More than “just a business”

How many times have we said this as business owners?

“I know I shouldn’t feel this way, but…it’s personal.”

We are taught to keep a hard line between personal and business. I could lie to you and say that it’s easier to separate the two if you aren’t the owner of a company, but that’s not true. For a lot of our employees, that line is blurry, and it stays blurry.

If your employees love what they do, they put everything into their work. They have invested time, energy, emotions, all of it, into those 40+ hours a week. So when the inevitable happens and someone is upset, things need to shift or a conflict is brought to the surface, it feels very personal.

When everything is personal

I remember early on in my entrepreneurial journey, a well-meaning mentor told me the best piece of advice they could give me was this:“Business is not personal. It’s business, nothing else.”

At the time, they were giving me advice on how to handle a difficult situation. In some ways, they were right. But what small business is just business?

We aren’t creating massive corporations where there are 10 levels of leadership separating people from decisions. That advice has its place, but at the end of the day, small business is personal. It’s impossible for it not to be.

I know every employee I’ve ever had was personally invested in the success of the business. They poured so much of themselves into it that when the landscape started to shift, it wasn’t just me who felt the change personally, they did too.

I loved that aspect of my team, but it also made things so much more difficult. So when I was building out my new teams, I sat with this idea for a while, not really sure where to place it. On one hand, I wanted to draw a hard line in the sand and say: It’s not personal. It’s just business.

But that didn’t feel true either. I don’t want this to be transactional. I don’t want people to clock in, do the bare minimum and leave without feeling connected to what we’re building. I want employees who feel invested. I want leaders who care deeply. I want teams that feel ownership, pride and purpose in the work they do.

If I’m being honest, I want that for myself too. I don’t just want to run a business, I want to build something meaningful. And meaningful things will always feel personal.

That is where I started to see my past a bit more clearly. My event company was personal—not just to me, but to so many people. The business, the relationships, the history, the loyalty, the identity of it all became so intertwined that eventually there was no separation left.

I used to think that was a beautiful thing, but I can see now how dangerous it can become when there are no boundaries holding it all together. When everything becomes personal, every disagreement feels personal. Every hard business decision starts feeling like a betrayal instead of what it actually is—a business decision. That hurt the business. It hurt the relationships. It hurt all of us—clients, vendors, employees and anyone else who walked through those doors.

Finding balance

Of course, swinging completely in the opposite direction isn’t the answer either. I don’t want to build businesses where people feel disposable. I don’t want leadership built on coldness or emotional detachment. I don’t want teams that are purely transactional because meaningful work will always feel personal. 

And that is where I found my own middle ground.

The goal isn’t to remove humanity from business. The goal is to create enough clarity, structure and boundaries that the personal side of business doesn’t consume the people inside of it. Just because something is personal doesn’t mean it should define us. It can matter deeply without becoming our entire identity. It can change without meaning we failed. It can require hard decisions without making us bad people.

These are words I desperately needed to hear last year and words that I am taking with me into my new ventures.

Setting boundaries

A few things I’m personally trying to do better moving forward:

1. Define roles and expectations clearly, even in close relationships.
2. Separate hard business decisions from emotional assumptions.
3. Reevaluate team structure and responsibilities regularly instead of waiting for resentment to build.
4. Create boundaries before they become necessary.
5. Stop assuming everyone defines success the same way I do.
6. Have honest conversations earlier, before things break down.
7. Allow people, roles and even dreams to evolve without viewing change as a betrayal.
8. Remember that meaningful work should support our lives, not become our entire identity.

Because the truth is, leadership is messy. Relationships are messy. Business is messy. But I don’t think that the process of making it less messy means we have to become less human. I think it means we must learn how to create businesses where people can care deeply about the work without losing themselves inside of it—including the owner. 

Dana Kadwell is an event business owner and venue consultant. She can be reached at hustleandgather.com.