I’m going to say something that cuts against every headline you’ve read this year.

The economy is grim and businesses are folding. Everyone’s “navigating uncertainty” and yet a noticeable chunk of the small businesses in my network are picking up work right now. Not white-knuckling it. Picking up work.

A disproportionate number of them are run by neurodivergent founders.

The pattern I couldn’t unsee

I work almost exclusively with small NZ businesses, and a lot of them are neurodivergent-led. ADHD founders, autistic founders. I’m AuDHD myself… autistic and ADHD, the combo deal. Heyyyyyyyy. Between clients and the networking groups I’m part of every week, I get a decent read on how small businesses are doing every day.

Over the last 18 months or so, the businesses that froze were the ones that kept doing what used to work, just harder. The ones thriving did something different. They dropped offerings early. They doubled down on what was actually moving. They experimented while everyone else waited for things to go back to normal.

(Newsflash! Things are not going back to normal.)

Our ability to run on incomplete information, treating the plan as disposable, refusing to pretend things are fine, isn’t something we picked up from a business book. For a lot of us, it’s just how our brains work. We’ve been adapting to a world that wasn’t built for us our entire lives. A downturn is more of the same, with invoicing.

No, I’m not going to say “superpower”

The “neurodivergent superpower” thing makes me want to lie down in traffic, so let’s not.

I want to see the bloody research that now backs the pattern. Recent work links ADHD and dyslexia to specific entrepreneurial traits, like alertness to opportunity, divergent problem-solving, comfort with uncertainty, early and effective delegation. Read that list again. In a stable economy, the advantage goes to whoever runs the known playbook most efficiently. In an unstable one, it goes to whoever notices first that the playbook stopped working.

But here’s the honest other half, because I refuse to write the sanitised version. The same brain that spots the opportunity loses the invoice. The hyperfocus that builds the thing forgets to send the proposal for the thing. And in my case there’s a second constraint stacked on top: I have a chronic illness. My energy is not consistent, I cannot “just push through,” and a flare can wipe out chunks of a week without warning.

So I never had the option of building a business that runs on hustle. I had to build one that runs on design. Depth over volume, systems that don’t depend on me having a good day, and a hard no to anything that burns capacity without earning it.

Which turned out to be the exact skill this economy rewards. Funny, that.

Then AI showed up 

I’ve watched founders bend themselves around software for years. It’s most of what I see go wrong, tbh. You buy the tool, and you spend your week feeding it instead of it feeding you.

AI, in the last 6 weeks specifically, is the first tooling shift I’ve seen that bends the other way. 

Some real examples, not hypotheticals:

We now build full client websites in a fraction of the time. Work that used to take days or weeks of manual dev. Same quality bar, fraction of the capacity cost. For a business owner who has to budget energy like money, that is a whole new ballgame.

I’m building our own CRM because every existing tool needed workarounds that ended up overcooked or messy, held together with badly automated duct tape. Instead of forcing our workflow into someone else’s software, we’re building software around the workflow. 

Notice what AI isn’t doing in any of those examples. Our robot overlord is not having the ideas. It’s not reading the clients. And it isn’t making the judgment calls. (Though it may never stop trying to convince you otherwise.) What it IS doing is removing the time tax we used to pay to act on them.

And from my perspective, neurodivergent founders seem to have adopted these tools faster than almost anyone, for the same reason we adapted faster in the downturn. Trying the new unproven thing isn’t a leap for us. It’s the default setting.

There is a distinct irony in that. I suspect it would then get labelled hustle-culture.

So what do you do with this?

Maybe nothing. Perhaps it’s just the musings of a madwoman. But I feel that the businesses doing well right now share a posture, not a neurotype.

They take action without waiting for direction. And they’ve stopped bending themselves around software that was never built for how they actually operate.

That last one is literally why Project 24/7 now exists, so let me declare the bias instead of pretending I don’t have one. We build custom web apps and tools shaped around how your business runs. But the conviction came long before the company. I spent years being told the problem was my brain, my energy, my way of working. The problem was the tooling.

So here’s your homework. Find the one tool in your business everyone works around. Ask what it would look like if it worked the way your team actually does. Then ask why you’re still paying for the other thing.

The recovery will come. (Well, some level of it anyway.) The businesses that come out ahead won’t be the ones that hunkered down and waited. They’ll be the ones that used the chaos as cover to rebuild how they work.

A lot of them will be run by people whose school reports said they “weren’t applying themselves.” We were. Just not to your playbook.

Sources / further reading