My grandpa Harry and grandma Letizia emigrated from Italy in the early 1900s. Grandpa Harry was a stonemason who spoke his own brand of broken English and loved to tell stories. Nobody laughed harder at his tales than he did.

Here was one of his absolute favorites:

Two Italian laborers, Tony and Louie, sit down on a curb for lunch. Tony opens a delicious homemade meatball hero on crusty bread. Louie opens a pathetic-looking peanut butter sandwich on white bread and groans, "Ahhh, itsa peanut butter. Ima hata peanut butter sand-a-weech."

The next day, Tony opens up a sausage-and-egg roll. Louie opens his lunch and exclaims, "Mama mia, itsa peanut butter again! Ima hata peanut butter!"

This goes on day after day until Tony finally asks, "Hey Louie, why don't you aska you wife to maka summa-ting nice-a?"

Louie looks at him and says, "Meh, I maka my owna sand-a-weech."

Grandpa's story carries two non-negotiable truths for every entrepreneur in the trenches:

You get to make your own sandwich. You have complete authority over your culture, who you hire, who you work with, and how you spend your day.

Because of Truth #1, you have zero right to bitch about your sandwich.

Tolerating Bad Ingredients

In our early days scaling Canvas On Demand, we made classic sandwich-making mistakes. Every time we tolerated a "bad actor" or toxic personality on our team just because they had specialized skills or specific operational knowledge, we were choosing bad ingredients.

We avoided frank, honest conversations because we were afraid they would quit. We let the negative energy drag down our entire culture because the pain of losing their skill felt scarier than the daily headache they caused.

It wasn't until the pain of the problem far exceeded the pain of fixing it that we finally sucked it up and made a change. And every single time we cleared out the drama, Tom and I would shake our heads and ask ourselves: Why did we keep eating that same terrible sandwich when we were the ones in the kitchen?

Stop Whining and Fix the Recipe

When Canvas On Demand wasn't growing the way we wanted, we scheduled coffee with a successful friend, Dr. Al Childers. We laid out our issues in what turned out to be a complete whine-a-thon about market conditions and operational stress.

Al listened patiently, looked us in the eye, and said:

"Gentlemen, you need to decide that you want to grow your business and that you want it to be profitable. Put your energy into fixing the problems. You are wishing for solutions to happen. Instead, you need to make them happen."

That was an embarrassing slap in the face. We had built an environment we didn't like and were complaining about it instead of fixing it.

As founders, we chose to step out of comfortable corporate jobs to become entrepreneurs. If you're constantly complaining about grueling 80-hour weeks, toxic clients, or drama in your office, step back and look in the mirror. You picked the ingredients.

(Bonus Tip: Don't complain to your spouse about this stuff either. They didn't start the business — you did. Make little index cards they can hand you when you start complaining that read: "You chose this business. Please stop bitching to me about it.")

Audit Your Sandwich: 5 Questions to Ask Yourself Today

If you want to evaluate whether you're eating a sandwich you actually like, answer these questions with brutal honesty:

1. Do you avoid having frank conversations with specific people on your team?

2. Do you cringe when you listen to conversations taking place in your office or Slack channels?

3. Do you ask your best, highest-performing employees to bend their behavior to accommodate a bad actor?

4. Do you stay in your office or avoid calls to dodge interactions with certain clients or staff?

5. Are you wishing for solutions to happen instead of taking action to make them happen?

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The EntreManure bottom line: assess what you can't stand about your business environment and fix it. You're the one making the sandwich — make sure it's something you actually want to eat. #stopwhining