Mike Andes delivers an unedited, personal message to entrepreneurs and leaders about depression and anxiety. He normalizes struggling—saying many leaders hide doubts on social media—and shares concrete business stressors (cash constraints, hiring expensive developers, pay-for-performance model, rapid growth without investors). He offers perspective that finding market fit and profitability often takes 4–5 years, recounts personal setbacks (dropped out of medical school, early mistakes), and closes with encouragement to persist.
Chapters
Hey, it's Mike Anders here. Hope you're doing super well. I'm at command center. This is where the team operates out of CoPilot Home Service, CPA and the team. But I want to send a quick message. If you are depressed, if you're anxious, whether you're a leader or manager.
Business owner, I want you to know you're not alone.
And that a lot of people go through that, and even people that you might look up to or admire go through it. And so I remember when I first got started, I always thought that.
I was the only one that was going through all the problems and making mistakes and having trouble with employees and not being able to figure out how I was gonna make payroll and stressed crazy about the finances of business. Like, I thought I was the only one that was that way. And the reason is partly because all the people you look up to on social media, things, they aren't gonna post about it, they're not gonna talk about how they're struggling and they're doubting themselves and the issues they're going through. And so because we look at social media so much, it's like, well, that's. Everyone else is doing so well and crushing it and killing it and growing and expanding, and that's just not the case. Two nights ago, I couldn't sleep almost the whole night.
Really. Just worried, like, mostly about, you know, the businesses, they're growing quickly. I don't have any investors or financial backing whatsoever, right? So it's a lot of cash requirements and pay for performance, something I'm super passionate about. But it costs a lot of money to get developers and continue growing and scaling up. And we don't even break the break the break even on development costs for pay for performance. Copilotsoftware.com or cp copilot CRM.com it's grown tremendously. But, like, I want to hire more developers, but they're not cheap and they're expensive. And it's like, well, what can I. How much can I burn before we get to profitability? But then still stay on the same rate of innovation and developing the features we need. And.
It'S not easy. Like, it's stressful. And then on top of that, you have people that you're responsible for and team members and managers that they're going through their own stresses and issues, financially or personally, and.
In their own life, and they're depressed, going through depression and anxious, and you feel bad for them, you feel helpless, you can't help them, and you feel bad about it.
And.
I just want you to know you're not alone. Like, this is what leadership and this is what trying to push yourself and improve and grow a business is like. And I consistently see it takes four or five years a lot of times for business owners to really find market fit, then develop a team, build a team that can support them and then really achieve profitability to a high level. And yet they're comparing themselves to people who've been in the game for 10, 15, 20, 30 years and they're like, oh, I'm such a failure, I can't do this. And a lot of times because maybe you don't have a supportive family, maybe your family thinks you're a failure or you should have done something differently or they think you should have done something a different type of business or they should have got, just got a regular job or, you know, I know it's kind of like to be there. I went to college when I was really young and then I decided to drop out of medical school and mow grass. So yeah, every single time I made a mistake, every single time I felt like I couldn't make ends meet and was struggling and.
I just thought maybe I did make a mistake, like maybe I made the wrong decision to do my own business. Maybe I'm not an entrepreneur, maybe I don't have what it takes. I should have stayed in school and like second guessing yourself in doubt, like that is part of it. You're going to go through that and it's not going to stop when you get bigger, don't have this thing in your mind, like if I go to a certain size business, it somehow goes away. It'll stop only when you stop growing. Growing your business, growing yourself personally, growing your team, expanding more locations, more employees, more problems like that. That is the process of evolution is like constant growth. And like the building of a muscle means tear it apart, build it back, tear it apart, build it back. And that constantly doing that in the gym, lifting heavy things is what builds muscle and makes people strong. And that's what's going to make you strong in the long run. But in the short term, it doesn't feel good. You get sore yet, cramps.
And it's not comfortable. So to make this message for someone, I want to be very clear as I go throughout my entrepreneurial journey that it is not all high highs and mountaintops and we're crushing it and wins. There are days, there are weeks, there are times, there are minutes and moments and hours that you're going to go through and I go through that. We question ourselves. We doubt ourselves. We wonder how we're going to make it financially. We wonder how we're going to be able to make it with our team. We wonder how if we're pushing people too hard. We wonder if we're made right decisions and whether or not we're a failure or not. It's part of the game. Keep your head up, keep grinding.
