“You need to fall back in love with your business,” a friend said to me.

I stopped in my tracks.

Had I really fallen out of love with it?

I knew I resented what the business had become and the cost of the lessons I had learned along the way. Not just financially, but mentally. My peace of mind had taken the biggest hit.

Her words lingered longer than I expected. And they led me to a harder question:

What would it actually take to fall back in love with my business?

Had I lost passion for my clients? For the work itself?

The answer came quickly and surprised me.

I hadn’t lost passion.

I had lost leverage.

Not leverage from working harder, but leverage created by structure.

That distinction matters more than most founders realize.

There were seasons when I loved my business. I loved the freedom, the momentum, the satisfaction of building something that worked. I loved watching clients win and knowing I played a role in helping them get organized, focused, and operationally sound.

And then there were seasons when showing up felt heavier than it should have, especially when everything looked “fine” from the outside. Clients were consistent. The work was good. The business was successful.

But behind the scenes, the structure required constant effort just to stay balanced. Overhead crept up. Hiring decisions were made out of necessity, not strategy. Every new client added delivery pressure, not freedom.

What I didn’t realize at the time was this: resentment doesn’t come from hard work.

It comes from operating inside a business that no longer creates leverage for the person running it.

That’s when I learned a truth most service-based founders never name out loud: loving your business has very little to do with passion and everything to do with structure.

Once I understood that, I could finally make sense of my five-year arc. Here’s how the forces of passion, resentment, leverage, and freedom all converged for me, and how building the right structure turned each of them from a liability into a source of power.

When Passion Is Enough

In the early stages, passion did a lot of the heavy lifting. The business was simple enough that effort translated directly into results. If I worked more, things moved. If I stayed visible, opportunities followed. It felt linear and rewarding.

As the work increased, I brought on an assistant and eventually rented a small co-working space. It felt like growth, not risk. Support was additive, not essential for survival. The structure didn’t need to be sophisticated because complexity was still low.

Looking back, I can see how easy it is to confuse this phase with sustainability. In the beginning, momentum masks inefficiency. Passion fills gaps where structure hasn’t been built yet.

But passion works best when the system is light. Once the business starts carrying weight, structure, not enthusiasm, determines whether it stays enjoyable.

When Growth Becomes Operational

By year two, the business felt established. Work was steady. Clients returned. Demand increased.

To keep up, I hired additional support. The goal wasn’t scale, it was capacity. I needed help to meet expectations, not to create leverage. At the time, that distinction didn’t feel important. I was solving the immediate problem in front of me.

Training a team while continuing to deliver client work added complexity. Decisions were made quickly. Processes were patched together. Systems existed, but they were reactive, built to keep things moving, not to support long-term growth.

Nothing was “wrong” yet. But the structure was already shaking.

When the Industry Shifted and the Model Had to Follow

The environment changed in my third year. The industry shifted, and the way services were valued shifted with it.

Work that had once been differentiated became increasingly price-driven. The services I had been offering were no longer being evaluated primarily on expertise or outcomes, and the economics of the model began to break down.

I could no longer sustain my team with the client volume we had at the time. I made the decision to let my entire staff go. It wasn’t a reflection of their performance. It was a structural reality.

That moment forced a hard reset.

I had already been supporting clients beyond a single function, but the way the services were packaged no longer matched the level of responsibility the work required. In year three, I separated those offerings and shifted deliberately toward supporting clients with their full operations.

Strategically, it was the right move. Practically, it was difficult.

Clients didn’t immediately understand the new direction, and converting work took time. There were moments that year when I genuinely didn’t know if the business would survive.

When clients did move forward, all the work rested on me. There was no buffer. No additional staff. Delivery, strategy, and execution depended entirely on my capacity.

Looking back, I see that year clearly. It wasn’t failure. It was exposure. The business had evolved faster than the structure supporting it.

That’s when resentment first showed up, not because I hated the work, but because the system demanded everything and gave very little back.

When Demand Returned but Leverage Didn’t

The work came back consistently in year 4 before the leverage did.

Demand returned. Clients were aligned. The services were genuinely valuable.

I hired support again.

In trying to solve for demand, I recreated a familiar problem: hiring too many people too quickly before the model was stable enough to support them. Payroll grew. Tool costs followed. Each addition made sense in isolation, but together they created overhead that was difficult to sustain.

Revenue came in, but it moved out just as fast. One or two client changes could disrupt everything. Stability existed, but it was fragile.

On paper, things looked fine. But structurally, the model was unforgiving. It depended on constant momentum and left little room to pause, recalibrate, or build reserves.

That’s when the question surfaced clearly:

If the work is good and demand exists, why does this still feel impossible to stabilize?

The Breaking Point That Forced Clarity

Eventually, the strain stopped being subtle in my fifth year.

Clients were consistent. The team was doing good work. But the economics no longer worked. Payroll became the constant pressure point. I couldn’t keep the team, not because the work wasn’t there, but because the model left no room to breathe.

What made this year different was the accumulation of everything that came before. Even good months didn’t create relief. They only postponed the next problem.

By the third quarter of my fifth year, I started to dread the work. Not because I didn’t care, but because every day felt like pushing against a system that demanded more than it returned. Even wins felt expensive.

That was the breaking point. Not the absence of clients, but the realization that continuing this way would only reproduce the same cycle.

The Reset: Reducing to Rebuild Leverage

The reset didn’t start with a grand plan. It started with space.

Without payroll, overhead dropped immediately. The pressure eased enough for me to step back and see the business clearly, not as something I had to constantly manage, but something I could intentionally rebuild.

I revisited fundamentals I had ignored for too long: how I paid myself, why reserves mattered before rehiring, and what level of revenue needed to exist before adding complexity back in.

I became a team of one by choice. For the first time in years, quality wasn’t competing with urgency. I could do good work without constant anxiety.

That’s when I realized something important: I didn’t hate what I did. I hated operating inside a structure that made everything harder than it needed to be.

Stripping the business back wasn’t a step backward. It was a return to leverage.

Passion Was Never the Problem

I learned this the hard way: I didn’t lose passion for my work. I lost leverage.

Passion can’t fix poor structure. Gratitude doesn’t compensate for thin margins. Motivation can’t override a business that requires too much of its founder to function.

Leverage is what changes the experience of the work. It allows effort to compound instead of reset. Without it, even a “successful” business becomes fragile, and fragility is exhausting.

Loss of leverage rarely announces itself loudly. It shows up in the constant need to stay “on,” the sense that good months don’t actually create relief, the feeling that every new client requires a full reset.

The question isn’t how to push through it. It’s what would need to change for your effort to start compounding again.

You didn’t lose your passion. Loving your business again doesn’t require rediscovering passion. It requires honesty about what the structure is asking of you.

Businesses evolve. Industries shift. And when structure doesn’t evolve alongside them, resentment shows up long before revenue does.

And if this experience can happen to me—someone who helps service-based businesses streamline, automate, and build leverage for a living!—it can absolutely happen to you. Not because you don’t know how to build structure, but because structure decisions are shaped by stage, pressure, and proximity. Because it’s easy to react instead of respond. And because short-term survival quietly overrides long-term design.

Ironically, going through this 5 year journey made me more passionate about the work I do, because I’ve experienced first-hand what happens when it’s missing.

Now, I am even more committed to helping business owners reinforce structure before resentment becomes the signal they can’t ignore.

If this resonated with you, I’d love to connect and hear how you found your way out of the pressure. If this reminds you of a client, family member, or friend, please send this to them so they know they’re not alone, so they know they’re not failing, and so they understand they’re just stuck— and there’s a way out.