EP 485: Freedom Isn’t Free: A Memorial Day Reflection on Why Building Your Business Is an Act of Gratitude

So today is Memorial Day, and for many of us that is the unofficial start of the summer. It’s a long weekend, a cookout, a beach, and in our case, my family is going to be at the farm. It’s a chance to exhale a little, and there’s nothing wrong with any of that. Rest is so good and so important, and time with the people that you love is essential for your success, but I did not want to let this day pass without saying something that I think needs to be said, not as a business lesson, not as a framework, not as a strategy, just simply as a human who is genuinely aware, at least on days like today of how much I have been given.

Now this episode is a little bit different, because we’re not teaching anything tactical. There’s no AI implementation, there’s no profitability analysis, no milestone planning. It’s just a conversation, a reminder, and an invitation to sit with something that I think we need again, including myself in this something that we need to sit with a little more often than we do. Welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. I’m Daniela, and today I am not here as a business strategist, I’m here as someone who woke up this morning thinking about what this day actually means, and someone who wanted to share with you before we head into another week of building our businesses. Now, if you’re listening from the United States, today is Memorial Day. This is the day that we set aside to honor the men and women who gave their lives in service to this country. If you’re listening from Canada or elsewhere, the specific holiday may not be the same, but the thread that I want to pull on is universal, because what I really want to talk about is freedom and what freedom makes possible, and how rarely we stop to feel the weight of that. So this is a short episode, but I do hope that it’s meaningful.

Memorial Day is not Veterans Day. It’s not a day to thank those who served and who came home. It’s a day to remember those who did not, the men and women who gave their lives fully, finally, completely, so that the rest of us could keep living the way that we live. I think about what that means sometimes, and I don’t think I sit with it long enough. Someone’s son or daughter went to war and did not come back, so that I could start a business. Someone’s daughter, someone’s husband, someone’s best friend made the ultimate sacrifice, so that the country that they believed in could keep going, so that the freedoms built into this nation could survive and extend to the next generation, and the one after that. I don’t want to be heavy on a holiday weekend, but I do think that heaviness is the point.

The weight of what was given is what gives the gratitude its meaning, and I think most of us, including me, live at a comfortable distance from that weight for most of the year. And today I just want to close that distance a little bit. So, thank you to every person who served and who did not return, to every family who gave someone they loved to something larger than themselves, we are living in the freedom that you chose to protect. Part of what those men and women protected, part of what has always been woven into the foundation of this country is the freedom to pursue your own vision, the freedom to decide what your life looks like, and then go and make it real. That is not a small thing. It is not available everywhere, and it is not guaranteed by geography or history or time. It exists because people fought for it, died for it, and handed it forward, and one of the most vivid expressions of that freedom, one of the most distinctly human things that you can do with the liberty that you have just been given, is to start a business, to say, I have a skill, I have a vision, I have something to offer the world, and I’m going to build something around that, that’s entrepreneurship, and it is at its core an act of freedom. So, let’s not look at entrepreneurship as a burden, let’s look at it as a gift. On the hard days, we treat it like a burden.

I do too. The overwhelm, the stress, the never-ending list of problems that need solving, the team conflict, the cash flow anxiety, the marketing that’s building up and needs to go out, the client that needs a response, the numbers that need to be reviewed. There is weight to all of that, and that weight. Is real. I’m not here to tell you that running a business is easy, or that the hard parts are not hard. They are, you know, they are right. I’m here with my people, but underneath all of it, underneath the stress and the chaos, and the days when you’re wondering, why did I ever even start to do this? There’s something extraordinary that is sitting quietly, and that is that you get to try. You get to try. You get to wake up every morning and pursue a dream that is yours. You get to build something that reflects your vision, your values, your expertise, your care for your clients. You get to fail. You get to fail and adjust and try again without asking anyone’s permission. You get to hire people and shape a culture and create a place where something meaningful happens every single day, that is a gift, and we take it for granted over and over and over again. I take it for granted. There are weeks where I am so deep in the problems of running a business that I forget, genuinely forget that the ability for me to run it at all is something that I was given something that was protected for me by people that I will never meet, whose names I do not know, who made a choice that cost them everything. So, on a day like today, I think that’s worth remembering.

Now I’m not going to give you homework, right? I’m not going to send you into the week with a checklist or a framework, but I do want to offer you something the next time that you are in the middle of a business problem or a hard week or even a hard season, and there will be hard weeks and hard seasons, because entrepreneurship is hard. I want you to try on a different question before you go and reach for the stress, not why is this so difficult, but what am I grateful to be building, not as a forced reframe, not as toxic positivity that pretends that the hard parts are not real, but as a genuine return to the reason that you started the thing that you wanted to create, the freedom you exercised when you said yes to building something of your own. You don’t have to do this. Nobody made you, you chose it, you get to, because something inside of you believed it was possible, believed it was worth it, believed that your vision deserved to be built. That belief is still there underneath the hard weeks, and today is a good day to find it again.

I know you might be exhausted right now. Maybe you’re heading into this long weekend rested, but not depleted. Maybe the stress has been particularly heavy lately. Maybe you’ve been wondering quietly in the middle of the night whether it’s even worth it. The fact that you are tired does not mean that you are failing. It means that you’re building something real, and real things take energy. The fact that it’s hard does not mean that you made the wrong choice. It means you chose something that matters enough to keep you going, even when it’s hard, and the freedom to keep going, to not quit, to adjust, to try something different, to hire better, to raise your prices to build the systems that make it easier. That freedom is yours. Nobody can take it from you. It was protected for you. It belongs to you, and that is worth something today. So, I want you to rest this weekend, if you can. I want you to recharge and be with the people you love, with the people that matter to you. Let the business be quiet for a day or two, if that’s possible, and come back next week with at least a little more of the gratitude that makes the hard part feel purposeful rather than just hard. Now I want to close today with the way that I started, and that is the day itself. Memorial Day exists because freedom is not free, because the life we get to live, the businesses we get to build, the dreams we get to pursue, the mornings we get to choose what to do with, was purchased at a cost we cannot fully comprehend, so today let’s remember those and carry a little of that remembering into the rest of the year to the families who are marking this day with grief instead of celebration. Who have an empty chair at the cookout, a name on the wall somewhere, a person that you’re still missing. I am holding you in my heart today, and to every one of you listening, every spa owner, every esthetician, every nurse, every injector, and every provider who is building something, and sometimes forgetting what a gift it is to be able to build it. Thank you for being here.

Thank you for building, and thank you for letting me be a part of your journey. Now go and enjoy your weekend, because you have earned it.