There’s an uncomfortable truth that successful entrepreneurs rarely admit in public: most business problems disappear when you’re making enough money. Not some of them. Not the easy ones. Most of them.
I’m not talking about the profound strategic challenges that keep founders awake at night, wrestling with questions about market positioning or competitive moats. I’m talking about the grinding, daily friction that consumes hours of mental energy and creates the feeling that your business is held together with duct tape and prayers.
When cash flow is tight, every decision becomes an agonizing calculation. You need a better project management tool, but the subscription costs two hundred dollars a month. Your customer service person is overwhelmed, but hiring another employee means committing to thousands in monthly salary before you know if next quarter’s revenue will materialize. The website is slow because you’re on the cheapest hosting plan. You’re manually doing tasks that software could automate because the software costs money you don’t quite have.
These aren’t interesting problems. They’re boring, soul-crushing problems that masquerade as strategic challenges but are really just resource constraints wearing a disguise.
Then something shifts. Maybe you land a major client, or your marketing finally clicks, or you raise prices and discover the market will bear it. Suddenly you’re bringing in fifty thousand dollars a month instead of fifteen. And just like that, entire categories of problems simply evaporate.
The project management tool? You buy the best one without thinking about it. The overwhelmed employee? You hire two more people and suddenly everyone has slack in their schedule to think creatively instead of just treading water. The slow website? You migrate to better hosting and pay someone to optimize it properly. Those manual tasks? You buy the automation software and implement it in a week.
This isn’t about wasteful spending or losing discipline. It’s about recognizing that many problems aren’t actually problems at all but rather symptoms of insufficient resources. When a doctor is trying to diagnose why someone feels terrible and discovers they’re severely anemic, the solution isn’t a complex treatment protocol, it’s iron supplements. The underlying issue was simple scarcity.
The same applies to business. When you’re adequately capitalized, you can hire specialists instead of being a generalist doing everything poorly. You can test marketing channels without betting the company on each experiment. You can say no to bad-fit clients because you don’t need every dollar that walks through the door. You can fix things before they break instead of running a perpetual crisis response operation.
There’s also a psychological dimension that’s hard to overstate. When money is tight, every problem feels existential because, in a sense, it is. The question isn’t just “how do we solve this?” but “can we afford to solve this, and if we spend money on this, what else dies?” That kind of thinking creates a scarcity mindset that becomes self-reinforcing. You make defensive, conservative choices because you can’t afford mistakes, which often prevents you from making the bold moves that could actually change your trajectory.
With sufficient revenue, problems become puzzles rather than threats. You can approach them with curiosity instead of panic. You can try the expensive solution first, and if it doesn’t work, try something else. You can bring in consultants or advisors without worrying that their fees will sink the business. The mental energy you were spending on financial anxiety gets redirected toward actually building something.
Of course, money doesn’t solve everything. It won’t fix a fundamentally broken business model or save you from building a product nobody wants. It won’t resolve co-founder conflicts or magically create a compelling vision. Some problems are genuinely strategic or interpersonal or require deep insight rather than capital.
But here’s what I’ve observed: entrepreneurs vastly underestimate what percentage of their problems fall into the “money would fix this” category. They convince themselves they’re dealing with complex challenges that require clever solutions when the real answer is simpler and more uncomfortable. They don’t have enough revenue.
This realization can feel demoralizing, like you’re admitting defeat or acknowledging that you’re not smart enough to bootstrap your way past resource constraints through sheer ingenuity. But it’s actually liberating. It means you can stop pretending you need to solve everything with creativity and hustle, and instead focus single-mindedly on the one problem that matters: getting more money in the door.
Sometimes the sophisticated answer is the simple one. Sometimes the reason you can’t solve your problems isn’t that they’re intractable, it’s that you’re trying to solve them with one hand tied behind your back. Give yourself enough rope and watch how quickly you learn to climb.
