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By Claire Wetmore | WBN News | October 19, 2026 Editor: Karalee Greer Subscription to WBN and being a Contributor is Free
The setbacks in your personal life may be building the person your company needs. Here is how owners can turn hard seasons into growth.
Most owners can name the setback they wish they could skip. The breakup. The move. The loss. The year money was tight at home and at work. At the time, it felt like it was taking something away from the business.
Research suggests it may have been doing the opposite. The person who builds a bigger company is rarely the one who had it easy. It is more often the one who learned, the hard way, how to keep going.
By The Numbers
- 77% of small business owners say running their business met or exceeded expectations (Bluevine 2026 Business Owner Success Survey)
- 77% also made sacrifices to keep the business going in 2025 (Bluevine)
- 27% report higher-than-expected burnout (Bluevine)
- 50% of small business owners expect revenue to grow over the next three months, the highest level of optimism recorded this year (Citizens Q3 2026 Business Pulse)
Key Developments
Owners who say the business was worth it are not saying it was easy. In Bluevine's survey of about 1,200 U.S. owners, the same share who were satisfied also gave something up. Many carried the cost at home as well as at work. Bluevine also found that owners who kept business and personal finances separate, and had credit buffers in place, reported less burnout at similar revenue.
Psychology research helps explain why hard seasons can build more than they take. A 2010 study by Mark Seery and colleagues, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, compared people's histories of difficult life events. People with a moderate amount of adversity in their past reported better well-being than people with none.
Researchers Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun call a related effect posttraumatic growth. Many people who struggle through major life challenges report a stronger sense of their own capacity, closer relationships, and a clearer sense of what matters. It does not happen to everyone, and it is rarely quick or painless.
How a person thinks about pressure also counts. Research by Alia Crum and colleagues found that people who see stress as something that can help them handle it better than people who see it as only harmful.
Business Impact
Building a company asks for personal strengths that no course can teach. Staying steady when a client leaves. Making a call without all the facts. Having a hard conversation with a person you like. Waiting through a slow stretch without panicking. Asking for help.
Many owners first learned those skills outside work, in the seasons they would not choose again. Those seasons trained patience, nerve, and judgment. They also showed who actually shows up, which is useful when you are choosing partners, hires, and advisors.
That doesn't happen automatically. The growth comes from looking back and naming it. One simple exercise: list the last three hard stretches in your life, then ask three questions about each.
- What did it teach me?
- What strength did it build that my business now needs?
- What would I be able to handle today that I couldn't before?
Then take the next step and build around it. Set a cash reserve. Keep business and personal money separate. Write down the processes so the company does not depend on you alone. Plan for the day you can't be there. Strength gets you through the next hard season. Structure lets the business survive it.
Why It Matters
Many owners treat their hardest seasons as lost time, something that set them back before they could start. This research points the other way. Those seasons may be part of how you became the person who can run a company at all.
That changes the question. It is not "Am I ready to build bigger?" It is "What have my hardest seasons already prepared me for?" Owners who can answer that tend to know their strengths, and to know where they still need support.
Setbacks do not guarantee growth, and no one needs to be grateful for what hurt. But the owners who stop treating the past as a penalty, and start treating it as training, have more to build on. That is the signal worth watching as owners decide what to build next.
By Claire Wetmore | WBN News – Real-Time Intelligence For Business. Contact: Claire.rfm@gmail.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-wetmore-72a74a25a/
My mission in financial education is to teach how to grow, save, and protect your money. My work is grounded in research rather than opinion; I dig into the studies, surveys, and behavioral science behind the way people actually think and act with money, and translate that into guidance that's useful in real life. I write regularly across several publications, covering everything from the psychology of financial shame to the habits that quietly build (or erode) long-term wealth. My goal is simple: help people feel less alone and less overwhelmed when it comes to money, and give them something they can actually use.
Editor: Karalee Greer Subscription to WBN and being a Contributor is Free
Tags: #Claire Wetmore #WBN News #Small Business #Business Owners #Entrepreneurship #Business Growth
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