If This Is the Business, What’s the Hard Part?
On choosing what you’re willing to struggle with.
One of the things I think people get wrong about starting a small business is that they:
Believe there isn’t a hard part if you pick the right business
Think that if there is a hard part, they’ll just hire someone to do it
Incorrectly identify what the hard part of that business will actually be
Let’s take these one at a time, spending the most time on the last one.
First: if you think your startup idea—or your buddy Frank’s business—doesn’t have a hard part, you’re wrong. Or you’re basically talking about a hobby. Every real business has a hard part. That’s where the profit comes from.
Second: you might think you can hire someone to do the hard part. You can’t. The hard part of the business is always the thing the business owner has to manage and be obsessed with, or it simply won’t happen at the level of excellence it requires. The hard part is the important part, and the business owner must be in charge of the important part.
This doesn’t mean you can’t hire people to help you execute. You can. But they will never own the hard part the way you will.
These are simple truths you have to accept. But the third piece—correctly identifying what the hard part actually is—takes more skill.
This is a big problem, because the hard part of a business is the part that:
If done right, makes the business successful and competitive
If done poorly, shuts the business down
You’ll spend the most time on, worry about the most, and need to become an expert in
(So if you want to live a decent life while running a business, you should make sure the hard part is something you’re willing to spend your days on.)
The businesses most destined for failure are the ones that spend most or all of their time—both at startup and day to day—on the easy parts instead of the hard parts.
Common businesses and their hard parts
Pizza shop with a good location
Almost every day, I drive past 440 Pizzeria, a little pizza shop on Broadway, right across from the high school. During after-school hours, it’s standing room only—teenagers jammed into the shop, clambering to hand over their money. You might see that and think the owner has it made.
But if you’re running a pizza shop with a great location, the easy parts are making pizza and getting customers. The hard part is keeping the lights on, the doors open, and the quality high over time. And the only way to do that is through strong systems, management structures, operating procedures, and boundaries.
Otherwise, the teenager you hired to open won’t show up. The cash register will be short. The bathroom will be dirty. You’ll run out of mozzarella. Eventually, these “headaches” pile up until you either close or run yourself ragged trying to do everything yourself.
So you might see a pizza shop owner. I see a process-and-procedures expert.
Maker / art / music business
The easy part of a maker business is making cool stuff. You know it’s the easy part because that’s the part people happily do as a hobby.
The hard part is sales—online marketing, selling to stores, pitching yourself to craft markets, social media, all of it. If you want to run a maker business, you’d better want to spend most of your day selling.
Seamstress / alterations business
I recently saw a flyer for a local seamstress and alterations business. Despite having been up for only a couple of weeks, all the tear-off phone numbers were already gone. That’s great—if the hard part of the business were finding customers.
But my hunch is that the real hard part of an alterations business is that customers tend to undervalue how complex and painstaking alterations actually are. There’s often a fundamental mismatch between what they want to pay and what you need to charge.
That mismatch can be reconciled—especially with strong customer vetting, onboarding, and project management—but there’s the hard part. And it’s one that few seamstresses probably love.
Cleaning, painting, or service business
What you think the hard part is: cleaning. Maybe getting your first few customers.
What the hard part actually is: getting long-term, consistent customers who are willing to pay your hourly rate.
That requires customer relationship management, proactive outreach and marketing to keep your funnel wide enough, and pricing and expectation-setting that support ongoing relationships rather than low-margin one-off jobs.
Martial arts gym, ballet school, or similar
It’s a common dream for a jiu-jitsu athlete or former ballerina to open their own academy. It makes sense—the idea of doing what you love while sharing it with others is deeply compelling.
Here’s the problem: this kind of business has multiple very real hard parts.
First, you’ll spend most of your time marketing to and onboarding new students. This can be fun at first, but it continues at an intense level for years.
Second, a physical space requires constant care: disinfecting mats, washing uniforms, maintaining equipment, managing everything that wears down simply by being used.
Third, every student needs you to be a coach, a community leader, and a technical expert. That requires an enormous amount of energy, skill, spiritual groundedness, planning, and sustained attention.
So the hard part of a business like this is that you’re juggling multiple full-time, sometimes contradictory, extremely demanding jobs—and you’ll need to execute them well for years, maybe decades.
You have to want to know what the hard part is, and want to do it.
I’ve been looking at different business types here, but the specifics of any business can shift where the hard part lives. A great location might make customer acquisition easier but drive up costs, turning profitability into the hard part. A bad location lowers costs but makes getting customers the hard part. Every business idea has its own constraints that shape the hard part.
If you can get better at correctly identifying the hard parts of a business, you’ll be able to assess your own ideas more honestly—and choose something that actually fits who you are and how you want to spend your time.
I often bemoan how unhelpful traditional business plans are, and this is yet another place they fail small business owners. If someone did no other planning at all, I’d still encourage them to answer this single question:
What are the hard parts of this business? And do I want to spend my days becoming extraordinary at those?