From Hospital Bed to £8.5k Months: Rebecca’s Story

How Rebecca Waclawyj turned a health crisis into Brighter Future Mediation – an affordable, accessible family and workplace mediation service now saving hundreds of children from the family court system, with Digital Boost’s small business support

Some businesses start with a five-year plan. Rebecca Waclawyj’s started from a hospital bed, with £400 in her account.

Eighteen months later, Rebecca is the founder and director of Brighter Future Mediation. It’s a fast-growing family and workplace mediation business that has supported 148 clients to date. And the monthly recurring revenue has grown by 100% in its first operating year!

A career built on seeing what’s broken

Rebecca’s route into family mediation wasn’t obvious, but it makes complete sense in hindsight. After studying psychology at university, she began her career as an assistant psychologist in a mental health unit. She then moved into probation work in the magistrates’ and Crown Courts. It was there that she saw first-hand how unequal the system could be for the people caught inside it.

She went on to spend 11 years at a pioneering domestic abuse intervention project. She became an expert witness in family court proceedings and wrote risk and vulnerability assessments. After her fourth round of redundancy (now a single mum) she moved into project management, eventually training as a mediator in 2017. Even then, the business idea was shelved: full-time work, childcare and the cost of accreditation made self-employment feel impossible.

A hospital bed turning point

In October 2024, everything changed. Rebecca was recovering in hospital from sepsis and a string of surgeries. She’d just been made redundant for a fifth time -so Rebecca made a decision. On her daughter’s birthday, she registered Brighter Future Mediation online from her hospital bed. She had just £400 to her name, but took the leap and paid a developer to build her website.

That’s when she discovered Digital Boost’s small business support. It was one of the first organisations she came across as she began searching for small business support, mentoring and a network to help her make sense of running a company on her own.

Digital Boost’s Small Business Support

Rebecca’s first Digital Boost event, in March 2025, was also her first networking event as a founder and she nearly didn’t go. “I’m a fraud, I shouldn’t even be here,” she remembers thinking, with only two clients to her name.

However, she stepped outside of her comfort zone and pushed herself to go. She took part in a goal-setting session and had a huge turning point during a powerful visualisation exercise. She wrote down a target of exiting her business for a minimum of £5 million by 9 March 2030 – a goal that now sits on her fridge alongside her family and health ambitions.

From there, the free mentoring made the difference between an idea and a functioning business:

• A mentor helped write a business plan that secured a £20,000 startup loan.
• Social media mentoring grew Rebecca’s followers to 1,000 within six months
• A tech mentor gave her the confidence to start building her own CRM and client app, despite having never built one before.

“I go to so many founders’ events and I say: start with Digital Boost,” Rebecca says. “You don’t have to commit to a mentor every week – just go on there, search for the one problem you have, message a few people, and see what happens.”

Learning to raise investment from scratch

Armed with growing confidence, Rebecca attended a NatWest fundraising accelerator workshop, where she first heard the terms SEIS and EIS – the UK tax-relief schemes that make early-stage businesses attractive to investors. Within weeks she had taught herself the entire process, secured Advanced Assurance, and closed a funding round of around £60,000 from personal contacts who believed in her.

“No VC would look at me,” she says candidly. “But these were women who said, you’ve always come through, and you always excel.”

With this injection of cash and confidence, Rebecca was able to invest in her business and take it to the next level!

The results: real growth, real impact

The numbers speak for themselves. Brighter Future Mediation’s monthly recurring revenue grew from £398 in its first month to £8,500 within the year. This was a 1,014% increase between the first and fourth quarters of its first year of trading! More importantly to Rebecca, the business has helped 148 clients and kept 252 children out of the family court system, sparing them the financial, emotional and time cost of lengthy legal battles.

Bright Future Mediation now also offers accredited workplace, civil and commercial mediation. This is alongside affordable court-support packages that help people fill out complex legal forms without paying solicitor rates.

Why it matters

Rebecca’s story is, at its heart, a story about what happens when ambitious founders get access to the right mentoring, the right network, and the confidence to ask questions in rooms where they don’t feel they belong. It’s exactly the kind of founder journey Digital Boost exists to support – free, expert business mentoring for small business owners and entrepreneurs across the UK, whatever stage they’re at.

Inspired by Rebecca’s story? Start accessing our free support today!