Learning to love your business is the easy part, learning to accept it’s flaws is entirely different. A business is like a relationship, it can start out feeling easy feeling hopeful. If you really believe in your business you may want to keep it exactly the same, exactly how it started when you fell in love with it. I came to my business very similarly. I had an idea that I loved and wanted to stick with it until the end. I ignored everything that told me things could be going wrong. I thought if I kept working, kept trying, everything would fall into place like it once did. What I didn’t realize? You can’t outwork a broken system.
In my book, Misdiagnosed, I talk about this issue like this; “When misdiagnosis persists, survival often depends on refusal, not dramatic refusal, but practical ones. People simplified product lines. They said no to opportunities they could not absorb. They delayed growth that would have broken what little stability existed. These choices rarely looked like progress from the outside. They often looked like settling. But inside the business, something shifted.” What I explain here is that it’s important to learn how to diagnose the issues within your business correctly. Not allow for personal feelings to muddle with your perspective and eventually, soon, the business will prosper again.
-EG