This statement is 100% true. When you are working on your own company, you are living, breathing, and putting your blood, sweat, and tears into it. Why? Because it's your baby, the dream you want to make true and the success that you are dreaming for in the very end. Small Business owners have the dream to not stay small, but to make an impact and become bigger businesses. They are run by mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, families and they are some of the hardest working people I know. They run on the fuel of their desire to make their companies successful and they put in more hours than anyone to "make it work".

There is a particular leech in bigger business that preys on these hard workers and tugs at their emotions. Their promises of "let us help you get there, let us make it easier for you" calls to us as we are losing nights of sleep on what did well that day and what did not. I call them leeches, because they are not really there to help you successfully get to your dream, they are there to take a piece of your dream and have you work all the more harder. They play with your emotions on promising that you will get to your dream faster or easier and they hold the cherry of your dream of success right there so you can almost taste it. They become a promise that someday you will succeed as long as they are along for the ride and sometimes we are desperate enough to believe that and so we invite them in and let them take 10% 20% 30% of our profit to get to the next level. It's not just one kind of business, it's many. It could be an advertising agent that promises to scale you up by paying a certain fee with the promise that you will be making tons of money in the future. It could be a marketplace that asks you to fork over 10-20% to list your items on their website to grow your sales. It could be a business partner that promises that you'll go twice as far if they are cut in on the deal. It could be a bank that is offering you funding or rather debt to spend your money away and grow you to the next level.

It's the hardest thing we have to do in growing our business, is to trust ourselves, and invest in ourselves. We often think that someone else is wiser, someone else has all the answers, someone else will guarantee that success. That might be true for some people, but for a lot of us we underestimate ourselves and it's just a short cut to avoid doing the hard work. Being a small business owner takes a lot of patience and a lot of time. It seems like everyone is getting richer and you are left behind struggling, but that's not really true is it? I've seen small business owners work themselves to the bone, forgetting everything from their own hygiene, to sleep deprivation, to letting everything go. I've seen the small business owner fail and fail again and the look on their face when they've hit a wall. But this time is not wasted, you've just learned what doesn't work and what won't work and now you are a little wiser than yesterday. If you haven't failed, you haven't learned anything at all. When you rise from failure you are a stronger and wiser you and you have new ideas on how not to fail the next time.

With the world changing as it does, we have fallen into the lure of instant satisfaction. We have gotten used to swiping past the things that don't interest us in only a few seconds. We've watched someone compact a video that takes a person hours and hours to make and reduce it down to a 60 second transformation wow. In the effort to grab people's attention, you have to be grander with a more dazzling end result, and it gets faster and faster. It's an impossible standard that we've set up for ourselves to see the world through filters and short clips of hard work simplified. We made it look easy and that anyone can do it. We are drowning in content that we have created and an audience trained to scroll past in an endless feed. We are now subjected to this endless stream of perfection and have burnt ourselves out just trying to keep up.

Now stop. Take a deep breath and don't fall for it. None of that really matters - oh they make you think that it does, but it doesn't. Your best customers are always going to be the ones you made an impact to their lives. I'm not saying you have to solve world peace in your transactions, but if your product helped a customer with something that impacted them, that's the customer you want not the one that jumps from one trend to another and forgets about you 2 seconds later because something new came in their feed.

What I love about small business owners is that they dream big and they seem to always be working on a problem that they want to change in the world. It doesn't matter the size of the impact, but to each owner the customers they affect mean the world to them and they are truly providing a service not just trying to get rich. They are working hard for their families, they are working hard for their customers, and they have much less in the way of resources than the big companies.

If you are out there and working hard for your dream, don't give up. Each day presents challenges. Conquer them and become better and someday you will get there. Believe in yourself and don't sell out for a short cut. Do the work and it will pay off, you don't need to sell chunks of your business to get ahead.