The Adam Feuerstein Podcast
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The Adam Feuerstein Podcast
The Part of Entrepreneurship No One Talks About (Until It Breaks You)
Let’s talk about what building a business really feels like.
In this episode of the Total Sum Game podcast,we get honest about the emotional rollercoaster of entrepreneurship.
We’re talking about the part no one warns you about:
💸 The financial pressure that keeps you up at night
🧠 The mental load of leading a team
🫥 The invisible stress behind every big decision
We open up about what it’s like to support founders in their hardest moments—the times when everything looks fine from the outside, but inside it’s heavy.
We’ll share the unexpected connection between failure, growth, and freedom—and how the messiest moments often shape us the most.
If you’ve ever felt like you’re carrying the weight of your business alone…
You’re not. And you don’t have to.
We created this space to talk about the real stuff: the mindset, the pressure, the vulnerability, and the personal growth that goes hand-in-hand with success.
🎧 Listen in—and if you’re ready for support that honors both your ambition and your humanity, head to www.totalsumgame.com
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When you're an entrepreneur, that reward to you is so much more powerful because you created that. Without you in the driver's seat, without your idea, without your inspiration, without your emotional motivation, whatever it is, you accomplished money, social impact, whatever wouldn't happen had you not. You're super upset why I lost $100,000 today. That's a good way to communicate to somebody else, like how shitty your day000 today. That's a good way to communicate to somebody else how shitty your day really is. That's a huge problem for most people, right?
Speaker 2:No, that's a big deal. But what really are you afraid of?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's not the $100,000.
Speaker 1:No, but that money and the dollar amount. It's a way of submitting emotional impact. There's other elements to this besides money. We like money because it's a way to gauge. It's a way to measure If that guy has a million dollars and I have a hundred dollars, he has a whole lot more money than I do. So it's a way to compare ourselves and gauge. But the truth is there's a soup of things.
Speaker 1:The intent of this conversation, too, is to talk to people who are on the fence or new to entrepreneurship. We want you guys to hear that you're not alone, you're not by yourself, and the way you feel about these things is not unique. Everybody goes through highs and lows. What Michelle is describing is a wonderful representation of what it can be like inside business emotionally, first of all, because of how emotionally intelligent Michelle is, but also from her perspective.
Speaker 1:If you think about it as an accountant. She's tied into all these different businesses. When you have dozens, sometimes hundreds, of clients, every one of those clients is in a different emotional state. One's super happy because he just got his first profit ever in history after five years of being on the grind. Another guy's pulling his hair out because the technology came along and it's undermining his business plan and he doesn't see a way through it.
Speaker 1:Imagine bouncing back and forth between those, from call to email to message, throughout an entire day, and so that's one of our things we want to talk about is emotional roller coasters. You know we hear all too often. Oftentimes as employees prior to being entrepreneurs bosses can be very moody, but there's a really good reason for that. I was very moody because things go there's highs, there's lows, and that's the first 10 minutes you've been at work, understanding that, when you take this on, that's part of what comes with it. There's highs and there's lows and it can be five minutes apart, it can be five days apart, it can be five seconds apart of how that works. So I can imagine in the beginning highs and lows for you are not only just in normal business operations, but by the incoming from all these different clients who are all in very different emotional states throughout their day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when you're directly responsible for communicating the numbers to someone, you know how that's going to affect their emotional state, and so you start getting really emotionally overwhelmed just invested in these people that you work for, because you know that this is their livelihood. And, yeah, you've got to deliver some bad news. It's not a fun thing to do, but yet you're the source of the information that can then help them make the decision to turn things around, and so it's an incredible responsibility for people that are in those roles, and if you have a really good finance team that you're working with, they do care about that. They care about what they're providing for you and they understand the impact of the information that they're giving, and I think that was one thing when you and I met. And even one thing that I really enjoyed with working with people is having them understand that they're not alone.
Speaker 2:When, as I got to the opportunity to work with so many people in so many different financial situations and also different kinds of businesses, they all go through the same emotional ups and downs, and the problem is that and I think that's this is like all parts of life is that when you're going through that, you think you're the only one.
Speaker 2:You think that no one else ever has to go through this and everybody else has it figured out and you're the one that's just missing something somewhere. And the truth is, in life that's of course. We know that's not the case. But in business that's definitely not the case. We all walk around in business and in life like we've got it all figured out and so and a lot of times we don't wear that on our sleeves. We're not supposed to say, yeah, my business is losing money or I'm barely making payroll. But when you start a business, that's likely just how it goes and that's part of it. And you're not alone in going through those different types of situations. Everybody goes through that and it's just part of being a business owner.
Speaker 1:And something to consider too if you're contemplating being a business owner once in a great while. It just goes smooth as glass or whatever Some people. God just shines on brighter than other people For some reason I don't know why, but the majority is that there is. It's a struggle. It's extremely difficult, but there's a reason for that. It's extremely difficult because the reward is so powerful, the huge reward, not just financially, it may not even be financially, maybe it's something else you're committed to that you're trying to accomplish. It doesn't have to be money, whenever that thing, whatever that is, comes to fruition. When you're an entrepreneur, that reward to you is so much more powerful because you created that Without you in the driver's seat, without your idea, without your inspiration, without your emotional motivation, whatever it is, you accomplished money, social impact, whatever wouldn't happen had you not. It literally exists because you created it from really thin air or from a dream.
Speaker 1:And Michelle hits a really important point talking about you're really not alone that everybody suffers on some level, and it's required as a symptom of natural law because the reward is so good. So some people lean into the suffering, some people lean into the grind, lean into the anxiety, because they know on the other side of that is this incredible reward. And I think that's what happens when you've done the things that Michelle and I have done. Where you've had a business I had one to go completely bankrupt, so I've been the entire spectrum Others that you sell very favorably, whatever that is. But you start to get that perspective, like now that we're at TSG, when what we used to call bad news may come, you get some bad report or something's not going the way you want it to. You're like oh yeah, this is part of the game.
Speaker 2:I think that's part of what we really want to share with people is now living through that, knowing all the emotional ups and downs, and that you go through Coming through that and then now starting over like we are. We know that we don't have to go through that. Right, we can choose to view things a different way because that's all it is. It's all your perspective. Like you said, you don't know whether something is good news or bad news. You just never do, because you don't know what that's going to lead to next. And getting to go start another business together, like we're doing now, whether things are up or down or whatever, that doesn't really mean that it has to affect us emotionally. We can go through these things, understanding that we're clear on our vision and what we're doing and that it's part of the process.