I'll be honest with you, because pretending otherwise would be exhausting.
I'm building a company. By myself. And I'm still doing the billable client work that pays the bills right now. Lately the build has been winning my days and stealing my nights. I keep telling myself I'll protect my sleep. Then it's 2 a.m. and I'm still heads-down on the thing I'm dying to get right.
The same bind my subscribers live in
Here's what stopped me cold this week. I'm not in some special founder bind. I'm in the exact bind my subscribers live every single day.
Think about it. The plumber knows he should be posting, following up on leads, building out his marketing. He can't, because he's under somebody's sink. The baker's Instagram went quiet months ago. Not because she stopped caring. Because she's baking. For every small business owner I talk to, marketing is the thing that gets sacrificed to the paying work. It's never the emergency. It's never today's fire. So it waits. And waits.
And here I am, the marketing guy, doing the exact same thing to my own marketing. The growth work loses to the billable work, because the billable work has a deadline and an invoice attached.
Hypocrisy, or the reason I get it
I could call that hypocrisy. I think it's the opposite.
It's why I get it. I'm not preaching to small business owners from a mountaintop where I've got it all figured out. I'm in the trench next to them, same mud on my boots, wrestling the same impossible math: the work that grows the business always loses to the work that funds it today.
That's the whole reason 9xNine exists. Not "marketing services" in the abstract. A way out of the trap where the thing you know will grow your business keeps losing to the thing screaming for your attention right now.
Still up too late
I haven't solved it for myself yet. I'm still up too late. But naming it honestly feels like the first step, so here it is.
If you're in this trap too, doing the job instead of growing the business, I see you. You're not lazy and you're not behind. You're one person, and the math is brutal.
So let me ask you the same question I'm asking myself: what would it take to stop sacrificing the thing that grows you?
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