The Business Nobody Sees on Instagram

Entrepreneurship

If you scroll through your feed for five minutes and you’ll see all of the grand openings, the full dining rooms, the glowing reviews, the “we did it” posts with champagne and confetti. Entrepreneurship looks incredible from the outside.

And I’m here to tell you that what you’re seeing is the highlight reel and nothing more.

My husband and I own two restaurants. And it is the hardest thing we’ve have ever done.

It’s Not Easy

The money will always go out before it comes in. There is no version of owning a restaurant where you aren’t watching the numbers with one eye while trying to run a business with the other. You’ll write checks bigger than your thoughts on a regular basis. The equipment breaks at the absolute worst time, food costs spike, and a slow week doesn’t care that you had a great month. And, the expenses don’t pause because you need a moment to catch your breath.

You build a team, you train them, you invest in them, and then a holiday weekend rolls around. The weekends you need to be fully staffed, the weekends that can actually move the needle for your bottom line, the weekends you’ve been counting on and the time-off requests start rolling in.

Nobody tells you about that part. Nobody posts that moment where you’re staring at the schedule at 10pm trying to figure out how to make it work with half your team gone. But, you do it any way and somehow it always works out.

No one thinks about how your entire livelihood depends on the success of the business. The stress and anxiety that comes with it is unexplainable. There are one hundred moving parts, a million questions, and a responsibility that takes over your life.

The Question That Lives in Your Chest

There’s a question that every entrepreneur knows and the one you may not say out loud. The one that lives in your chest on the hard days, quiet and heavy:

Can we really do this?

I have asked myself that question more times than I can count.

And somehow, the answer turns out to be yes.

And, it’s not because it gets easier or there’s some magic moment that arrives and the hard parts disappear. But because you dig into something you didn’t know you had, and you pull it off.

The schedule gets covered, the week turns around, the doors stay open, and another day happens.

You pull it off, and that becomes the answer.

What Social Media Gets Wrong About Owning a Business

Here’s the thing about the highlight reel, it’s not lying, exactly. Those good moments are real where the house is full and the pride is strong. The days when everything clicks and you look around and think I built this; those happen, and they’re worth every hard thing that came before them.

But social media skips the part in between. It skips the 6am and the midnight. It skips the loneliness of being the person who has to hold it all together when everything in you wants to sit down and cry.

If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur looking at someone else’s business and thinking it looks effortless: it isn’t. I can promise you that. And, what you’re seeing is the result of a thousand hard days that never made it to the feed.

And if you’re a fellow business owner reading this at the end of a brutal week: I see you. I feel you. We’re all in this together.

Why We Keep Going

I’m not going to wrap this up with a bow and tell you it’s all worth it in some easy, tidy way. Because it’s not easy, it’s messy, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.

But, what I will tell you is this: there is something on the other side of can I really do this that you cannot find anywhere else. You won’t find it in a salary, not in a title, not in anything someone else built for you. It’s this particular feeling of pulling it off when you weren’t sure you could. It’s keeping the doors open day after day. It’s writing paychecks that support other families. It’s meeting new customers who give you a great review.

That feeling is worth it. You won’t feel it every day but enough days which makes all of this worth it.

Owning a business will ask more of you than what seems fair and it will test you in ways nothing else will. It will have you questioning yourself at your lowest and surprising you at your highest.

And if you’re built for it, you’ll keep answering yes.

Always keeping it real & cheering you on,

M