The hardest parts of running your business aren’t the challenges.
It’s feeling as though you’re the only one having a hard time.
Facts: I’ve built wealth and lost it. I’ve rehearsed confidence I didn’t feel. I got depressed. I struggled to keep my home together. And for years, the loneliest part of any of it wasn’t the losses. It was the silence around them. Nobody warns you that the higher you climb, the fewer people you feel like you can call. (Spoiler alert: that’s a lie. You can call the people, and the missing ingredient is a community of peers, but we can get to that in a bit.)
Entrepreneurship becomes lonely because we’re convinced we’re supposed to know what to do. We started the thing. We signed the lease, hired the team, put our name, our savings, or both on the line. So when it gets hard, some part of us assumes the challenges are evidence that we’re doing it wrong; that somewhere out there, other people are crushing it with a manual we never received.
I remember spending years trying to project confidence while privately wondering if everyone else had that manual. They didn’t. Nobody does. Every entrepreneur gets stuck. I’ve never met one who hasn’t. What separates the ones who keep building from the ones who quietly fold isn’t the absence of hard seasons. It’s what they do the moment they realize they’re in one.
A mentor once told me something I’ve never forgotten: “The answer you need is almost always inside someone else’s experience.” At the time, I nodded politely and didn’t fully believe him. I was still operating on the theory that asking for help was a confession of weakness, that the strongest move was always the solo move. It took getting stuck – I mean really stuck, the kind where you lie awake doing math that doesn’t work – before I tested his advice out of desperation rather than conviction.
I made a phone call. Not to a consultant. Not to someone I was paying by the hour to tell me what I wanted to hear. I called another entrepreneur whom I knew had weathered something similar. I didn’t ask him to fix it. I asked him what it looked like from where he stood.
Talking with him didn’t answer any questions or fix my problems, but it did give me something more useful: a different angle on a problem I’d been staring at from the same exhausted position for weeks. Within a day, I saw three options I hadn’t considered, simply because someone outside my own head had looked at the same wall and noticed a door.
Most breakthroughs don’t happen because someone hands you the perfect answer. They happen because another business owner helps you see your situation differently.
Isolation magnifies problems. It takes a manageable obstacle and, left alone in a quiet room with your own anxiety, turns it into a wall.
Community does the opposite. It shrinks the wall back down to the obstacle it actually was.
I want to be specific about what this looks like in practice, because “build community” is the kind of advice that sounds nice on a poster and means nothing on a Tuesday afternoon when you’re underwater. So here’s what I actually do, step by step, when I hit a wall. I encourage you to be proactive now and build the same habit into how you run your business, not just how you feel about it.
- Diagnose before you dial. Before you call anyone, get specific about what’s actually stuck. Not “everything feels off”. That’s fear talking, not fact. Is it that revenue is fine, but nothing’s left over at the end of the month? Is it that you’re the only one who can make decisions and the business grinds to a halt the moment you step away? Name the actual constraint. A vague problem gets vague advice. A specific problem gets a specific fix.
- Call someone who’s carried the weight, not just watched from the sidelines. Talk to another entrepreneur… not a well-meaning friend who’s never signed a lease or made payroll, but someone who understands the particular flavor of pressure you’re under. Their advice will land differently because it’s been tested against their own sleepless nights, not just their opinions.
- Write the problem down before you say it out loud. Problems become surprisingly manageable once they leave your head and land on paper. I keep a single page for this: the constraint at the top, and underneath it, everything I know to be true versus everything I merely fear is true. It’s astonishing how much smaller the actual problem looks once fear has somewhere else to sit.
- Separate the facts from the fear. This is its own step because most business owners accidentally fuse the two without noticing. “We’re going to lose the client” is a fear. “The client hasn’t returned two emails” is a fact. Build your next move off the second sentence, not the first.
- Take one action before the conversation ends. Every call I make when I’m stuck, I try to walk away from with at least one concrete next step. Not a feeling of relief, an actual action. Momentum creates confidence far faster than more thinking ever will. Confidence isn’t a prerequisite for moving forward. It’s a byproduct of it.
If you take nothing else from this, take this: the version of you that’s supposed to have it all figured out alone doesn’t exist, and chasing that version is costing you more than it’s protecting you. The strongest founders I know aren’t the ones with the fewest questions. They’re the ones with a community of peers and a list of people they’re not afraid to call.
You are not the only one having a hard week. You just might be the only one pretending you’re not. Swallow your pride and reach out.
You’ve got this.
-Mike
