In July 2024, in a thread about leaving employment to run your own business, one owner dropped the job description nobody prints. His words, verbatim: “Running a small business is far more sales and marketing, and if you are lucky enough to get to the point where you need to hire someone, then HR, managing suppliers and fuck me don’t get me started on fucking customers.” Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41047920
The dream being punctured in that thread was wealth without labour; his correction is the real inventory: the product you thought you were building turns out to be one line item, and the business you actually bought is everything around it. But the escalation order in his list is worth reading twice. Why does the marketing slice dominate the surprise — why does the inventory start with sales and marketing before it ever reaches HR, suppliers or customers?
The profanity earns its place — this article keeps it verbatim, because softening it would sanitise the recognition that makes it true. And the answer to the ordering question is the hinge of the whole inventory: for most small firms, the marketing slice is the first load that arrives without any trained instinct behind it — HR is people, and most owners have been people all their lives; suppliers are negotiations, and owners have negotiated forever. Marketing is the one department on the list that nobody staffed, trained for, or chose. That is why it dominates the surprise, and why it is the slice this story returns to at the end.
The job you bought is not the job you imagined
Because sales and marketing never arrive as separate tasks with separate hours. They arrive woven through everything: the quote that needs chasing, the quote that needs winning in the first place, the presence that must exist so the phone can ring, the relationship that only continues if someone maintains it. The owner’s discovery is arithmetic, not weakness — the marketing load of even a tiny firm is a job-shaped hole in a person-sized week, and it sits directly on top of the job the owner actually chose the independence for.
What makes the pressure specific rather than generic: none of it is delegated, because there is nobody to delegate to. HR, suppliers, customers — his escalating list — all stack on the same shoulders that carry the presence. The load is not too heavy because the owner is weak. It is too heavy for one person because it was never one person’s job: it was a department, compressed.
Same owner, same business, one department lifted
Now the counterfactual the MarKomX Pain Stories project agreed on: the same owner, the same business they left a salary for — and one part of the everything carried for them. The “far more sales and marketing” slice becomes an operation instead of a duty stacked on top of duties: presence kept current, content produced on rhythm, the marketing function staffed and run.
What stays theirs is stated precisely so nothing is oversold: the customers — all of them, including the ones that make him want to scream — plus the suppliers, the HR, the delivery. Nobody pretends customers become easy; this story’s profanity stays in the story because sanitising it would break the recognition that makes it work. What changes is arithmetic: the hours a week that marketing consumed as a second, invisible job return to the functions that only the owner can do — and to the evenings that were quietly funding them.
The decision to take this week
Take one honest hour and price your marketing load the way you would price a job ad: the hours it actually took last week — chasing quotes, posting, updating the website, answering the same questions — times what those hours cost at your own effective rate. The rate your invoices already assume you are worth is the rate the work is really consuming.
Do the multiplication as if the person doing this work were anyone but you: a colleague, a hire, a firm. Owner-hours are the most expensive currency a small firm spends — they come out of the only supply of hours that carries every other function at once. The annual figure that lands on paper is really a vacancy notice: this function has no owner, and it has been paying itself in hours you were already spending elsewhere — write that number down, with the year on it, because what it costs now versus what it would cost carried properly is the honest comparison.
The figure on paper, and what it changes
Keep that figure — the annual cost of the slice nobody chose as a job — next to the real inventory this story started with: the customers, the suppliers, the HR. The number is not a complaint; it is the marketing slice’s true size, measured the way a department would be measured.
Then ask the only two questions that matter: is this load getting done, or just surviving — and is it the load you went independent to carry? If the load is surviving rather than done, the number on paper has named the gap between the two, in hours, at your own rate — the first honest measurement most owners ever make of the function they least chose. Which of the two failures is yours — an unfinished department, or an unfinished dream — decides what kind of answer the number calls for, and that is the point of writing it down.
An honest number, once, changes the conversation you have with yourself every midnight after. It also arms the conversation you eventually have with anyone you bring in: a priced, written, honest load is the difference between hiring a pair of hands and handing over a department.
Part of the MarKomX Pain Stories series on ai-fi.ch — real owners’ verbatim words, worked honestly.