This post is part of The Mompreneur Edit — a philosophical manifesto for high-achieving women rewriting the script. View all Mompreneur Edit posts HERE.
I was standing at my desk in my office because I had done a little too much sitting over the holidays. My iPad was propped up playing Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour documentary. I had leftover Chinese food heating up for breakfast. My coffee was finally ready. QuickBooks was open on one screen. My phone was recording content on the other. I had gotten to the office first thing that morning, hit the microwave, hit play on Taylor, poured the coffee, and got to work.
And that’s when it hit me again — this is the real work of entrepreneurship.
Not the aesthetic stuff that shows up on social media. Not the highlight reels. Not the perfectly lit desk shots and inspirational captions. This is the real version. This is the quiet, unglamorous, deeply necessary part of running a business.
After years of building multiple companies, I can say this with total certainty: you don’t have to like every job in your business, but you absolutely have to know how to do every single one of them.
Because your employees will call in sick. Your vendors will forget about you. Your family will be way less supportive than you think they’ll be. And no one, not one single person on this planet, will ever care about your business as much as you do.
Not your spouse. Not your parents. Not your best friend. Not your first hire. Not the vendor you pay every month. You.
So it becomes your responsibility, and yours alone, to find your groove and get all of the shit done.
Across all of my companies, my roles look remarkably similar. I am the bookkeeper. The sales department. The scheduler. The social media coordinator. The PR team. The marketing team. The operations manager. The crisis manager. The person who vacuums the floor. The person who closes the deals. The person who sees the vision and builds the path.
The only thing I outsource is accounting to a CPA, because I do not mess with the IRS.
Do I love every part of this? Absolutely not.
People problems are the hardest. I am an introvert by nature and I hate conflict, but business does not care about your comfort. So over the years I have forced myself into what I call ambivert mode. I can now talk to anyone, anywhere, about business. I will meet someone in line at a coffee shop and two minutes later I am their biggest cheerleader and the small business coach they did not ask for.
Then there is chasing invoices, which might be the most emotionally exhausting part of entrepreneurship. There is something deeply painful about providing a service, honoring your end of a contract, and then watching someone fail to honor theirs. It feels personal. It feels like betrayal. Like, dude, I thought we were friends. But we were never friends. This is business.
Over time I learned to build systems that protect my company even when my feelings want to avoid the conflict. Termination after thirty days of non-payment. No new services when there are outstanding balances. Firm boundaries that keep the business healthy even when it hurts a little.
One of the most consistent and heartbreaking realizations I see in entrepreneurs is how little their personal network understands their motivation. People imagine you announce your business and the room explodes in applause. What you usually get is polite disinterest and a subject change. At best.
Do not expect your friends and family to buy from you. And if they do, expect them to ask for a discount or for it for free. Plan to build your business on the backs of complete strangers who believe in what you are doing, not the people who already know you.
That shift alone saves entrepreneurs years of disappointment.
There is also a rhythm to this life that no one prepares you for. Some days are content days, which for me simply means I am doing all of the normal work but recording it. Selfies at networking events. Videos while cleaning conference rooms. Talking to my phone about QuickBooks while it is open in front of me.
Some days are networking days. Chamber events. BNI meetings. Events I am hosting myself. Putting on the networking personality and digging deep even when my social battery is already empty.
Some days are cleaning days. Vacuuming. Organizing. Resetting rooms. Prepping for shows with Auburn & Main. Running the business center when an employee needs a day off.
And then there are the ship-steering days. The door is closed. Something is playing on my iPad for background noise. QuickBooks is open. Bank statements. Blog drafts. New business cards. Writing checks. Scheduling doctor appointments. Solving ten problems no one else even knows exist.
Most days of entrepreneurship are ship-steering days.
And the ocean is the Atlantic in hurricane season.
The hustle never stops, but damn, it is a powerful ocean to be sailing on.
Here is the core belief I carry as a business owner: the world is full of well-meaning, flawed humans who will ghost you, disappoint you, deprioritize you, and make mistakes. When you hire anyone, employee or vendor, you expect them to care like you do. That expectation is unrealistic. No one will ever care about your business as much as you do.
So you must know how to do every job.
Not because you will always do it.
But because one day you may have to.
And when that day comes, your business survives because you prepared.
Everything in your business is interconnected. Ignore that and your business bleeds. If you are incredible at sales but do not understand your numbers, good luck paying your mortgage. If you have an amazing product but refuse to learn sales, your business stays in your mom’s basement. If your sales are strong but your vendors constantly ghost you, your customers will revolt. If your content looks beautiful but your backend is chaos, the collapse is inevitable.
Once you truly understand how each piece affects the whole, you learn what it is actually worth to outsource and how to spot nonsense. You can tell when a social media agency is selling you mass-produced AI garbage you could create yourself in two focused hours a month instead of paying them hundreds to sit on retainer.
As Taylor Swift says in the Eras Tour documentary, everyone envies what you have, but no one envies the work it took to get there.
They see the stage. They do not see the rehearsals, the injuries, the contracts, the exhaustion, the years of invisible building.
Business is exactly the same.
So no, you do not have to love every job in your business. But you do have to respect every job. Learn every job. Understand every job. Because when you truly know your business, you stop being held hostage by people who do not care about it like you do.
And that is when everything changes.