Business: Problems, Resentment, and Realization
Through the many cycles of business, owners can develop problems, that come with resentment, and the realization that we are going to be okay!
In this article, I want to walk you through the process of realizing where that resentment is coming from and how to change it to love!
The Business of Change
I have worked with a ton of businesses helping them to grow, and as the internet loves to call it, “scale” their resiliency and success in their business.
What You and your business will look like when you start, will change within 6 months, let alone 6 years down the line.
It’s easy to acknowledge and even expect growing pains during this process.
Pretty much everybody understands that growth is uncomfortable.
But when YOU are deep within the changes, it’s easy to get stuck, or completely bogged down in your own sludgy struggle.
The Problem
When we start overworking ourselves, we become exhausted, often avoiding our personal priorities.
To put it dramatically, we martyr ourselves for our business and begin to slide down that slippery slope into the sludge.
We start making reactive decisions.
We stop looking for holistic and creative solutions and start choosing between binary options.
We view our business, industry, economy, and our world as a battle to be fought, a win or lose.
Typically, we hit full-blown martyr status after the first few months into years in our business.
All of the planning, the launch, even those first few successes, and sales are exhilarating.
That first year is a roller coaster of soaring highs and plummeting lows.
We experience some early success and double-down on our commitment.
We endure some crushing losses but take it on the chin.
“We’re learning,” right?!?
But because business is cyclical, we invariably endure a contraction. Our growth projection takes a bit of a sideways crawl or even a dive.
At some point, you crossed over the threshold of eager beginner business owner to seasoned.
We’ve had to say “no” to some of the things that are most important to us. We give up on the idea of weekends and breaks.
We tell ourselves we “have to” choose our business.
Everyone is depending on us, and this is the way it has to be.
So we sacrifice ourselves for our success.
We repeat the same failures and tell ourselves, “never again” more than once.
My favorite fable, “this will change soon ... next busy season, next event, next product launch, it will be different.”
You don’t do anything different, or think differently.
You may have hired an expert or paid for an outstanding designer to fancy things up, but it’s the same thoughts, feelings, assumptions, and stories guiding us.
When You Own Your Own Business, Work Is Personal
After you’ve been in business, and really, the length of time for any “in the business” does vary for people based on business and personality.
It can also experience and leadership style. Once you start to define yourself by the success of your business, you can’t seem to separate you from your work.
When you start our business, or actually, much earlier in the planning process, we assume all jobs and responsibilities.
Imagine the logo and branding, the products, and the people who are buying them. We see the locations and store-fronts or websites and social media posts.
We think through production and distribution, business development, and partnerships.
We get advice from financial and legal experts.
We practice the sales and the elevator pitch.
Then we launch.
Maybe we got financing, maybe we invest our personal savings, or maybe we’ve started on a hunch and a shoestring.
Perhaps we’ve even gotten friends to give us some money for our initial concept.
It’s fun!
When you first start you should wear all the hats, or at least be closely monitoring every activity in your business.
You’re learning and growing, and in doing so, new opportunities, fast failures, and growth occur.
You go through a few hiring cycles, and it’s frustrating.
You test some marketing campaigns, some of which are good, but others fail and feel like huge wastes of investment let alone hope.
By this point, you’ve likely got a lot of people in your ear telling you how hard a new business is.
They mentioned how most fail and your friends and family are likely rolling their eyes when you’re (not) around … a lot.
The Resentment
Fast forward.
You put in thousands of hours, who knows how many dollars, late nights, working weekends, laptops on vacations, and investment from every part of your being.
Suddenly you hit a wall and tell yourself, "I can't keep going!"
This business has become your everything.
But there's resentment and the question of when you did start to resent your business?
Knowing business owners as I do, it was probably around the same time you start asking yourself “how did it get like this?".
The Realization
When you start resigning yourself to the inevitable work vs weekends, uninspiring sales targets, then you've accepted the general malaise that many assume comes with ownership.
It’s time to - as a great poet of the 20th century would say - check yourself before you wreck yourself.
Through your journey of being encounter more cycles of problems and resentment, but there is also that a business owner, you may
In this next article, I go over the Three Reasons for that resentment and how to find creativity and love for your business again!
Read Next: The Three Reasons You Are Killing Yourself For Your Business