I had a conversation recently that I cannot stop thinking about.
It was with a friend. A young man from Denmark, like me, who about ten years ago left our small country to build a bigger life. He landed first in Switzerland, where he secured a great job and, as fate would have it, met the woman who would become his wife. A few years later, the two of them moved to Spain, and there he started a business from scratch. A business that at one point supported his entire family, including the two small children who came along the way. A business with real potential. A business that, with the right adjustments, could have made him wealthy while giving him more time with his family than any job ever could.
He is about to walk away from it.
Not because the business failed. Not because the market disappeared. Not because he lacks talent or connections or opportunity.
He is walking away because he cannot stop fighting for his own limitations.
And that is what I want to talk about today. Because I see this pattern everywhere. I have seen it in hundreds of businesses over the years. I have seen it destroy more potential than any recession, any competitor, any market shift ever could.
When you fight for your limiting beliefs, you get to keep them.
The Conversation
My friend operates in a luxury niche. He built something that, by all measures, should be printing money. His clients are wealthy. His service is specialized. His experience is substantial. On paper, everything points to success.
But he has been struggling. The business declined. His savings depleted. He now lives off his wife’s income while he figures out what to do next. After months of depression and sleepless nights, he reached out to ask my advice.
He told me he was thinking of shutting down the business entirely. Moving his family to another country. Getting a job. Starting over as an employee.
I listened carefully. And then I asked him some questions.
What are your margins?
He told me a couple of examples of his costs and his pricing, and I quickly calculated that his margins are about 20 to 21 percent.
I stopped him right there.
You do not have a business, I told him. You have a job. And not a very good one.
At 20 percent margins, there is almost nothing left after you account for taxes, unexpected expenses, slow periods, and your own time. Unless you are running a high volume sales operation, and even if your fixed costs and administration expenses are relatively low, you are working for practically nothing. You are taking on all the risk of business ownership with almost none of the reward. You have built yourself a prison disguised as a company.
He nodded. He understood this intellectually. But understanding something and doing something about it are very different things.
So I dug deeper.
The €150 Catastrophe
Here is what I discovered.
In his business, he had been personally accompanying clients on their experiences. This is perfectly fine when you are just starting up a business, as it keeps expenses to a minimum while you build your reputation and client base. But it becomes catastrophic very soon after. When you are personally in the field delivering every experience, you cannot scale. You cannot manage the business. You cannot work on the business because you are too busy working in it. You are the bottleneck, and the bottleneck is the ceiling.
There are only 24 hours in a day. He could only be in one place at a time. And every trip he took meant time away from his wife and young children.
Soon he was away from home upwards of 200 days a year. Two hundred days. More than half the year spent in the field, away from his wife, away from his two young children. He felt he was missing out on the moments that matter most. First steps. First words. Birthdays. Ordinary Tuesday evenings that you never get back. His children were growing up, and he was not there to see it.
He reached a breaking point. Something had to change.
So he made adjustments. He tried to step back. But stepping back meant the business declined because he had built everything around himself.
I asked him: Have you considered charging a premium for your personal presence? Make your involvement an add-on. Something exclusive. Something special.
He said he had actually done this recently. He charged extra for personally accompanying a client.
How much? I asked.
€150 per day.
I nearly fell out of my chair.
€150 per day. For exclusive, personal access to the founder and expert. In a luxury market where clients are already spending tens of thousands on a single experience.
This is not pricing. This is financial self-harm.
I told him that price should be at minimum ten times higher. Probably fifty times higher. Perhaps even more. We are talking about exclusive personal access to an expert in a specialized field. Wealthy clients pay thousands per day for far less valuable access.
Do you know what his response was?
He fought me on it.
The Excuses Began
No one would pay that, he said. Not in my market. Not my clients. They all know each other. They all talk. They know what other providers charge. They would think I was trying to take advantage of them.
I asked him: Do you know about Mar-a-Lago? Donald Trump’s club in Florida?
He had heard of it.
Do you know what it costs to be a member?
He did not.
As of 2024, the initiation fee is one million dollars. The annual dues are twenty thousand dollars. And membership is capped at 500 people. There is a waiting list.
One million dollars. Just to walk through the door. Twenty thousand more every year after that.
My point was simple: If the offer is right for the right people, those people are willing to pay dearly for it. Value is not about cost. Value is about perception. Value is about exclusivity. Value is about what the experience means to the buyer.
His clients are wealthy individuals who travel internationally for a specialized luxury hobby. These are not price-sensitive people. These are people who spend more on a single weekend experience than most people spend on their annual vacation. And he is charging €150 for exclusive personal access.
But he would not hear it.
Fighting for Limitations
Here is where the conversation became painful.
Every point I made, he countered. Every opportunity I presented, he dismissed. Every example I offered, he explained away.
The market is different here. My clients are not like that. They all know each other. They would never pay more. The competition would undercut me. Denmark is small and everyone talks.
On and on and on.
He was not listening to understand. He was listening to argue. He was not exploring possibilities. He was defending impossibilities. He was not looking for a way forward. He was building a case for why there was no way forward.
He was fighting for his limitations.
And here is the truth that broke my heart: When you fight that hard for your limitations, they become part of your identity. They stop being beliefs you hold and start being who you are. They fuse with your sense of self until you cannot separate the limitation from the person.
I am someone who cannot charge premium prices. I am someone whose market will not pay more. I am someone who has to compete on price. I am someone who cannot succeed in this business.
Once a limiting belief becomes an identity, it is nearly impossible to change. Because changing the belief means changing who you believe yourself to be. And that kind of change feels like death. The ego will protect itself at all costs, even if that cost is financial ruin.
What He Could Not See
Here is what my friend could not see, no matter how clearly I tried to show him.
His business had already proven it could support his family. It had done so for years. The decline was not because the market disappeared or the opportunity dried up. The decline was because of structural problems that could be fixed.
The margins were too low. That is fixable. He was the bottleneck. That is fixable. His pricing was absurd. That is fixable. His positioning was confused. That is fixable.
Every single problem he faced had a solution. Not easy solutions, necessarily. But solutions nonetheless.
What was not fixable was his belief system. Because he would not allow it to be fixed.
He came to me for advice. I gave it to him. And he spent the entire conversation explaining why my advice could not possibly work for his unique situation.
His situation was not unique. I have worked with more than 250 businesses. I have seen every variation of this story. The specifics change but the pattern remains the same.
Business owners who fight for their limitations get to keep them.
The Decision
By the end of our conversation, his mind was made up. He would shut down the business. He would move his family from the South of Europe to London, England. He would find a job. He would become an employee again.
He believed this would give him more stability. More time with his children. More peace.
I fear he is completely wrong.
A job in London will not give him more time with his family. It will give him a commute, office hours, someone else’s schedule, and the illusion of security. He will trade the uncertainty of entrepreneurship for the different uncertainty of employment, where his income depends entirely on decisions made by people who do not care about his family.
He will uproot his wife and children. He will abandon eight years of work. He will start over at the bottom of someone else’s ladder. And he will likely end up working just as many hours for less money and zero equity.
All because he could not stop fighting for beliefs that were never true in the first place.
The Lesson
I share this story not to mock my friend. I share it because I see myself in him. I see you in him. I see every business owner who has ever let limiting beliefs determine their destiny.
We all have these beliefs. Every single one of us. The question is whether we examine them, challenge them, and ultimately release them. Or whether we defend them, justify them, and let them run our lives.
Here is what I want you to consider:
What limitations are you fighting for right now?
What beliefs do you defend even when someone with more experience tells you they are wrong?
What excuses do you repeat so often that they have become part of your identity?
What would be possible for your business if you simply stopped arguing for why it cannot work?
I do not know the answers for your specific situation. But I know this: If you are fighting for your limitations, you will get to keep them. And they will cost you far more than you can possibly imagine.
The saddest part of my conversation with my friend was not that he could not see the opportunity in front of him. The saddest part was that somewhere inside, he could see it. He just could not allow himself to believe it was for him.
That is what limiting beliefs do. They make opportunity invisible. Or worse, they make opportunity visible but unreachable. Something for other people. Never for you.
If you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them.
But if you are willing to release them, everything changes.
The choice is yours.
What limiting belief have you been fighting for? What would change if you simply let it go?
