Kit Barber says building a business costs you more than money. When payroll was uncertain, he learned confidence isn't something you start with; it comes from surviving days without it. A business exposes your weaknesses and forces you to change.
Everybody thinks building a business changes your bank account, and it does, but that is not the interesting part. Building a business changes you. I remember one Tuesday, sat in the car park outside of the business. I hadn't made payroll yet that month, and I didn't know where the hell it was coming from. I sat there for a few minutes, longer than I really needed to, just breathing before I walked in and acted like everything was completely fine because, well, the team needed me to be fine. That wasn't an obstacle though. That was the training that I didn't know I was getting. Most people think confidence comes first, then you go and do the hard thing, but it is exactly the opposite. Confidence turns up after you've survived enough days where you had none of it. A business has a way of finding every weak part of you and putting pressure straight on it. Your impatience, your ego, your need for everything to be certain before you'll make a flipping decision. It finds it and then it just waits to see whether you'll deal with it or let it crush you. For a long time, I thought that pressure was the cost of doing this. Now I think it was the whole point. Yes, the revenue is nice. I'm not gonna pretend it isn't. But 10 years from now, you won't remember your best sales month. You'll remember who you had to become to get there. And that's the real return.
