can’t extract yourself. Not because the business needs you, but because you’ve spent so long being “the business owner” that you no longer know who you are without that identity strapped to your back. The company can survive without you now. The question is whether you can survive without the company defining you.

Both of these are forms of adversity. They’re just quieter than the ones I trained for. Nobody’s shooting at you. But the pressure is real, the stakes are real — your finances, your health, your family, your future are all riding on how you navigate this — and the motto still applies. Faithful in adversity doesn’t mean staying stuck in the same position out of stubbornness. It means staying committed to the outcome that actually matters even when the path there requires you to change everything about how you’ve been operating.

Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do for the business you built is learn how to leave it well.

Why I Built #ADDAZERO the Way I Did

When I sat down to build the #ADDAZERO Methodology, I wasn’t starting from a business school textbook. I was starting from twenty years of learning what it actually takes to hold your position — or know precisely when and how to change it — under real pressure.

The framework has two tiers, deliberately. Eight Universal Laws that hold the principles, and beneath them, the eight practical Rules — #ADDAZERO itself — that translate those principles into what you actually do on a Monday morning when the business is demanding more of you than you have to give.

I built the HONESTY Agenda the same way. It replaces the old up-front-contract language you’ll find in traditional sales methodology, because in my experience, business owners in adversity don’t need another script. They need a framework that assumes forward movement is always possible, even when the honest answer in the room is “I don’t know yet.” The final letter — Y — never asks for a binary yes or no. It asks which option feels most aligned. That’s not softness. That’s what faithful, honest strategy actually sounds like when you strip the sales-floor theatre out of it.

And the three exits framework that runs through the entire #ADDAZERO Trilogy — GROW, SCALE, EXIT — exists because I refuse to let business owners believe that “exit” only means selling up and disappearing. Sometimes the exit is from the centre of the business, into a role where you actually enjoy your work again. Sometimes it’s a genuine sale. Sometimes it’s handing the reins to someone else while you stay involved on your own terms. All three are legitimate. All three require the same underlying discipline: faithfulness to the outcome, even through the adversity of changing your own role in the story.

The Thread That Runs From the Beret to the Boardroom

I think about that cap badge more than people probably expect. Not with nostalgia exactly — more as a kind of internal compass check. When a client is mid-crisis, when a launch is wobbling, when a partnership is fraying, when the numbers aren’t where they should be three weeks before a deadline that can’t move — I ask myself the same question I’d have asked on operations: are we still faithful to the actual objective, or have we quietly started protecting our comfort instead?

Those aren’t the same thing, and adversity has a way of blurring the line between them if you’re not paying attention. Comfort says: stop pushing, lower the ambition, quietly retreat from the plan and call it “being realistic.” Faithfulness says: the objective hasn’t changed, only the conditions have — so adapt the method, not the mission.

That’s the whole difference between a business owner who survives a hard season and one who’s still standing five years later having actually built something that outlasts them.

What This Means If You’re Reading This as an Accidentally Successful Business Owner

You didn’t sign up to be tested this way. Most people who build businesses that grow beyond their original intention didn’t draw up a plan for managing four, forty or four hundred staff, or extracting themselves from day-to-day operations, or working out what their identity even is once the business no longer needs them standing in the middle of it every hour of every day. You backed into this. That doesn’t make the adversity any less real, and it doesn’t make the discipline required to navigate it any less demanding.

But here’s what I want you to take from a badge I wore for years before I really understood what it was really asking of me: faithfulness in adversity was never about grinding through unchanged. It was about staying loyal to the mission while being willing to completely change your own position within it. Medics don’t win battles by refusing to move. They win by staying exactly where the mission needs them — which sometimes means holding ground, and sometimes means falling back to reorganise before pushing forward again.

Your business is asking the same thing of you right now, whichever side of “accidentally successful” you’re sitting on. The question was never whether you’re capable of adversity — you clearly are, or you wouldn’t have built something this substantial in the first place. The question is whether you’re willing to be faithful to what the business actually needs from you next, even when that means letting go of the role you’ve been playing so far.

In Arduis Fidelis. Faithful in adversity.

That motto got me through a medical discharge I didn’t choose, a corporate career I outgrew, a business I lost to forces entirely outside my control, and two businesses I built and scaled with everything I had. It’s the same motto sitting underneath every law in the #ADDAZERO Methodology, whether the reader ever knows where it came from or not.

If you’re in the middle of your own version of adversity right now — trapped in the centre of a business that’s outgrown you, or stuck holding an identity a business no longer requires — that motto is available to you too. Not as decoration. As discipline.

Stay faithful to the mission. Just be honest about what the mission actually needs from you next.

Jay Allen is a former Rapid Deployment Combat Medic Veteran and now the founder of My TrueNORTH Limited, creator of the #ADDAZERO Methodology, and host of The Accidental Business Owner Podcast. His book trilogy — GROW, SCALE, EXIT — launches on 11 September 2026.