Oh, absolutely. The negativity that comes with owning a business was absolutely the most surprising thing of ownership to me. Its the #1 thing I will mention to any aspiring or just starting out entrepreneur before anything else. There is nothing that can prepare you for it besides just knowing its coming.

Family and friends were always, and still are, backhanded or veiled negativity. “Oh… that’s your location?”. Yeah dude, local restaurants don’t usually have a Olive Garden style build-out on the main shopping drag in town. “You know most restaurants close in their first year”. Yeah so this is an existing restaurant that we are rebranding - it is already cash flowing itself. “You don’t even make $2,000 a month? I could never live on that”. Yeah, small business restaurants aren’t going to start printing McDonalds money by the second month. My favorite are the ones who, today, are like “oh you deliver (for the restaurant), things must be rough at the restaurant”. Oh no, taking our orders is how my house was paid for when turned 31 and I do it now because I’m not needed for anything else there so I’m just bored. I love watching their face change. They don’t know how to process it.

But… the general public. I will never forget the vitriol we experienced in our getting started years when money was tight, I was sinking my life into it all seven days, and we were doing truly the best we could with what we had. It is breathtaking how the general public will stomp all over something you have sunk tens of thousands of dollars and your literal blood sweat and tears into over some of the most ridiculous, arbitrary, and nonsensical things. I was told we’d go out of business because our grilled vegetables still had a crunch to them and weren’t totally soggy because “that’s what grilled means”. I was told we’d never make it because we had a freak volume night and there were some people who had to wait 30 minutes on orders as if they’d never waited 30 minutes at the chain restaurants on a busy night. The number of people that told me they’d never come back - actually literally screaming from the doorway - because we didn’t have servers and you order at a counter was more than even your worst assumption in people would have you guess. That doesn’t even start on the Yelpers. It doesn’t even start on the negativity from employees. And, holy hell, it doesn’t even start on the covid years that were their own horror show - I lost all my faith in humanity after that. I’ve never seen hate on that level as I did during the covid years.

Anyway, all that said - it’s really easy to let this kind of stuff get to you and lose sight of the bigger picture. These people did get to me for a while, made me question my direction, and made me ashamed of my position in life for a while. One day I finally woke up and realized that for all this worry I put myself through on a daily basis by hanging on these haters’ every word, we were actually dealing with growing pains… not barely scraping by. How could it be that our sales, revenue, and my income were growing to the point we needed to buy more equipment, change layouts, and hire more people if everything was terrible and we weren’t going to make it? I realized at that point I was listening to miserable people who just didn’t want me to make it and their opinion carried no weight other than that. I stopped reading reviews, started letting the comments from friends/family go in one ear and out the other, and left it all behind. It was the best decision I ever made. Do you best, create products/services you’re proud of, take ownership of your mistakes, and support your products/services to a realistic point for the price range you operate in. Then, let the cards fall as they may.