You found the thing. The thing you're good at. The thing you love. It's a product you make or a service you provide, and you can do it well. You can do it faster, smarter, better. People in the world value your thing and they will pay for it. You can convert your time into good money, great money, just doing your thing. It's amazing. You can do a thing you love and get paid well. This is the dream.
Except- to do your thing, you need a framework. You need to set yourself up as a small business. You need to market yourself. You need to worry about delivering your product. You need to worry about schedules and commitments. If you hire help for any of this, you need to worry about recruiting, HR, and payroll. You need to worry about the cash flow, invoices, payments, taxes. Rules and regulations, stakeholders, and reporting. And a ton of administrative support work behind all the rest
Whatever your thing is, most of the rest of it won't be your thing. It's not the thing you've been developing all this time. You can do this stuff- most of it, or get a piece of software that does it, or pay someone to do it, but you need to make sure it's done properly all the same. Doing it, administering it, checking your expectations, figuring out the gaps, communicating between people and systems- all of it is time. The time you're doing stuff you don't love. Stressful, exhausting, boring, but necessary
To make a living doing the thing you love and working for yourself, you have to do all this other stuff you don't love and aren't great at. You have to spend time doing it, but first, you have to spend time learning how to do it- because the only thing worse than spending time on something you don't enjoy is having to spend even more time on it when you do it wrong the first time.
Starting a small business is scary because maybe you don't know if the world will see all the value of the new thing you bring to the table. There is an unavoidable degree of risk in that. But there are a lot of other risks too. One of the big ones is burnout- that you'll spend so much time attending to all the details and on top of that you still have to actually perform the service and make the product. Another huge risk in small business is all the little things you need to get right to make it work, in fields that have little to do with your core business. Accounting and Admin and HR aren't fun or sexy but if you do them wrong your business can fail even when you have a great product and a market-beating a path to your door.
Here's how you mitigate the risk: get a partner whose thing is to run business. Running a business is a set of skills and tools, and like any set of useful skills, there are people who excel at them. There are very affordable tools that can do the lion's share of the heavy lifting. We're a team with the skills to make a tool that fits your business. That means you just do the things you're good at, and the minimum possible admin and reporting, and the system will leverage that to complete all of the necessary functions of business.