Barbora Red

Business Accounting Entrepreneurship Management Startups Personal Finance

I'm Barbora, an accountant, business owner, assistant parkour coach and someone who has taken a fairly unconventional route to building a business.

I started my career in the corporate world in London, following the sensible career path. Somewhere along the way, I discovered parkour.

What started as being spectacularly bad at jumping over things eventually became a huge part of my life. I trained, became a beginner coach and helped manage a parkour company in London. And without realising it at the time, parkour completely changed the way I thought about fear, risk, leadership and failure.

Those lessons followed me into entrepreneurship.

I went on to build Red Viking Finance, my own accounting and CFO practice, and later made my first business acquisition. Taking on a substantial existing client portfolio and learning very quickly that running a business is an entirely different skill from being good at your profession.

Today I lead a growing team, advise business owners on their finances and strategy and continue to explore business acquisitions as part of growing Red Viking Finance.

I love talking about the side of entrepreneurship that doesn't fit neatly into a spreadsheet: making decisions without knowing whether they're right, learning to trust a team, taking calculated risks, dealing with fear, recovering when things don't go to plan and becoming the person capable of running the business you're trying to build.

And, occasionally, I can even talk about tax.

A few questions you can ask me

• What can jumping over a wall possibly teach someone about running a company?
• Is parkour actually about taking risks or avoiding stupid ones?
• What's scarier: your first parkour jump or your first business acquisition?
• When did you realise being an accountant and running an accounting firm were completely different jobs?
• What did you get wrong when you first became a business owner?
• How do you know when fear is warning you about genuine risk and when it's simply stopping you progressing?
• Why are business owners often so emotional about their finances?
• When should a founder stop trying to do everything themselves?

I'm happiest on podcasts where we can have a genuine conversation rather than deliver a perfectly polished business lecture. I'm very comfortable talking about what worked, what didn't, what scared me and what I'm still figuring out.

If your audience consists of founders, business owners, leaders or people contemplating a slightly unconventional career path, we'll probably have plenty to talk about.