How Bad Do You Really Want It?

I didn’t expect buying a new home for our family to involve scooping water out of a toilet that’s been disgusting for at least a decade, and yet here we are.

My husband and I put an offer in on a foreclosure property back in July, after months and months of house hunting.

You’d think getting an offer accepted would mean we were finally getting somewhere, but buying a bank-owned foreclosure apparently comes with approximately eight million additional hoops.

After working with 4 different lenders over 4 long months and providing everything short of a DNA sample, we were able to purchase the house, only to be told that the amount we needed to renovate it didn’t line up with what the house would be worth after the work was done.

The problem was how much of that work needed to happen before we could even think about making anything “valuable.”

This house had been abandoned for more than three years after the previous owner had done some of their own “less than well done” home renovation projects. So we’re talking foundation repairs, a roof that needs fixing, a termite treatment, plus that nasty, aforementioned toilet situation.

The bank wanted us to lower the construction cost, which meant going back to our contractor and basically saying, “We know what you quoted us for you to do the work, but now WE are going to have to do a lot of it.”

But finally, feeling like it had been an eternity of doing nothing, we finally got to start doing something.

You know when you’ve already had to work so hard just to get to the starting point that you’d really appreciate the next part being a little easier?

Yeah, apparently the house project did not get that memo.

We started pulling up the floors so we could get the demolition out of the way before the foundation work (let me just say, tile is of the devil) and underneath that horrendous job was another discovery: anywhere there was a water connection, the subfloors were trashed, which meant the work we were currently doing to get ready for the work we need to be doing… had uncovered MORE WORK.

And as with most things in my life, I can’t help but see the parallels to growing a business.

So much of this renovation reminds me of what I’ve gone through, and what so many of my fellow entrepreneurs have gone through, trying to build something we really want.

How bad do you want it when it looks like THIS?

You’ve already built a business that works, and now you’re ready to grow beyond what you can keep doing the way you’ve been doing it and planning that next version is exciting.

Then, after all the thinking and deciding, it feels good to finally start doing something. You know it’ll take work, but you’d really like that work to feel like progress.

You start pulling things apart so you can rebuild, and suddenly you understand why we were less than thrilled about those subfloors.

The system that’s worked for years won’t support where you’re going, and replacing it is a bigger job than you thought.

Or you realize the help you need means committing to an expense that makes you uncomfortable before you’ve seen the growth you’re hiring for.

Even putting a new offer out there can uncover more than you bargained for. You’ve raised the level of what you deliver, but now your marketing needs to reach a different client, and some of the people who loved your old offer aren’t coming with you. You expected to work on selling it, but you weren’t expecting rejection to have you questioning whether you’re capable of delivering it.

You took action because you wanted to build something, and now you’re dealing with a problem you didn’t know was part of the job.

For me, a lot of what came up this past year was mindset work, which surprised me because I’m generally a pretty confident person.

Revamping my program and raising my prices exposed insecurity and frustration, but also some overconfidence and pride.

There were moments when I wanted people to recognize my value without putting in enough of the effort to show them, and my coach had to call me out on it.

Emotionally, I was all over the map for months and dealing with limiting beliefs intertwined with pride is the LEAST fun business activity EVER!

Your hard part might be somewhere else entirely.

You may know it’s time to hire a team member, but discovering that letting someone else take responsibility is way harder than you were expecting.

You may understand the value in networking, but sharing a 30 sec intro about your business to a bunch of strangers might make you unexpectedly break out in hives.

We all have our Achilles ‘ heel, and that’s when “How bad do I want this?” becomes a much more honest question.

You’re tired from doing the work you planned for, and now there’s something else to face before you can get the result you wanted.

Are you willing to get help with what’s come up, reconsider something you thought was settled, or allow more time and effort than you’d hoped this would take?

You still get to have boundaries and make responsible decisions about your money, but within those boundaries, how much of the uncomfortable work are you willing to do now that you can see it?

As usual, I’m still answering that myself (preferably without discovering any more opportunities to work on my character).

Weekly Challenge

Think about something you’re working on to grow your business, and name what’s turned out to be harder than you expected or uncovered a problem you hadn’t planned for.

Ask yourself: How bad do I want this, now that I know more about what it’s going to take?

Go beyond “Of course I want it” and get honest about the part you’re reluctant to face, whether that’s asking for help, committing to an investment, or working through a belief you didn’t realize was getting in your way.

Within your actual budget and boundaries, what are you willing to do about it?

Write down the next couple of steps, and take the first one this week.

If you want some help having that conversation with yourself, the issue’s companion AI prompt in Notion AI Skool will help you work through what’s been uncovered and what you’re willing to do next.

You can keep the uncomfortable answers between you and the AI; I’m sharing mine, but that doesn’t mean you owe me yours.

This one feels pretty vulnerable, and I know you probably don’t want to reply with the details of your own rotten subfloor, but if you want to send me a “Yeah, I want it bad, too,” that’s enough, and we can cheer each other on while we figure this out.