Most business owners expect the first few years to be difficult. What they don’t expect is to still be asking the same question ten or twenty years later.
Why is running my business so damn hard?
It’s probably a question most business owners have asked themselves at some point.
Not necessarily out loud.
Maybe it’s after another evening catching up on emails. Maybe it’s after cancelling a family meal because a client needs something. Maybe it’s after spending the day solving everyone else’s problems instead of doing what you planned.
Whatever the reason, the thought crosses your mind.
“Surely it shouldn’t always feel like this?”
The strange thing is that most business owners never question it.
They assume that’s just what success looks like.
The bigger the business gets, the bigger the problems become.
More staff. More customers. More responsibility. More pressure.
They convince themselves it’s simply the price of owning a successful business.
But what if it isn’t?
The Business Isn’t Hard Because It’s Successful
I’ve worked with business owners for over twenty-five years, and I’ve noticed something interesting.
It doesn’t matter whether the business turns over £500,000 or £5 million.
The conversations are remarkably similar.
They’re working long hours.
They’re constantly interrupted.
Everyone seems to need them.
Taking a proper holiday feels impossible.
And many of them wake up wondering what fresh problems will be waiting in their inbox that morning.
They’ve built successful businesses.
They just haven’t built businesses that are easy to run.
Success Can Make the Wrong Things Bigger
One of the biggest myths in business is that growth automatically makes life easier.
Sometimes it does.
Often it doesn’t.
If your business relies on you to make every decision today, doubling the size of the business usually doubles the number of decisions waiting for you tomorrow.
More customers don’t solve that problem.
More staff don’t solve that problem.
In fact, they often make it worse.
The business grows.
The pressure grows with it.
You’ve Probably Solved Hundreds of Problems
The irony is that business owners are brilliant problem-solvers.
Every challenge gets dealt with.
Recruitment.
Cash flow.
Customer complaints.
Equipment failures.
Supply issues.
Another problem appears, and you solve that as well.
What rarely happens is stepping back and asking a much bigger question.
“Why does the business keep creating these problems in the first place?”
That’s often the problem behind the problem.
It Doesn’t Have to Feel Like This
One of the biggest breakthroughs my clients have isn’t finding a magic system or a clever management technique.
It’s realising that the pressure they’ve accepted as normal… isn’t.
Businesses can be designed to be easier to run.
Teams can take more responsibility.
Problems can be prevented instead of constantly fire fought.
Owners can leave on time.
They can take holidays.
They can enjoy building the business instead of simply surviving it.
Not because business is easy.
But because it no longer has to depend on one exhausted person holding everything together.
That’s a very different way of running a business.
And once you’ve seen it, it’s difficult to go back to believing that this is just “how business is.”
By Andy Walter
Leadership & Management Partner
The problem you can see is rarely the problem holding your business back.
If you’ve ever found yourself asking, “Why is running my business so damn hard?”, perhaps it’s time to discover the problem behind the problem.
Join us at the next Your Mastermind Group networking session.
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