In "The Year-End Email I Almost Didn't Send" and "7.4% Face This Every Day," we talked about the weight of running a business. The isolation. The mental load. The fact that most of us carry it quietly and rarely hear it named out loud.
This piece picks up where those left off. Because there's a part of the weight I didn't get into, and I think it might be the most expensive part.
What I didn't say
Some of the weight we carry as owners, we're adding ourselves.
Not the equipment failures. Not the lease negotiations. Those land on you whether you're ready or not. I'm talking about the other kind. The conversation you know you need to have with a team member but keep pushing to next week. The price you're thinking about cutting because someone opened down the road. The hire you made because the person who asked was connected to you and saying no felt worse than saying yes.
These don't hit like an emergency. They sit. And while they sit, they get more expensive.
I've started thinking about it like debt. Not the financial kind. The kind where putting off a decision feels like patience, or loyalty, or being reasonable. But the cost doesn't hold still while you wait. It compounds. On the business, because the store carries whatever you're not addressing. And on you, because you're walking around with the weight of something you know needs to happen and haven't done yet.
The manager
I had a store manager who'd been with us for years. She ran more of the day-to-day than most people realized. Client services went through her. She handled the commercial invoicing, checked the numbers, made sure vendors got paid right. She managed the schedule, dealt with callouts. She coordinated pickup and delivery so orders went out on time, and when a gig driver left a bag behind or didn't get something right, she got in her own car and re-delivered it herself.
If you pulled her out of that role, all of that work was landing somewhere. And that somewhere was me.
Then her performance started to drift. Not overnight. Not a blowup. Just a slow slide, the kind you explain away for a month, then another month, then a quarter.
Here's the thing. I could see it. It wasn't a mystery. The work was slipping and I knew it.
But knowing and acting are two different things. Part of what slowed me down was that the more she carried, the more room I gave her. There's something that happens when you depend on someone for that much. You extend the benefit of the doubt a little further than you should. Research on escalation of commitment suggests that when we're personally responsible for putting someone in a role, we tend to evaluate them more favorably over time, not because they're performing better, but because the commitment itself bends how we see the work.¹ ² That was part of it.
But the bigger part, the part I think most owners will recognize, is simpler than psychology. It's logistics.
Letting someone go means absorbing their entire workload until you find a replacement. Finding a replacement means posting the role, interviewing, hoping the person actually shows up to the interview. Then hoping they show up on day one. Then training them. Then finding out two weeks in whether they're going to stick around or whether you're starting over.
If you could snap your fingers and have someone trained and ready tomorrow, you'd make the call today. Most of us would. The delay isn't because we can't see the problem. It's because the cost of solving it is real, and the timeline is uncertain, and every owner who's been through a hiring cycle in the last few years knows how many people accept a position and never walk through the door.
So the decline ran longer than it should have. The store carried it. Clients probably noticed before I was willing to do anything about it. And when I finally made the call, the work came right back to me, all of it, until I could rebuild the role.
The firing wasn't the expensive part. The months of quiet decline before it, that was the interest on the debt. And I paid it every week I waited.
What stays with me is the timing. I didn't regret acting. I regretted waiting. And I think most owner/operators who've made this call say some version of the same thing. It wasn't hard because it was wrong. It was hard because it was right, and the wait had a price.
The price
An owner/operator I know has a solid store. He redid it about four or five years ago and keeps it well maintained. It still looks brand new.
An older store down the road recently got bought by a new owner who retooled it. Put in new machines, new signage, fresh coat of paint. Then this new owner went straight for the bottom. Lowest prices in the area. Free dry. Specials stacked on specials.
When that happens, the instinct is to match. Dropping your price feels like competing. It feels like you're doing something. But what it really does is let you skip the harder question, which is whether your mat can hold on to what it already built and offers clients.
He held. Didn't touch any of his pricing. Decided to watch before giving away any of his margin to a fear.
The first stretch was tough. The lower prices and free dry pulled some attention, and his numbers dipped some. But the novelty of the new mat wore off. Over eight to twelve months, things settled. Last we spoke, he was up year over year. The competitor is still there. They pulled back on the free dry, cut the promotions, but they're still the cheapest option in the area.
If he would have matched, he would've locked in a lower price he'd be struggling to walk back now, all to react to a situation that worked itself out in under a year. The avoidance here wasn't inaction. It was the opposite. The urge to do something, a special, a promotion, anything, to make the discomfort stop. Holding was the harder move.
The community
This one doesn't come as a single moment. It builds.
When you own something visible in a community, people come to you. Friends, family, people from around the way. They come looking for work, and there's an unspoken expectation that you'll help. How heavy that expectation sits depends on who sent them and how they're connected to you.
And you want to help. That's real. But sometimes the person in front of you is someone you wouldn't hire if a stranger with the same background walked in. The only difference is who's asking.
Saying no feels like turning your back on someone. So the easier move is the yes, made out of obligation, not judgment. That's avoidance too, just wearing a different outfit. It looks like generosity. Underneath, it's the same thing. You're choosing the easier discomfort now over the harder discomfort of a direct conversation.
And the interest on this one might be the steepest. Because once that person is on your floor, removing them costs you the very relationship you were trying to protect. Plus whatever they cost the business along the way. The yes that felt like kindness ends up straining both the business and the relationship, instead of protecting them by keeping them separate.
Thinking about the thinking of laundry:
When you realize the discomfort of acting is a one time cost, but the discomfort of avoiding is a tab that's running up.
In those earlier pieces, I wrote about the weight that comes with the territory. The mental juggling act. The construction headaches. Team members dealing with personal stuff that bleeds into the business. Equipment going down when you need it most. That weight is real. Naming it mattered. And based on the response those pieces got, a lot of you were carrying the same thing quietly.
But the weight I'm talking about here is different. It's not the stuff that lands on you. It's the stuff you can set down but haven't yet. The conversation. The price. The hire. These are bricks you're adding to your own load, and you can put them down. Not easily. Not without some discomfort. But the discomfort of acting is a one-time cost. The discomfort of avoiding is a running tab.
I've paid that tab longer than I needed to on at least one of these. I'd bet you have too.
The regret was never the decision. It was the wait.
That's all I got for you today.
Waleed
Echoing the thoughts of Seneca.
There are more things likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
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