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 on the phone earlier today with my friend Jo and we were doing what small business owners do best: talking shit about our businesses. The kind of conversation that feels like therapy and comedy and crisis management all wrapped into one. We were laughing about the worst kinds of customers, the ones who pay the first invoice and then their card “mysteriously declines” on the second month. The ones who swear they’ll pay tomorrow. The ones who blame cash flow, or stolen cards, or the dog, or Mercury being in retrograde. We were talking about how half of Michigan is currently down with some kind of aggressive flu, and how being sick as a small business owner is especially offensive because your business does not care. Your body can be falling apart but your mortgage is still due. Payroll still runs. Vendors still want their money. You do not get to disappear just because you feel like absolute garbage. And then there’s the bookkeeping. The endless, invisible, unglamorous work of reconciling accounts, balancing checkbooks, cleaning up QuickBooks, closing out the year, and preparing for taxes. The work that no one claps for. The work that nobody thanks you for. The work that still has to get done no matter how tired you are, how distracted you are, how sick your kids are, or how badly you’d like to put it off another day.
We were venting and laughing and commiserating, and somewhere in the middle of it I had this very calm, very certain realization: yeah… I’d still do this anyway. Even if I didn’t have this business specifically, I would still be doing something business-wise. I would still be building something. I would still be tinkering with systems and ideas and offers and content and ways to serve people. I would still be creating things just to see if I could make them work. It’s what my brain does now. It’s what I do for fun. My husband and I talk about business the way some couples talk about their fantasy football leagues. It’s our version of a hobby. And that’s when the sentence fully formed in my head: if I had a billion dollars, I would probably still be a small business owner.
The irony is that Jo and I were also talking about how wildly unoptimized this path is from a purely financial perspective. We both took out very large SBA loans to fund our businesses. And if you’ve never done that before, let me tell you, it is absolutely terrifying. You start your business full of hope and belief and just enough naivety to survive the process. You sign the papers. You take the leap. You pour the money into buildouts and equipment and inventory and staff and marketing and signage and software and furniture and systems and things you didn’t even know you were going to need yet. And then one day you look up and realize you are bleeding cash while desperately trying to build something that will eventually produce cash. Your bills do not care that your revenue hasn’t caught up yet. Rent is due. Payroll is due. Suppliers want their checks. There are so many moments in those early years where you are absolutely convinced that you are not going to make it. You try everything. You chase customers. You tweak your offers. You stretch your timelines. You tell yourself you just need one more good month. One more deal. One more break.
Now, years later, both of our businesses are operating, stable, and supporting our families. And yet, every single month, we are still staring at this massive mountain of debt that we have to climb. The plan is working. The timeline is correct. The math makes sense. And it still hurts. It still stings to write that check. I would very much love to keep that five, six, seven thousand dollars a month. But instead I pay the loan. Because I already spent the money building the thing that now supports me. And I will continue to spend the next several years paying for the privilege of having built it.
Here’s the part that really messes with your head: if we had done almost anything else with that money, we would probably be better off financially right now. If I had stayed in my corporate job and invested consistently in a boring S&P 500 ETF, my portfolio would look incredible after the last five years. If I had bought rental properties. If I had bought an apartment complex. If I had just stacked cash and let compounding interest do what it does best. On paper, those paths would have been cleaner. Safer. Easier. Probably far less stressful. And yet, none of them would have been mine.
Long before I ever signed an SBA loan, I was already a small business owner at heart. I’ve been selling on eBay since I was eighteen. Old clothes. Craft supplies. Shipping materials. Whatever I could move. I sold on Etsy — cross-stitch projects, crocheted hats and scarves. I flipped items on Facebook Marketplace. It was never about survival back then. It was just… fun. A puzzle. A little game of sourcing and pricing and listing and selling and shipping and watching the numbers move. Going the formal small business route later, taking the loan, building something at scale with my husband, didn’t change who I was. It just gave me the tools and the permission to take myself seriously.
What I love most about this life isn’t the money. It’s the moment someone pays me for something I built. The thirty to sixty days between the first phone call and the signed contract. The quiet thrill when a system finally works the way you designed it. The satisfaction of watching numbers move because of decisions you made. It’s the dopamine hit when a social media reel unexpectedly takes off and I get to reverse-engineer everything about it — the music, the hook, the timing, the length, the seasonality, the psychology. It’s the monthly ritual of closing the books, reconciling accounts, spotting trends, understanding seasonality, and watching the business evolve year over year. You don’t just build a business. The business builds you.
I learned a long time ago that just because something looks good on paper does not mean it feels good in real life. You can plan for everything — your kids’ education, your retirement, your vacations, your budget, your five-year projections. And then life shows up and laughs. Vendors fall through. Markets shift. Kids get sick. You get sick. Equipment breaks. Plans collapse. Success shows up unexpectedly. Small business ownership teaches you the most valuable skill of all: agility. You learn how to pivot when life throws lemons at your head when you were fully prepared to bake an apple pie. And strangely, beautifully, that chaos becomes part of the joy.
There’s another part of entrepreneurship that no one really prepares you for: how addictive it becomes. The moment you figure out how to build a product. The moment you crack a marketing strategy. The moment you land a client. The moment your systems finally hum. The moment you see growth and realize it happened because of you. You don’t want to stop. You want to keep building. Keep trying. Keep optimizing. It’s not about greed. It’s about creation. You stop wanting to consume life and you start wanting to build it.
When I picture myself at eighty, I don’t care what my net worth says. I care that I built a life that fit me. That I bent my professional world around my personal one instead of the other way around. That I wasn’t trapped by golden handcuffs in a job I hated just because it paid well. That I knew my children. That I knew my husband. That I saw the world. That I built something sustainable and meaningful and mine. No two businesses are the same. No two lives are the same. And this one — messy, exhausting, thrilling, terrifying, beautiful — is the one I chose.
So yes. If I had a billion dollars, I would probably still be here. On the phone with a friend. Talking shit about my business. And loving it anyway.