10/17/2026
The Weekend Howl #17 🦊
This week's about the moment a business stops being a feeling and starts being a fact you can actually see.
I was helping a small consulting firm here in Calgary get quotes for a basic website, nothing fancy. Three agencies wrote back. Three wildly different numbers for the same handful of pages this firm needed just to look real to its own clients. Same brief, same work, and the spread between them was wide enough to stop me.
I remember sitting with those quotes on the screen for a long time, not touching anything else. Not because I was shocked exactly. More like the picture was finally coming into focus.
This firm wasn't wealthy. They counted every dollar, the way small businesses do when nobody's cushioning the fall for them.
And I realized those quotes weren't really for a website at all. They were paying for square footage in some downtown office. Salaries for people who'd never once speak to their customers. A name on a building somewhere they'd never visit.
➡️ That was the moment it clicked for me. Entrepreneurs weren't paying for solutions. They were quietly subsidizing overhead they never signed up for.
👉 The gap between what something costs and what it's worth is usually just somebody else's rent, dressed up as your bill.
Take a look at any invoice you've paid for something simple, and ask yourself honestly how much of it was actual work, and how much was funding an office you'll never see. A lot of small business owners are paying for a lobby they'll never walk through. Once you notice that split, you start valuing your own hours the same honest way, without apologizing for it.
So here's what to actually do with that before Monday, no shortcuts:
1. OPEN your last three recurring invoices, whatever they're for, and read every single line item like it owes you an explanation. You can't fix what you've never looked at properly.
2. CHANGE one thing you're currently paying someone else to do into something you build yourself this weekend, even if it's rough around the edges. Rough and finished beats polished and invoiced every time.
3. SAY to one person this week, in one plain sentence, what you actually do, before they have to work it out from your website. Said out loud, it stops being a guess. It becomes a decision you actually stand behind.
Not a business plan, my friend. Just one line item, finally questioned.
So tell me, what are you still paying for that you could build yourself this weekend?
Dream, Be-lieve, Do. Have!! 💪
