27 Small Business Memes for People Who Answered 47 Emails Today and Also Fixed the Printer

There's no department for this. There's just you, 47 emails, and a printer that picked the wrong day.

Small business owners don't clock out. They just move from one kind of problem to a slightly different kind of problem until it's too late to start anything new, and then check their emails one more time just in case.

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via collective
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via esty.memes
Running a small business is not one job. It was never one job. It was always the creative vision job and the accounting job and the customer service job and the social media job and the packaging job and the "why is the website doing that" job and the "I need to figure out what a W-9 is right now" job, all running simultaneously on different tabs in a brain that also needs to remember to eat lunch at some point.
The small business owner doesn't have a department for things. They are the department. Every department. The org chart is one circle with their name in it and somewhere below that, in very small text, "everything else." When the printer breaks, they fix the printer. When the invoice doesn't go through, they figure out why the invoice didn't go through. When a customer sends a message at 9pm on a Sunday with a question that requires a real answer, they are the person who writes that answer, because there is no one else and also because they genuinely care, which is both the best and most exhausting thing about them.
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via lulu_ssweets
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via popcreativedesigns
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via itsisobelperl
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via fullofshadee
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via luxebeautyandbodyco
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via dcollective
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via remotelama
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via adcavepk
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via craftsbycass.co
The emails are their own category of experience. Not just the volume, though the volume is real, and 47 is not an exaggeration, and some of them require actual thought and some of them are from the same person who emailed three hours ago, but the range. One email is a wholesale inquiry. The next is a shipping complaint. The one after that is a collaboration pitch from someone with 200 followers. Then a vendor invoice. Then something from the government that requires reading three times to understand. All before noon. All requiring a different version of the same person.
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via entrepreneur
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via yellowmelons_
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via qshop.tec
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via _accessoriesbymishi_
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via rushbrookstudio
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via 49north.digital
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via studioamaaan
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via known.product
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via pauzretreats
And yet. Somehow, between the emails and the printer and the four different platforms that all need content today and the order that needs to go out by 3pm, something gets made. Something real, something theirs, something that exists because they decided to build it and then kept showing up every day to make sure it stayed built.
That's the thing nobody puts on the meme. The chaos is real and the exhaustion is real and the printer situation is genuinely unacceptable. But so is the fact that they built something from nothing and are still here, answering email 48, fixing whatever broke next, and somehow not done yet.
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via jakeagnew_
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via coach_l.b.a
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via handmadelovebyggairang
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via connessouk
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via _accessoriesbymishi_
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via remotelama and entrepreneur_memes
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via stephgorton__