Permission to stop offering that profitable service you secretly despise.
Permission to charge what would make the work worth it.
Permission to say no to customers who text you at midnight.

You're waiting for someone to tell you it's okay to prioritize your sanity over your spreadsheet.
Consider this your permission slip.

The market doesn't care about your suffering.
Your customers don't care if you're miserable as long as the work gets done.
Your employees don't care if you hate Mondays as long as paychecks clear.
Your competitors don't care if you're dying inside as long as you're not taking their customers.

The only person who cares if you hate your business is you.
And you've been taught that your feelings don't matter.
That business is supposed to be hard. That suffering is just part of the game.

But suffering and challenge are different things.
Challenge energizes you. Suffering depletes you. And depletion is terminal.

Not bad pricing. Not poor marketing. Not even bad work.

What kills detailing businesses is owners who wake up one Tuesday and realize they'd rather do literally anything else than walk into their own shop.

So they stop trying. They go through the motions. They become the walking dead of the business world.

A shop owner called me last month. Successful operation. Good revenue.
He said he fantasized about his shop burning down so he could collect insurance and start over.
Not because the business was failing. Because he'd built something he couldn't stand to operate.

We went through his entire operation. Every single thing he hated was fixable.
But he'd been so deep in it for so long, he thought the suffering was mandatory.
He thought everyone felt this way.

They don't.

The successful owners I know love Tuesday mornings.
Not because business is easy for them.
Because they've systematically removed everything that makes them want to quit.
They've designed their business around their energy, not despite it.

They have advisors who call them out when they're building a prison.
They have people who remind them that the goal isn't just profit.
It's building something you can operate for a decade without losing your mind.

Stop optimizing for everything except your willingness to continue.

Want to overpay that service advisor because they make you laugh every morning? Do it.
Want to cut that profitable service because you hate every second of delivering it? Cut it.
Want to fire that technically competent employee who drains your soul? Fire them.

Your enthusiasm is the oxygen your business breathes.
When you hate what you do, you're slowly suffocating everything you've built.

Thriving owners have people they trust to tell them the truth.
People who can see the patterns they're too close to notice.
People who've watched enough shops succeed and fail to know which suffering is necessary and which is self-inflicted.

Surviving owners? They're alone with their thoughts at 2 AM, wondering why everything feels so hard, convinced that this is just how business works.

It's not how business works.
It's how business works when you build it wrong and have nobody to tell you.

Stop waiting for permission.
Start cutting what makes you miserable.
And find someone who's seen this movie before to tell you how it ends if you don't make changes.

Because you only have yourself to blame for the rules you accept.
And accepting rules that make you hate the game is the slowest form of business suicide.