The most seductive mistake in starting a business is the one that feels productive. Not the obvious mistake. Not the one you’ll recognize in the moment. The one where you’re moving fast, checking boxes, showing up, and doing exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time.
I want to tell you about a year I spent doing that, and the pattern I’ve watched other people repeat since.
The Office That Wasn’t the Point
Years ago I was working on a new venture inside our company, called NuWire. And I was completely convinced we needed a separate office.
Not just convinced. Passionate. I’d read a book about Lockheed’s Skunk Works and decided I’d found the playbook. If NuWire stayed under the same roof as the existing business, I was sure it would get crushed by the inertia of the core company. A separate space, a little distance, room for the team to breathe, innovate, and grow on its own terms.
I spent weeks lining it up. Finding the space, negotiating the deal, thinking through the floor plan. It felt like progress. It felt like exactly what a founder should be doing.
The business never fully got off the ground.
The office wasn’t the reason. I was busy with the wrong thing.
The Pattern I Watch Other People Repeat
Since then, I’ve had a front-row seat to tens of thousands of people becoming business owners through our work at Guidant. And I still watch people do the exact thing I did.
They pour their energy, and their money, into the parts of starting a business that feel productive and are completely within their control. The office. The logo. The equipment. The values document. The entity filing.
Entity filing is where I see it most. People will spend weeks on this. They’ve heard that if they file in Wyoming or Delaware they won’t pay taxes and their name will stay off the records. So they research it, they agonize, they treat it like one of the most consequential decisions they’ll make.
Mostly, that isn’t how it works. Your taxes follow where you actually do business, not where you file the paperwork. If you’re operating in your home state, you generally owe taxes there no matter what state you originally filed in. On top of which, you have to register in the state where you actually operate. And that state probably doesn’t play by the same rules as Wyoming or Delaware.
The decision isn’t nothing. For some businesses, it matters. But for most people it’s a few hundred dollars and an afternoon, and they turn it into a project that eats weeks they could have spent finding out if anyone wants to buy what they’re selling.
Why We Do This
So why do we do this? Why did I do this?
Because the performative work is satisfying in a way the hard work isn’t.
The office, the logo, the equipment, the entity filing, the values document. These things are visible. They’re controllable. You can finish them. There’s no external factor that gets in the way.
When your friends and family ask how the business is going, you have something to show them that looks like a business.
The problem is that isn’t the work that usually determines whether the business will succeed.
Figuring out whether a stranger will hand you money for what you’ve built is uncertain, uncomfortable, and slow. Nobody claps for you while you’re doing it. There’s no afternoon where you finish and check the box.
So we drift toward the busywork. It isn’t laziness. Busywork feels like progress, and the hard part feels like exposure.
The Way NuWire Ended
We got that skunkworks office. I fought for it, and we got it. We had it for about a year. Then we downsized the project and moved it back into our existing office space, the very thing I’d been so determined to escape.
A couple of years later we sold the business for less than half of what we’d put into it.
The decision I’d been most passionate about turned out to be the one that mattered least.
The Question I Ask Now
When I start something now, I ask myself one question before anything else.
What are the one or two things that will actually determine whether this business works?
It points me toward where the business needs me, instead of where I already feel sure of my footing. It’s the opposite of the office question. It’s the question that leaves me a little uncomfortable, because I usually don’t know the answer yet.
For NuWire, the answer was never the office. It was a question I didn’t want to think about, because I didn’t have the answer to it yet.
Who is our customer? And why are they going to buy from us?
Those two questions would have determined everything. And I ducked them for months while I was picking out floor plans.
One Last Thing
When you’re excited about starting something new, what’s the piece of the work you find yourself gravitating toward first? And is that where the business most needs your attention?
