It seems like everybody is selling a fantasy of starting a business. The fantasy is very much templated; Quit the job, launch the thing, watch the money roll in. This is the “everything-is-suppose-to-work-out-version”.

Like if you just started your business, everything will workout and fall into place. The problem is the lack of reality. To build something, it takes significantly more than just starting and creating a sick logo.

Your state of mind influences whether or not your business survives or becomes a failed idea.

So people skip the part where it gets hard. They start a business with the same broke mindset that had them stressed as employees, and then they’re confused when the business is broke too.

Here’s the thing: a scarcity mindset in business doesn’t look like being poor, nor does it mean that someone is poor.
Scarcity mindset, looks like:

• Urgency
• Need to make money NOW
• Impatience
• It’s thinking money has to show up right now or the whole thing was a mistake.
• It’s skipping the plan because a plan takes too long and time feels like the one thing you can’t spare.
• It’s assuming customers are just going to appear the second you open the doors, like the hard part was getting the doors open in the first place.
• It’s charging less because you’re scared somebody’s going to say no, then panicking when that cheap price can’t even cover what it actually costs you to keep the lights on.

I’ve watched this play out up close more than once, and it goes the same way every time.

“He’ll Figure It Out”

I have a pastor friend who started a church in Ibadan, and for thirteen years he had only twenty members.

Financially, he was always begging friends and relatives to support him with rent, keeping his car on the road and paying off the school fees of his daughter.

One day he came asking for financial help for the umpteenth time from me, and I decided to have a heart-to-heart talk with him because I felt begging for financial handouts all the time is not good for a minister of the gospel.

He then told me his plan. He wanted to start a branch in Abuja and another one in Lagos. Making three branches and he would be the one ministering in all three branches.

I asked him how.

He said he would do a 7 AM to 9 AM service in Ibadan, a 10 AM to 12 AM service in Lagos and a 6 PM to 8 PM service in Abuja, all on the same day, and he would be commuting by road to all three branches.

This is a graduate, but common sense would have told him the plan was all fantasy and not fit for execution.

I told him the plan made no sense; he said I should not be pessimistic because he will figure it out.

He did not figure it out.

He started the Lagos branch in the house of a friend and could only hold the inaugural service.

After that service, he realised what anybody could’ve told him on day one: that he could not physically be in three places doing the same job at the same time.

The problem was every decision got made in the moment, out of panic, instead of ahead of time, with a clear head. Three locations because more locations felt like more money coming in faster.

He did not address the issue of growth with his current church; instead, he gave excuses like, “It is a predominantly muslim area, and most of my female members end up getting pregnant in their late teens and early twenties and moving out of the church to their husband’s houses”

“This Business Is Really Scalable”

The second story is more recent, and it hits a little different because I like this girl and I want her to win.

She finally launched her business a few weeks ago. Small arts and crafts events for the stressed-out woman, the kind of thing that takes real effort to pull off and a real community to fill a room. And she did it. All organic marketing, no ad spend, and she got traction. People actually showed up. Most people never even get past the idea stage.

But she’s exhausted, and the money isn’t there yet, and it’s been one month.

One month.

I told her maybe it’s time to raise her prices. She said if she raised prices, nobody would show up to her events. Then she started venting, the way people do when they’re running on empty, about how nobody understands how hard it is to start a business, and she listed off everything she’s had to scrape together to get it running. Venue, materials, marketing, her own time, the mental load of basically doing it solo.

And I’m sitting there thinking, Yes, that’s what starting a business is. Nobody’s arguing it isn’t hard. The real question was never whether it’s hard. It’s whether her pricing and her timeline actually match what she’s building.

Then she brought up some influencer who did a similar one-day event and walked away with a lot of money for promoting her business. I could tell without her saying it that some part of her expected that all the people the influencer attracted would patronise her.

She ended up disappointed.

I told her something I don’t think she wanted to hear. When you’re starting a business, it’s normal to be in the negative for a while. Negative in money, negative in time, negative in energy some days. There’s an upfront stretch where you’re pouring resources in before the thing has built any momentum of its own. That’s just what it looks like before it’s actually built.

She wasn’t with it. “This business is really scalable, and I can make a lot of money my first month,” she said, and moved on.

She didn’t want to sit with the other version of the story, the one where month one is about survival and month twelve is closer to where you find out if the thing actually works.

The Broke Mindset Doesn’t Disappear Just Because You’re the Boss Now

A scarcity mindset was never about how much money you actually have. It’s about how you relate to time, risk, and information.

Somebody operating from scarcity wants the money now because waiting feels dangerous. They skip the plan because planning takes time they don’t feel like they have, and every day without income feels like proof the whole thing’s already failing. They think visibility is the same as sales, because in their head, the labour was just getting the business open, not getting people to know it exists and trust it enough to actually pay. They keep prices low because a “no” from a customer feels like their fear getting confirmed, so they’d rather earn less than risk hearing it. They avoid their own numbers because not knowing feels safer than finding out something bad.

They call it self-protection. It’s the same wiring that comes from growing up broke or living check to check, where not looking at the number sometimes felt like the only way to survive the week. Problem is that wiring doesn’t switch off just because you’re a business owner now. If anything, it gets louder, because now your name is on the line.

Ten Ways the Broke Mindset Shows Up in Business

Once you know what to look for, this mindset is everywhere. It looks responsible on the surface, and it’s really just fear in disguise.

1. Trying to troubleshoot a problem instead of paying a professional to solve it and thereby wasting time, worsening the problem and still paying to get it resolved

2. Being scared to spend before the money’s coming in

The logo, the permits, the equipment, the marketing, the samples, the software, all of it gets filed under “losing money” instead of “getting what the business actually needs”. A broke mindset can’t tell the difference between spending and investing, because both feel like money leaving your hand, and that’s the only part it’s tracking.

3. Pricing off your own wallet instead of the market

If you personally wouldn’t pay two hundred dollars for something, you assume nobody would, so you’re pricing for yourself instead of your actual customer. The events planner is pricing for someone already nervous about the cost of a workshop, not necessarily for the entrepreneur who’d happily pay more for the right room and the right connections.

4. Needing the money to show up immediately

If a strategy doesn’t produce cash in week one, it gets labelled broken, even though most strategies need months to actually compound. One month into a business isn’t evidence of anything besides the business being one month old.

5. Buying cheap and paying for it twice

Cheapest equipment, cheapest freelancer, cheapest materials, and then paying again when all of it falls apart and has to get redone. Cheap up front and expensive later is still expensive. It just hides the real total until later.

6. Being scared to test anything that might flop

Business means putting money, time, or reputation behind an idea before you know if it’s going to work. The psychic never tested the two-location idea small. She went straight to full commitment because testing felt like admitting she might be wrong.

7. Treating every dollar spent as a loss

A broke mindset asks, how do I avoid spending this? A business mindset asks, what can this purchase actually create? Same dollar, completely different question, completely different result.

8. Taking every client, nightmare clients included

When money feels scarce, even a bad deal starts looking like the only deal on the table. Desperation lowers your standards for who you’re willing to work with right when you can least afford the wrong client.

9. Undervaluing yourself because you need the sale too bad

And customers can usually feel that. Desperation has a smell, and it tends to attract people who negotiate harder, not people who respect your price.

10. Confusing frugality with strategy

Saving money is a genuinely useful skill. Being too scared to actually deploy money isn’t the same skill, even though it can look identical from the outside. One’s discipline. The other’s paralysis wearing discipline’s clothes.

What makes this list uncomfortable is that people with this mindset are making emotional decisions. Which, let’s be honest, one should not do in business.

Avoiding the fifty-dollar expense feels responsible. Refusing to spend on a logo before there’s revenue feels smart. Pricing low feels generous. Taking every client feels grateful. Each individual choice has a story that justifies it. It’s only when you line them all up side by side that the pattern shows itself, and the pattern’s always the same. Comfort is getting picked over growth, every single time, because growth means sitting in uncertainty and comfort doesn’t ask that of you.

Why This Pattern Is So Hard to Break

The frustrating part is none of this is really about business skill. The psychic clearly knew her craft. The events planner clearly knows how to organise people and fill a room, which is its own real skill most people don’t have. Both were failing because the decisions around the ability were being run by fear instead of information.

That’s the part scarcity thinking hides the best. It disguises itself as instinct. It feels like you’re being careful, being smart, and protecting yourself from risk. But real risk management means actually looking at the numbers, the market, the real cost of things, and deciding from there. Scarcity thinking means avoiding the numbers completely and deciding from whatever feels safest in the moment. Those are not the same process, even if they can look similar on the outside, like frugality or caution.

There’s also a timeline issue baked into all of this. A scarcity mindset wants proof right now. It wants the return before the investment’s had time to compound, before the marketing’s had time to reach people who need to see it more than once, before the pricing’s had time to attract the kind of customer who doesn’t flinch at the number. Almost nothing in business runs on that timeline. The businesses that make it are usually the ones willing to operate at a loss, or close to one, longer than feels comfortable, because they did the math and know what the numbers need to look like eventually, even if they don’t look like that yet.

The Final Word

The businesses that last are usually the ones where somebody sat down first, figured out the real cost of running it, priced accordingly, and accepted that the first several months might look like investment more than income.

That means knowing your numbers even when the number is ugly. It means pricing off what the work actually costs you, not off how a customer’s face looks when they hear it, and not off what you personally would pay out your own pocket. It means understanding that visibility isn’t the same as demand and that people need repeated exposure and trust before they actually hand over money, especially for anything experiential or personal like a reading or a workshop. It means accepting that month one is rarely the real test of whether a business works. Month twelve is closer to it, and even that might be early.

It also means being willing to spend money on the business before the business has proven itself, because almost nothing gets proven without that spend happening first.

Starting a business with a scarcity mindset doesn’t just put the business at risk. It reproduces the exact conditions that made money feel unsafe in the first place, just with higher stakes and your name on the lease now. The dream was never the problem. It’s the shortcut around the boring, uncomfortable groundwork that quietly guarantees the dream won’t hold.