Cracker Barrel’s Julie Masino didn’t step down for making changes. Masino stepped down, in effect, because of how she found out what to change.

Masino came in, modernized a beloved brand, customers revolted, President Trump weighed in, she reversed course, and now she’s gone anyway even after steering a real turnaround. The moral is simple: don’t touch what customers love. Change is dangerous. Keep the status quo.

That moral is wrong, and it’s about to cost many companies a lot of money.

I’ve spent two decades watching executives use “we did the research” as a substitute for actually understanding their customers. Masino pointed to customer research when she rolled out the new look, and the backlash happened anyway. But the takeaway of “change bad, nostalgia good” misses the actual failure. The failure wasn’t the decision to evolve a stale brand, but mistaking data for understanding.

Those are not the same thing. I wrote an entire book on the difference, because I kept watching smart leaders get burned by it.

Customers will answer your question, but they won’t tell you the truth

In 1999, Sony ran a focus group for a yellow Sport Walkman. Participants loved it. “So sporty,” they said. Sony thanked them and let each person take a free unit home: black or yellow, their choice. Every single person took the black one.

That’s how people work. What someone says in a survey and what they do at the moment of truth are two different data sets, generated by two different parts of the brain. Neuroscience research on decision-making suggests roughly 80 to 90% of it runs on emotion, not logic. Ask a customer what they think of a new logo, and you’ll get a rational-sounding answer. But the reaction that actually drives their behavior — loyalty, defection, an angry post shared four thousand times — is running on something else entirely: identity, nostalgia, a sense that something theirs was taken without asking.

Cracker Barrel’s customers weren’t reacting to a font. They were reacting to a feeling that nobody bothered to ask them how they’d feel. That’s a translation failure, not a strategy failure. And it’s the same failure that’s sunk a hundred rebrands nobody remembers, because the companies were smaller and the backlash never made a headline. The mechanism is identical. Cracker Barrel just had the misfortune of doing it in public, at scale, with a political spotlight attached.

“We did customer research” is not a finding, it’s an alibi

Most customer research is built to produce certainty, not insight. You ask a clean question, you get a clean answer, you write a report, and you move forward feeling protected. If it goes wrong later, you can point back to the “data.” But clean answers to shallow questions don’t predict behavior — they just make leadership comfortable pulling the trigger.

The real work is qualitative, messy, and uncomfortable. It’s understanding not just what customers say but the emotional terrain underneath it, what they’re afraid of losing, what identity they’ve attached to your brand, what unstated expectation you’re about to violate. That kind of understanding doesn’t come from a survey question with five tidy response options. It comes from digging past the first answer to the second and third questions nobody thought to ask.

Most organizations stop at the first answer because the first answer is fast, quantifiable and defensible in a board meeting. The second and third questions are slower, harder to summarize in a slide, and occasionally tell leadership something it doesn’t want to hear. That’s exactly why they get skipped. And that’s exactly why the surprises keep happening.

Jo-Ellen Pozner, the Santa Clara management professor who’s been vocal about the Cracker Barrel case, is right that the environment matters. A shaky economy makes any brand’s core audience more protective, not less. But protective customers aren’t asking companies to freeze. They’re asking to be brought along. Those are opposite instructions, and only one of them requires you to actually understand your customer instead of just surveying them.

The lesson boards need, and the one they’re about to learn instead

Leaders need to take a hard look at whether “customer research” in your organization means real translation of customer psychology, or just a compliance step before a decision that’s already been made. But that’s not going to happen. Boards will instead flag every future rebrand, logo tweak, or product evolution as too risky and strategic drift will calcify for another year because nobody wants to be the next Cracker Barrel headline. But change was never the threat. A shallow understanding dressed up as due diligence was.

The irony is that freezing is its own decision, and it carries its own research failure. A board that won’t touch the brand because it’s afraid of the emotional terrain still hasn’t mapped that terrain. It’s just betting that nothing changes in the meantime. That’s not caution. That’s the same alibi, worn a different way.

So don’t ask your team, “Did customers like it?” Ask them what your customers were actually afraid of, and whether anyone bothered to find out before the launch. If nobody can answer that with more than a survey score, you don’t have customer research. You have an alibi for when things go south.

Cracker Barrel’s Julie Masino didn’t step down for making changes. Masino stepped down, in effect, because of how she found out what to change.

Masino came in, modernized a beloved brand, customers revolted, President Trump weighed in, she reversed course, and now she’s gone anyway even after steering a real turnaround. The moral is simple: don’t touch what customers love. Change is dangerous. Keep the status quo.

That moral is wrong, and it’s about to cost many companies a lot of money.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Wall Street analysts listening in to Bank of America’s quarterly results last month may have been scrambling for a dictionary. 

The confusion was intentional. The CEO of the second-largest U.S. bank, Brian Moynihan, deliberately sprinkles obscure, archaic words into his prepared statements on these calls, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. 

Moynihan regularly uses words like “gainsay,” “concomitant” and “fantods” as part of a secret game he plays on analyst calls, people familiar with the matter told the Journal. The game is so secretive that only a few employees within Bank of America are in on it. 

These employees note that someone chooses random words at the last minute for Moynihan to use in his prepared statements. For example, Moynihan has used “gainsay,” or labeling something as untrue or invalid, more than once. In one earnings call, he said adviser productivity was strong, along with accompanying or “concomitant” growth in fee-based assets. In another call, he said he didn’t “get fantods,” or wasn’t nervous. 

“There is no question, Brian loves a good challenge and always makes us think,” a Bank of America spokesperson told the Journal. “Or what might be called ludically noetic.” According to Merriam-Webster, “ludic” means playful while “noetic” means relating to or based on the intellect.

How he does it

Typically, Moynihan adds at least one advanced word per earnings call, although at times he includes multiple archaic words in one sentence. Bank of America staff members listening in on the calls try to pinpoint the word that Moynihan added, and sometimes it is easy to find.

For example, Moynihan added “perspicacious,” meaning “smart, sharp and quick to notice or understand things that are hidden,” to a sentence during an analyst call in 2022. “A perspicacious analyst might wonder whether talk of inflation, recession and other factors would fructify in a slower spending growth,” he said at the time.

Moynihan’s penchant for advanced vocabulary can sometimes lead to confusion. During a July call with analysts, Moynihan labeled the Iran war as “anfractuous,” which means winding, complex or tortuous. 

The unusual vocabulary created a transcription mess. FactSet recorded the word as “infructuous,” meaning unproductive, while Bloomberg’s transcription service captured it as “intractable,” or difficult to manage. 

S&P Global Market Intelligence transcribed the remark as: “the Iran war is in [fractures].”

One listener, Wells Fargo analyst Mike Mayo, labeled Moynihan’s vocabulary an “intellectual flex” and said he preferred to keep things simple. Mayo said Moynihan was the “anti-Jamie Dimon.” When the JPMorgan Chase CEO speaks, “everybody understands,” he added. 

Moynihan’s journey

According to the Journal, Moynihan studied history at Brown University, where he also co-captained the rugby team. He graduated in 1981, then got his JD from the University of Notre Dame Law School in 1984. Members of his team describe him as intelligent, having a photographic memory and constantly working, per the Journal.  

He joined Bank of America in 2004 following the company’s merger with FleetBoston Financial and stepped into the top job in 2010.

Bank of America had a market capitalization of $443 billion at the time of writing. 

Wall Street analysts listening in to Bank of America’s quarterly results last month may have been scrambling for a dictionary. 

The confusion was intentional. The CEO of the second-largest U.S. bank, Brian Moynihan, deliberately sprinkles obscure, archaic words into his prepared statements on these calls, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. 

Moynihan regularly uses words like “gainsay,” “concomitant” and “fantods” as part of a secret game he plays on analyst calls, people familiar with the matter told the Journal. The game is so secretive that only a few employees within Bank of America are in on it. 

I have used an LLC formation service myself. It organized an unfamiliar process, clarified the required steps and helped turn a business idea into a registered legal entity.

The service did what it was designed to do. It made formation easier.

But once the LLC existed, the difficult questions remained. How should limited capital be used? Which expenses could be reduced without weakening the business? When should work be delegated? How could revenue become sustainable profit? Which processes needed to become repeatable before growth created disorder?

The administrative beginning had become easier. Building the company had not.

Interest in starting businesses remains strong. The U.S. Census Bureau recorded 531,423 seasonally adjusted business applications in June 2026, an increase of 1.1% from May. The figure shows that a substantial number of Americans continue to take formal steps toward creating new ventures.

That activity creates a natural market for formation support. More prospective owners entering the process means more people confronting entity registration, tax identification, state filings and continuing compliance obligations.

Texas illustrates the scale of that opportunity. The state has 3.52 million small businesses, second only to California’s 4.34 million, making it one of the country’s largest potential markets for LLC services in Texas.

Volume is only part of the explanation. Texas founders forming an LLC must navigate requirements across state and federal agencies, including Secretary of State filings, registered-agent rules, federal tax identification and continuing state reporting obligations. That administrative burden helps explain the demand for services that simplify formation and compliance.

The logic is straightforward. More people are taking steps toward business ownership, large states such as Texas contain significant potential markets, and the formation process remains complex enough for outside support to be useful.

But these conditions say more about access to entrepreneurship than the difficulty of succeeding at it.

Registration has a defined result. The filing is accepted and the entity becomes active. Operating the resulting company has no comparable endpoint. Each completed task introduces another decision involving customers, money, people or capacity.

Making the entry point easier does not remove the challenges waiting beyond it.

Registration solves a defined problem, not the hardest one

The difference between forming and operating a business becomes clearer once the owner moves beyond administrative work.

The Federal Reserve Banks’ 2026 Report on Employer Firms found that reaching customers and growing sales was the most common operational challenge among small employer firms. Hiring or retaining qualified staff followed, while increased costs were the leading financial challenge.

These challenges cannot be solved through registration.

A formation service can help establish the entity, but it cannot create demand for what the company sells. It cannot determine whether prices protect margins, whether another employee is affordable or whether a marketing campaign will attract customers at a sustainable cost.

Financing pressure makes those decisions harder. 60% of firms in the Federal Reserve survey sought financing during the previous year. Among applicants, 56% sought funds to meet operating expenses.

This is where the nature of the work changes. Formation is largely procedural. Operating a company requires judgment under uncertainty.

Money allocated to customer acquisition cannot simultaneously fund product development. Hiring may create capacity but reduce the company’s financial cushion. Faster growth may increase revenue while also raising labor, support and delivery costs.

The correct decision depends on margins, demand, timing and the business’s ability to recover when an assumption proves wrong.

Costs, people and systems determine what happens next

Cost control is not simply a matter of spending less. Owners must determine which expenses create long-term capacity and which merely create activity.

Cutting too aggressively can weaken the product, slow delivery or damage the customer experience. Growing revenue can also conceal weak economics when every additional sale brings disproportionate labor, support or overhead.

Revenue shows that customers are buying. Profit shows whether the model can sustain the work required to serve them.

People introduce a different kind of complexity.

A founder who begins alone may eventually depend on employees, contractors, partners and suppliers. Work must be delegated without losing accountability. Expectations must be communicated before problems become urgent. Decisions that once existed only in the founder’s head must become understandable to other people.

That transition is difficult because delegation requires more than assigning tasks. It requires clear standards, useful feedback and enough trust for others to act without constant supervision.

Systems become important for the same reason.

During the earliest stage, the founder may personally remember every customer request, deadline, payment and delivery step. That approach can work while the volume remains low.

It becomes fragile as activity increases.

Processes held in one person’s memory can turn into missed follow-ups, inconsistent service and delayed decisions. The founder may then become both the company’s most valuable worker and its largest bottleneck.

Formation tools can reduce repetitive administrative work. They cannot decide how a company should price, sell, hire, communicate or consistently deliver what customers were promised.

The value of easier formation is the attention it preserves

Recognizing these limits does not reduce the value of formation services.

Administrative work consumes time and attention. Simplifying filings and compliance allows founders to direct more of both toward customers, finances, people and operations.

That is the real benefit.

The mistake is treating administrative completion as evidence that the business itself is ready. A newly approved LLC has a legal identity, but it may not yet have stable demand, healthy margins, reliable processes or enough capital to withstand a difficult period.

Those capabilities develop through testing, correction and repeated decisions.

Formation is therefore best understood as infrastructure. Good infrastructure reduces avoidable friction, but it does not replace the work built on top of it.

Easier LLC formation is meaningful progress because it creates a clearer starting point. The hard part begins when the founder must turn that legal entity into a functioning company.

The filing creates the entity. Execution creates the business.

I have used an LLC formation service myself. It organized an unfamiliar process, clarified the required steps and helped turn a business idea into a registered legal entity.

The service did what it was designed to do. It made formation easier.

But once the LLC existed, the difficult questions remained. How should limited capital be used? Which expenses could be reduced without weakening the business? When should work be delegated? How could revenue become sustainable profit? Which processes needed to become repeatable before growth created disorder?

As I write this, both the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average are up over 12% since the beginning of the year and more than 20% over the past 12 months.  It’s boom times in the markets.  But make no mistake: sooner or later, there is going to be another significant stock market contraction. History guarantees that much. What history doesn’t tell us is when.

Over the past 50 years, the S&P 500 has fallen more than 10% on 25 separate occasions and more than 20% six times. People overbuy, overvalue and overextend themselves. It’s just human nature.  This time will be no different.  Back in the day, there were banking, internet, real estate, junk bonds, recession, inflation, energy and war crisis which caused stock market contractions.  Today, there are many of the same factors, with the addition of crypto, terror attacks, AI and data center over-investment. All, most or any of these factors will contribute to the next contraction.

No matter how much you may want to deny it, the stock market has an enormous impact on your business. Customers delay purchases, banks tighten lending standards, investors become more cautious, employees get nervous about their 401(k)s, owners see their personal net worth decline, vendors become more aggressive about collections, hiring gets postponed and capital spending is curtailed.

If you’re like most business owners, you’ve got your company, personal, retirement and college fund savings invested in the markets. So do your employees. So does everyone else. When the markets drop, it causes a collapse in confidence in the economy. People feel less wealthy, and they get scared. The impact reverberates.  Economics is not a science. It’s an art. It’s psychology. It’s emotions and feelings and confidence and moods.  When there’s a blow to all or any of those factors, the impact is felt throughout.

This will happen. So, as a business owner, what should you do to protect yourself?  Here’s what I’ve learned over the past 30-plus years living through a number of stock market contractions.

For starters, pay attention to history

In 2009, during the Great Recession, the Dow fell from a high of 14,165 to 6,547.  That’s a loss of value of almost 54%. Imagine living through that. Like me, maybe you don’t have to imagine. It was ugly. But what eventually happened? The markets recovered. They always do. Now the Dow is more than eight times the value over its low recorded in 2009.   Know your history. Stay the course.

Check your greed

If you had your money in an S&P stock index fund, your $100,000 in investments from 2021 — five years ago — would now be worth about $175,000.  Even if today’s markets drop 20%, it’s still a pretty big win, don’t you think? If you’ve already made 70% over five years, giving back some of those gains in a correction doesn’t mean you’ve suddenly become poor. You’ve heard that the stock market generally outpaces all other markets over the long term. It’s true. Don’t be greedy. Be grateful.

Next, make sure your assets are diversified

I know it’s fun to speculate, but try to limit your investments in individual stocks unless they’re a relatively smaller part of your overall wealth and are mostly in companies with strong financials, well-known brands and that you regularly use and trust (For me,  it’s Microsoft, Amazon, American Airlines and Marriott). Keep the lion’s share of your stock investments in mutual funds, indexed to sectors and larger, more stable corporations. They will ultimately recover from a contraction. Also, if you’re able, spread your investments between stocks, bonds and real estate.

Take advantage of significant tax deductions

There are significant tax deductions when you lose money on a stock.  You can sell it and offset the loss against any capital gains up to $3,000 and then carry the rest forward.  In addition, you can use a tactic known as a “wash sale,” where you sell the stock and then buy it back after 30 days. You can then add that loss to the basis of the stock, thereby lowering your overall taxable gain in the future if and when the stock has regained value and you sell it. 

Get your financing in place

When markets fall, the banking industry tends to freeze up and everyone runs for cover.  They limit new loans and re-evaluate existing loans.  If you know this is going to happen in the future, then it’s best to open, secure and renew available working capital lines of credit for your business now so that they’re able to be used if you have any liquidity issues during a downturn. You may pay additional fees today, but consider it insurance for tomorrow.

Turn off the internet

CNBC will put red arrows on the screen. Websites will run photos of terrified traders. Experts who didn’t predict the crash will confidently predict what happens next. Ignore most of it. This is how we in the media earn our money — we create fear and we count the clicks.  Most of the stock market and economic coverage you’ll read will not make you happy during a downturn, so do your best to limit it.  For your mental health, turn down or turn off the noise. Go outside. Ride your bike. Walk your dog. You’ll find that the world is still there and looks exactly the same as it did before the markets fell. And it will look the same generations later.

Build your cash reserves now, so that you can buy later

If you’re able to do so now, try to accumulate some cash and put it in an interest-bearing account. Because when the market falls, all stocks will fall, even the ones of companies that have strong earnings, great brands and competent management. Those companies — as they always do — will recover and will probably exceed even their value before their stock declined. Your goal is to snap up a few shares at a discount so you can ride this recovery.

Finally, work with a wealth manager

You know your business. The stock market people know their business. Just like you rely on electricians, shippers, marketing agencies and accounting firms for their expertise, so should you be doing the same with your individual and corporate savings. Use a wealth manager and, yes, like all the others, pay their fees. It’s their job to maximize your returns. It’s also their job to console, comfort, soothe and calm you when the market falls. You’ll find their advice to be helpful, as I always do.  However, don’t just have one wealth manager: diversify with two or three. Meet with them once or twice a year and measure their results.

My best clients are always thinking ahead.  So should you and I. The markets are no different. We know darn well that there’s going to be a significant contraction; we just don’t know when. But, like so many other uncertainties that impact our business, that shouldn’t stop either of us from being prepared for this inevitable event.

As I write this, both the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average are up over 12% since the beginning of the year and more than 20% over the past 12 months.  It’s boom times in the markets.  But make no mistake: sooner or later, there is going to be another significant stock market contraction. History guarantees that much. What history doesn’t tell us is when.

Over the past 50 years, the S&P 500 has fallen more than 10% on 25 separate occasions and more than 20% six times. People overbuy, overvalue and overextend themselves. It’s just human nature.  This time will be no different.  Back in the day, there were banking, internet, real estate, junk bonds, recession, inflation, energy and war crisis which caused stock market contractions.  Today, there are many of the same factors, with the addition of crypto, terror attacks, AI and data center over-investment. All, most or any of these factors will contribute to the next contraction.

No matter how much you may want to deny it, the stock market has an enormous impact on your business. Customers delay purchases, banks tighten lending standards, investors become more cautious, employees get nervous about their 401(k)s, owners see their personal net worth decline, vendors become more aggressive about collections, hiring gets postponed and capital spending is curtailed.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Success in business is often associated with confidence. Founders are expected to make decisions quickly, project certainty and inspire others to follow their vision. Yet the longer I have spent around entrepreneurs, the more I have come to believe that their greatest competitive advantage has little to do with certainty. The business leaders who continue thriving over decades are rarely those who believe they have all the answers. They are the ones who never stop learning.

Learning looks very different once formal education ends. No curriculum tells entrepreneurs what comes next, no examination confirms they are ready, and no graduation marks the moment they know enough. Markets evolve, industries are reshaped, and new technologies continually rewrite the rules. Those changes reward people who treat learning as a lifelong discipline rather than a stage of life.

Here are five lessons that have shaped my own thinking.

1. Learn beyond your industry

Many entrepreneurs spend years becoming experts in a single field. Expertise is valuable, but breakthroughs often arrive from somewhere else.

Some of the most innovative ideas in business have emerged when leaders borrowed concepts from psychology, architecture, healthcare, behavioral economics or the arts rather than simply studying their competitors. Reading widely is not a distraction from business. It is often where the next opportunity begins.

2. Use AI to gather information, not replace judgment

Artificial intelligence has transformed the speed at which entrepreneurs can learn. Market reports can be summarized in minutes, unfamiliar concepts explained instantly and emerging trends identified long before they become mainstream.

Those capabilities should be embraced. Judgment, however, remains a human responsibility. AI can tell you what happened. Deciding why it matters, what to ignore and which risks are worth taking still depends upon experience, curiosity and values. The most effective entrepreneurs use technology to improve their thinking, not to outsource it.

3. Success can become your greatest blind spot

Early-stage founders ask questions because they have no alternative. Established entrepreneurs sometimes stop asking because previous success appears to validate existing assumptions. Markets rarely reward that mindset for long. Customer expectations change, technologies evolve, and younger competitors often see opportunities that established businesses overlook. Confidence should grow with experience. Certainty should not.

Success also changes the feedback entrepreneurs receive. As organizations grow, people become less inclined to challenge the founder’s thinking. Teams naturally seek alignment, customers become more forgiving, and public recognition can create the impression that past judgment will continue producing future results. That is precisely when leaders need to seek out disagreement deliberately.

The willingness to invite criticism, question familiar assumptions and remain intellectually uncomfortable often becomes the difference between businesses that endure for generations and those that gradually become victims of their own success.

4. Your smartest teacher may not be your mentor

Mentors remain invaluable, but entrepreneurs who learn consistently draw lessons from unexpected places. The most influential teacher in your career may not carry an impressive title or decades of executive experience. Sometimes the person closest to a problem sees it more clearly than the person furthest up the organizational chart.

A dissatisfied customer may reveal more about your business than a consultant. A graduate joining the company may understand changing consumer behavior better than senior management. Competitors, suppliers and businesses operating in completely different sectors can all become teachers if approached with genuine curiosity.

Even failures deserve closer attention. Deals that fall apart, products that underperform and partnerships that never materialize often contain insights that success quietly conceals. Entrepreneurs who develop the habit of conducting honest post-mortems frequently discover that disappointment can become one of the most valuable forms of education.

Learning depends less on where knowledge comes from than on whether we remain willing to recognize it. The entrepreneurs who continue growing are rarely the loudest people in the room. More often, they are the ones who continue listening long after everyone else believes the lesson has ended.

5. Never confuse knowledge with education

Knowledge has become increasingly accessible. Education remains something different. Knowledge answers questions. Education teaches us which questions deserve asking in the first place. Entrepreneurs who continue learning throughout their careers rarely succeed because they possess more information than everyone else. They succeed because they continue questioning assumptions, revising their thinking and remaining intellectually flexible when circumstances change.

Entrepreneurship has never been a destination reached through expertise alone. Every stage of building a business demands new perspectives, unfamiliar skills and the humility to admit that yesterday’s answers may no longer fit tomorrow’s challenges. The entrepreneurs who endure are rarely the ones who know the most. More often, they are the ones who have never lost the curiosity that first inspired them to begin.

The future may reward an entirely different kind of entrepreneur from the one we have traditionally celebrated. For generations, business admired those who projected certainty, moved decisively and appeared to have all the answers. The decades ahead may favor leaders who are intellectually adaptable enough to change their minds, curious enough to keep learning and humble enough to recognize that every technological revolution creates questions no previous generation has had to answer.

Perhaps the ultimate measure of an entrepreneur will no longer be how much they know, but how quickly they can continue learning. In a world where knowledge is becoming increasingly commoditized, curiosity may prove to be the rarest and most valuable form of capital.

Success in business is often associated with confidence. Founders are expected to make decisions quickly, project certainty and inspire others to follow their vision. Yet the longer I have spent around entrepreneurs, the more I have come to believe that their greatest competitive advantage has little to do with certainty. The business leaders who continue thriving over decades are rarely those who believe they have all the answers. They are the ones who never stop learning.

Learning looks very different once formal education ends. No curriculum tells entrepreneurs what comes next, no examination confirms they are ready, and no graduation marks the moment they know enough. Markets evolve, industries are reshaped, and new technologies continually rewrite the rules. Those changes reward people who treat learning as a lifelong discipline rather than a stage of life.

Here are five lessons that have shaped my own thinking.

I have recently been looking for new site locations for my co-warehousing business, Blue Co.  What an eye-opening experience that has been over the last couple of months, rife with ups and downs and business lessons for all. The short story is: as a startup, you only have a few opportunities to open a new location, and you have to get it right to impress your investors. 

No opportunity is perfect, and you may need to make some sacrifices. But knowing what elements are non-negotiable could be the difference between keeping your business growing and potentially “sinking the ship.” 

Allow me to explain.

What was Blue Co searching for?

Blue Co was on the hunt for 50,000 to 70,000-square-foot buildings in major metropolitan markets of the Southeast at terms its unique co-warehousing model could afford. The locations needed to be within the beltways of those major markets (e.g., under 10 miles from the city center), with nearby highway access and plenty of parking for its members. After reviewing over 200 listings and not a single signed lease to show for it, it became clear that this search would be a lot harder than expected.

What were the challenges?

There were so many decision points in picking a new location. The city, the location, the property, the surrounding neighborhood and demographics, the building type (e.g., industrial, retail, office), the floor plan, the building features (e.g., number of docks,  number of parking spots), the lease terms and the capital required, to name a few. 

On this last point about capital, there were a lot of variations, including financing the real estate, tenant improvements, lease securitization, startup costs, etc. And to make matters worse, there wasn’t a one-size-fits-all investor — some preferred real estate investing, some preferred venture investing in the operating company, and some preferred lending debt secured by needed equipment. 

Even if you found the right building, there was no guarantee it would come at terms you would be happy with or with financing partners that shared the enthusiasm for that location.

Some screening decisions were easy — decisions made by me

For our business, having enough parking was pretty important. If the property wasn’t at least 5 acres to accommodate parking for over 150 cars, it was largely a non-starter and could quickly cut those properties from the list. If we really liked the location, maybe we could find a nearby satellite parking lot, but that meant we couldn’t do one without the other, adding complexity to our search and discussions. Other simple decisions could be made quickly to ensure the property had an entrepreneur-friendly landlord, affordable rent, sufficient square footage, nearby highway access, etc. The point here is that the better you can screen these properties for the most important need, the less time you will waste.

Some screening decisions were easy — decisions made by them

Sometimes, a building would check all the right boxes for us, but we didn’t check all the right boxes for our landlord. Maybe they didn’t like our co-warehousing model in their building.  Or their lending banks didn’t like having a start-up as a tenant. Or our financials were not as “pretty” as those of other larger companies. Whatever the case may be, it is never fun to find a great building only to have it shot down by the other party. So ask those questions early in the process to ensure you do not unnecessarily spin your wheels.

Issues with the landlord

Not all landlords are created equal. Institutionally owned, big, billion-dollar buildings were typically the hardest to work with. Their requests of a tenant were pretty much the same regardless of the tenant’s business size, making it much harder for a startup to secure a building with them. But, on the other hand, even if you found an entrepreneur-friendly landlord, that doesn’t mean they will give you the best terms. As an example, we had one such landlord try to charge us 33% higher rent because they knew we didn’t have much negotiating power as a startup. Just make sure whoever you decide to work with will do so in a win-win way and have your back in good times and bad.

Investor issues

We have had a couple of situations where we found an investor for the building, but something didn’t work well for them. They liked to invest in Raleigh (not Greensboro, too far away). They like to invest in industrial buildings (not the converted big-box retail site were looking at). They won’t look at any building with rezoning risks. We had one investor say, “We’ll fund the building you like, but we are going to need to take this other, less desirable building as well,” which didn’t work for us. Or we needed to hit some operating metrics on our old buildings, before they would consider the new buildings. Fundraising is never easy, but make sure you do your due diligence on them, at the same time, they are doing their due diligence on you.

Issues with the building and lease terms

Every building brings its own set of challenges: floor configuration, ceiling height for racking, office build-out, climate control, system age, dock type, and whether the exterior matches your brand image. You need to know which of these are genuine deal killers and which you can live with.

Commercial leases have just as many variables: term, base rent, operating costs, free rent, tenant improvement dollars, and securitization demands such as guarantees, letters of credit, or deposits. All of these pieces must fit together for both parties to close. Get these terms on the table early, before you fall in love with a building, so you do not waste time chasing a deal that will never work.

One case study worth calling out: The perfect building at less than perfect terms

We found what felt like the perfect building in the perfect location with a landlord who understood our business. But once their bank stepped in, the required letter of credit was so high it effectively blocked us until we completed our fundraising, and the only way to reduce it was to cut back tenant improvements to a point where we would not have enough office space to support clients or the P&L.

We tried every angle to make it work, but signing that lease would have created an underperforming location and drained our cash cushion at the same time we were raising capital. Moving forward before the fundraise closed felt like putting the cart before the horse, so as painful as it was, we walked to avoid putting the business in a bind if things did not go according to plan

Closing thoughts

So, why did I share all these excruciating details about our site selection process? To basically say three things: (1) know what the priority levers are in any business decision to save you from spinning your wheels on a lot of unnecessary work; (2) when you do find something that could work, quickly assess it to ensure the terms and partners are to your liking; and (3) never “force it” — if your gut is telling you moving forward would be a stretch for your business, walk away to live another day, no matter how much you like it.

I have recently been looking for new site locations for my co-warehousing business, Blue Co.  What an eye-opening experience that has been over the last couple of months, rife with ups and downs and business lessons for all. The short story is: as a startup, you only have a few opportunities to open a new location, and you have to get it right to impress your investors. 

No opportunity is perfect, and you may need to make some sacrifices. But knowing what elements are non-negotiable could be the difference between keeping your business growing and potentially “sinking the ship.” 

Allow me to explain.

Higher education has spent the last decade going digital. Most universities now have application portals, CRMs, student information systems and automation tools meant to make admissions faster and smoother. On paper, everything looks modernized.

But inside admissions offices, the reality feels very different. Recent research from AACRAO’s 2025 staffing survey throws light on the growing strain within admissions offices. It raises an alarming issue of lean enrollment teams managing increasingly complex workloads, sans a corresponding increase in resources or support. The same research has also highlighted that staffing challenges and excessive workloads are becoming perennial concerns for enrollment leaders across institutions.

Teams are busier than ever. Not because applications are harder to access, but because they are harder to process. Applications are harder to process because they no longer come in a standard format. A single application can include transcripts, identity documents and academic records that all need to be interpreted and verified. 

Transcripts vary widely across countries and grading systems, so teams often need to decode formats and convert GPAs before they can even evaluate them. On top of that, information is usually scattered across different systems, which means a lot of time goes into assembling and validating data rather than reviewing applicants.

The problem is not visibility or access anymore. It is operational overload that has quietly scaled with complexity.

Admissions didn’t get simpler; it got heavier

Admissions workflows have grown substantially heavier in both scope and complexity in recent years. Transcripts come in different formats. Grading systems vary widely. Identity documents need validation. Transfer credits need to be mapped across institutions.

Every application is slightly different, and each distinction adds time.

At the same time, application volumes continue to rise, especially in international education. Studies on global enrollment patterns show a steady increase in cross-border applications, which has added both volume and complexity to admissions pipelines. Institutions are no longer processing uniform applications but highly fragmented and diverse documentation sets.

So the workload is not just complex. It is multiplying. And yet, most admissions teams are still operating within systems designed for bygone era.

Most of the work is not decision-making

A common misconception is that admissions teams spend most of their time evaluating candidates.

In reality, a large portion of their day is spent on manual processing.

That includes:

• Reading and extracting information from transcripts
• Checking and verifying identity documents
• Converting GPAs across different grading systems
• Evaluating transfer credits manually
• Responding to repetitive student queries
• Coordinating information across disconnected systems

None of this is optional. It is essential work. But it is also work that takes time away from higher-value decision-making and student engagement.

Research on administrative burden in higher education has shown that as processes become more compliance-heavy and documentation-intensive, staff spend significantly more time on coordination and validation tasks than on core evaluative responsibilities. This shift increases cognitive load and reduces the time available for meaningful admissions decisions.

The cost is not always visible, but it is real

This overload does not always show up as a clear failure point. Instead, it shows up in smaller, cumulative ways. Students often experience longer waiting times before receiving responses, which slows down the overall admission journey. Decision-making cycles have become more time-intensive, leading to delays in final outcomes. Workloads tend to become unevenly distributed during peak admission periods, creating operational pressure points.
Experienced staff end up holding a disproportionate amount of institutional and contextual knowledge. New team members often require more time to ramp up because much of the process knowledge is not systematized. And over time, teams feel it.

A 2024 research study published in Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education highlights a significant and under-recognized burnout crisis among non-academic administrative staff in universities. The study warns that sustained overwork among professional services teams risks destabilizing institutional operations.

Turnover in admissions roles also remains a concern across institutions. Many professionals stay in these roles only for a few years, which creates a recurring cycle of hiring and training that further adds to operational strain.

Burnout is not sudden. It builds gradually. Most importantly, institutions do not always recognize that this is a systems issue, not a performance issue.

Most universities are not without technology. CRMs, SIS platforms and application systems exist almost everywhere now. But digitization is not the same as simplification. In many cases, what used to happen on paper now happens on screens, but the underlying process remains unchanged.

Information is stored digitally, but still processed manually. Systems exist side by side, but do not fully work together in a unified way.

So instead of removing effort, digital transformation has often just relocated it.

The real gap is operational intelligence

What is missing is not more software. It is intelligence that connects the workflow. Operational intelligence means systems that help structure, interpret and move information in real time, instead of just storing it.

It means reducing the need for manual extraction, repeated validation and disconnected decision steps. And it means shifting from a world of batch processing to one where information flows through a connected system.

What changes when this problem is solved

When admissions operations become more intelligent, the entire nature of the work begins to shift in a meaningful way. Instead of spending the majority of their time manually processing documents, extracting information and reconciling data across systems, teams are able to focus more on higher-order responsibilities such as evaluating exceptions, applying institutional judgment and engaging directly with students in a more meaningful and responsive way.

Instead of constantly chasing missing or fragmented information across emails, portals and disconnected systems, staff can work with structured and readily available data that is already organized, validated and easy to act on. 

This reduces the friction in everyday workflows and allows decisions to move forward without unnecessary delays caused by manual coordination.

Instead of reacting to backlogs that accumulate during peak admission cycles, teams are able to manage a continuous flow of applications in real time, where information is processed and surfaced as it arrives rather than being handled in large, delayed batches. This creates a more stable and predictable operational rhythm across the admissions cycle.

The role of admissions teams does not diminish in this model. It evolves. Work becomes less about repetitive execution and more about meaningful decision-making, student support and institutional impact, making the function not only more efficient but also more strategically valuable within the university ecosystem.

Why this matters now

Higher education is becoming more competitive, more global and more time-sensitive. Students expect faster responses. Institutions are competing across borders. Application complexity is not going down anytime soon.

In this environment, operational delays are no longer just inefficiencies. They directly affect enrollment outcomes. Speed, consistency and clarity are becoming part of institutional competitiveness.

Closing thought

Admissions teams are struggling because the system around them has quietly become heavier than it was designed to handle. And the longer that reality is treated as normal, the harder it becomes to change.

The encouraging shift now is that institutions are beginning to rethink not just the tools they use, but the structure of the workflows themselves. AI-powered systems and operational redesign are helping streamline repetitive tasks, connect fragmented data sources and reduce the manual effort required at each step of the admissions process.

As these changes take hold, enrollment workflows become faster, more transparent and more predictable. Teams are able to move away from constant firefighting and instead operate within a more structured, real-time flow of information. This creates space for better decision-making, stronger student engagement and a more sustainable working environment for admissions professionals.

The direction of change is already clear. With the right combination of AI and thoughtful process restructuring, admissions operations can shift from being overloaded and reactive to becoming streamlined, responsive and far more effective in supporting both institutions and students.

Higher education has spent the last decade going digital. Most universities now have application portals, CRMs, student information systems and automation tools meant to make admissions faster and smoother. On paper, everything looks modernized.

But inside admissions offices, the reality feels very different. Recent research from AACRAO’s 2025 staffing survey throws light on the growing strain within admissions offices. It raises an alarming issue of lean enrollment teams managing increasingly complex workloads, sans a corresponding increase in resources or support. The same research has also highlighted that staffing challenges and excessive workloads are becoming perennial concerns for enrollment leaders across institutions.

Teams are busier than ever. Not because applications are harder to access, but because they are harder to process. Applications are harder to process because they no longer come in a standard format. A single application can include transcripts, identity documents and academic records that all need to be interpreted and verified. 

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.