As a business owner, it’s natural to look for ways to save money. So, when business owners look at appointing a registered agent, they think they can assign the role to anyone — a spouse, a sibling, a friend or even themselves. On paper, that may seem practical, but what most businesses don’t realize is that it carries unnecessary legal, financial and operational risk. 

I see the fallout of bad registered agent assignments up close in my line of work. 

In Florida, missing an annual report deadline can trigger a $400 late fee, and repeated failure to maintain accurate company information can cause the government to actually shut down your business. In California, there is a $250 penalty for missing company information, and many other states have similar fines, which can cause huge headaches and, if not dealt with, can lead to dissolution. 

This is a big reason why business compliance firms like mine exist. Businesses that have been hurt by compliance violations don’t want to make the same mistake twice, so they choose to assign a formal, accountable party to serve as their registered agent. 

What is a registered agent?

A registered agent is an individual or professional service assigned to receive legal documents, tax forms and government information on behalf of the business organization. A registered agent is required for most LLCs, corporations and other formal business entities. Effectively, the registered agent serves as the official point of contact between your business and the authorities, ensuring nothing important is missed. While at times this may seem like a glorified courier service, it’s actually a critical role within your business infrastructure.

For example: 

• If you receive a deadline-sensitive notice, the registered agent helps make sure it reaches the right person quickly.
• If you miss an annual report deadline, the registered agent receives state reminders or delinquency notices, allowing you to act before late fees, penalties or dissolution occur.
• If your business falls out of good standing, the registered agent receives warnings from the state so you can correct the issue before suspension or your business is forced to close.
• If you move offices, the registered agent provides a stable address so that official notices are not sent to an old business location.
• If your business gets sued, the registered agent receives the lawsuit, summons or subpoena and forwards it quickly so you have time to respond.

Whoever you choose needs strong communication and organizational skills. If a registered agent misses an important notice or forgets to deliver it, the business can face severe compliance issues and even legal consequences.

Myths about registered agents

A registered agent does not need to be a lawyer, accountant or other licensed professional. While some attorneys or accounting firms may offer registered agent services, the registered agent role itself is separate from legal or accounting work and should not be treated as an add-on service. It is a completely separate role. Drawing that distinction can help establish a clear system for handling these important documents. 

Another common misconception is that naming someone as your registered agent makes them an officer of the business. It does not. They do not control your company, have the power to sign documents on your behalf or make decisions. 

Lastly, some business owners assume that hiring a registered agent means their company is fully covered from a compliance standpoint. In reality, a registered agent does not take over all of your business obligations. You are still responsible for filing annual reports, paying required fees, maintaining tax compliance and keeping your company information up to date with the state. A registered agent can, of course, help support the process by receiving notices and, in some cases, reminding you about important deadlines, but they are a point of contact, not a replacement for proper business compliance management.

Who should be my registered agent?

You should carefully choose a registered agent who can reliably support your business’s compliance, privacy and communication needs. Having someone you know and trust might seem like a good idea, but friends or family members aren’t always available and don’t always treat the role with the respect or professionalism it deserves. They might just see it as a favor. 

Likewise, being your own registered agent might seem like a cost-effective way to make your money go further — and who will care more for your business? But there are some drawbacks. Namely, you need to be the one reacting to the documents, and you are hamstrung by your physical office when you should be focused on other aspects of your business.

Why choosing the right registered agent matters

A registered agent does more than help your business stay compliant. They help create the legal and administrative infrastructure your company needs to operate with stability. Every strong business has systems. A registered agent is part of the system that ensures official documents, legal notices, tax correspondence and state communications reach the right person at the right time.

The right registered agent serves as a reliable point of contact for your company. Instead of having important notices received by whoever happens to be home, available or checking the mail, the business that uses a professional registered agent has a formal channel for receiving critical information. That channel helps separate casual communication from official communication.

A professional registered agent also supports better internal accountability. When an official document arrives, there should be a clear process: receive it, record it, notify the business owner and make sure the right person takes action. That process becomes especially important as the business grows and more people become involved in operations, accounting, legal matters or administration.

Choosing a registered agent might seem like a small decision compared with hiring employees, winning customers, managing cash flow or developing a growth strategy, but small infrastructure decisions shape how well a company handles pressure and ensure that your business organization continues to run smoothly.

As a business owner, it’s natural to look for ways to save money. So, when business owners look at appointing a registered agent, they think they can assign the role to anyone — a spouse, a sibling, a friend or even themselves. On paper, that may seem practical, but what most businesses don’t realize is that it carries unnecessary legal, financial and operational risk. 

I see the fallout of bad registered agent assignments up close in my line of work. 

In Florida, missing an annual report deadline can trigger a $400 late fee, and repeated failure to maintain accurate company information can cause the government to actually shut down your business. In California, there is a $250 penalty for missing company information, and many other states have similar fines, which can cause huge headaches and, if not dealt with, can lead to dissolution. 

Bars are getting flatter. Vodka waters are replacing vodka seltzers, tequila and soda is now tequila and water. It turns out Gen Z is fussy about the fizz in their drinks.

Non-carbonated drinks made up 38% of new product launches in the $22 billion premixed drink market last year, up from 27% in 2021, according to Bloomberg. “Because there’s no bubbles, you don’t feel so full,” says Emily Aprigliano, a 26-year-old New Yorker who switched to canned cocktails after trying non-bubbly Surfside on a beach trip. “You can’t even taste the alcohol, so they just kind of go back easier.”

Surfside, made by Philadelphia-based Stateside Brands, is now one of the fastest-growing alcohol brands in the US, built around the trademarked slogan “No Bubbles, No Troubles.” Boston Beer followed two years later with Sun Cruiser, which is now propping up sales as its Truly seltzer brand slows down.

Smaller startups saw the shift coming even earlier. Jill Morrison started sipping spa water with a splash of vodka on a Dominican Republic vacation, then launched Mom Water with her husband in southern Indiana in 2021. “The competitive landscape is tenfold what it was five years ago,” says co-founder Bryce Morrison. The brand is on track to top 1 million cases this year.

Even hard seltzer giant Gallo is adapting. The company launched Lucky One Lemonade with Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, which sold 1 million cases in its first seven months, a sign the Millennial-era hard seltzer boom is waning.

Bars are getting flatter. Vodka waters are replacing vodka seltzers, tequila and soda is now tequila and water. It turns out Gen Z is fussy about the fizz in their drinks.

Non-carbonated drinks made up 38% of new product launches in the $22 billion premixed drink market last year, up from 27% in 2021, according to Bloomberg. “Because there’s no bubbles, you don’t feel so full,” says Emily Aprigliano, a 26-year-old New Yorker who switched to canned cocktails after trying non-bubbly Surfside on a beach trip. “You can’t even taste the alcohol, so they just kind of go back easier.”

Surfside, made by Philadelphia-based Stateside Brands, is now one of the fastest-growing alcohol brands in the US, built around the trademarked slogan “No Bubbles, No Troubles.” Boston Beer followed two years later with Sun Cruiser, which is now propping up sales as its Truly seltzer brand slows down.

Smaller startups saw the shift coming even earlier. Jill Morrison started sipping spa water with a splash of vodka on a Dominican Republic vacation, then launched Mom Water with her husband in southern Indiana in 2021. “The competitive landscape is tenfold what it was five years ago,” says co-founder Bryce Morrison. The brand is on track to top 1 million cases this year.

Even hard seltzer giant Gallo is adapting. The company launched Lucky One Lemonade with Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, which sold 1 million cases in its first seven months, a sign the Millennial-era hard seltzer boom is waning.

If you look at where enterprise AI dollars are flowing, the disparity is stark. Software engineering teams are adopting autonomous agents almost overnight, while revenue operations — sales, marketing and go-to-market (GTM) — are barely scratching the surface.

As a CEO who spends time coding in Claude, building in Cursor and prototyping in Vercel, I understand why developers have embraced these tools so quickly: they’re incredible. Yet, when I talk to other executives about the relative quiet across their sales organizations, I find they usually draw the wrong conclusion.

They assume large language models (LLMs) simply aren’t mature enough to handle complex commercial motions. But that diagnosis misses the real bottleneck. The reason coding agents thrive while GTM agents struggle isn’t an intelligence problem. It’s a context problem. 

The context trap: Codebases vs. commercial reality

In order to understand the gap, you have to look at the environments these two agents live in. A coding agent runs over a codebase. That codebase is self-contained, machine-readable and fully accessible inside a single repository. Every piece of context the model needs to write the next line of code exists right in front of it. The agent doesn’t need to consult external systems or guess what a third party thinks about its architecture.

A go-to-market agent, by contrast, faces a fragmented reality. Building an actionable account plan requires synthesizing past conversation histories, buyer profiles, executive tenure, funding rounds, technology stacks, earnings signals and open job postings.

Even if an enterprise centralizes its internal data across calls, emails and CRM records, that first-party view represents only a fraction of the necessary picture. For decades, companies assumed they were capturing account context by forcing sellers to log details into CRM fields. But reps rarely log complete information, and whatever does get entered is filtered through what revenue leaders call “happy ears” — the natural tendency of salespeople to interpret prospect interactions far more favorably than reality warrants.

More importantly, critical external signals like funding events, executive turnover and tech stack changes sit entirely outside internal systems. Without that external intelligence, an autonomous agent is operating blind.

The fragmentation and identity resolution nightmare

Solving that context gap isn’t as simple as plugging external data streams into your CRM. You first have to confront a messier internal reality: Revenue data inside most enterprises is notoriously chaotic. CRMs are routinely crippled by duplicate entries, inconsistent records and messy naming conventions. A single enterprise customer might appear as “Cisco” in a CRM, “Cisco WebEx” in call transcriptions and “AppDynamics” inside an outreach platform.

If an AI agent attempts to reason across this disconnected dataset without an identity resolution framework, it inevitably draws flawed conclusions. It might pull conversation notes from one entity, apply financial metrics from another and deliver a next-best action that is confidently wrong.

Look at how vertical AI has succeeded in sectors like the legal industry. Specialized platforms like Harvey and Legora don’t rely on generic LLMs alone; they ground their models in domain-specific reference architecture and verified legal datasets. GTM AI requires the exact same foundation. A generic model does not understand B2B commercial logic out of the box. To generate real value, an agent must be anchored in a unified reference data layer.

Democratizing the infrastructure layer

Historically, unifying first- and third-party data required massive engineering teams and multi-quarter custom implementations stuck behind IT backlogs. But as intelligence layers mature, that dynamic is evolving. When underlying data architecture is exposed through flexible APIs and Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations, even non-technical business leaders can construct custom AI workflows in an afternoon.

Recently, I spoke with the CEO of a 50-person mid-sized business who reached out regarding a quick API integration question. He wasn’t a software engineer or a RevOps builder. Yet, using Claude Code paired with ZoomInfo’s API infrastructure (GTM.ai), he was able to build a custom account-scoring and enrichment application tailored specifically to his team prospects.

A few years ago, he would have been forced to rely on whatever rigid software interface a vendor built for him. Instead, he was interacting directly with a unified data layer inside Claude to automate his team’s specific commercial logic. This reflects a massive structural shift: moving away from traditional software applications where hundreds of thousands of users log into a single interface, toward millions of tailored, natural-language interfaces grounded in live data.

Grounding the future of AI GTM

In the end, the advice I give to other revenue leaders is always the same: Don’t confuse a slick demo with a viable enterprise strategy. Right now, dozens of lightweight AI sales tools are stalling out because they built polished interfaces without a durable data foundation beneath them. An autonomous agent is only as intelligent as the context layer feeding it. If you bolt an agent onto fragmented data, you get unreliable outputs every time.

The real unlock in go-to-market won’t come from writing cleverer prompts or buying newer software wrappers. It comes down to doing the foundational architecture work — unifying internal systems, anchoring them to verified external intelligence and giving agents a coherent view of the world. The leaders who capture the promise of enterprise AI won’t be the ones waiting for foundation models to magically solve B2B complexity. They will be the ones who build that prerequisite context layer today so their agents have the complete picture required to deliver.

If you look at where enterprise AI dollars are flowing, the disparity is stark. Software engineering teams are adopting autonomous agents almost overnight, while revenue operations — sales, marketing and go-to-market (GTM) — are barely scratching the surface.

As a CEO who spends time coding in Claude, building in Cursor and prototyping in Vercel, I understand why developers have embraced these tools so quickly: they’re incredible. Yet, when I talk to other executives about the relative quiet across their sales organizations, I find they usually draw the wrong conclusion.

They assume large language models (LLMs) simply aren’t mature enough to handle complex commercial motions. But that diagnosis misses the real bottleneck. The reason coding agents thrive while GTM agents struggle isn’t an intelligence problem. It’s a context problem. 

For decades, innovation has been measured mostly by speed: who launched first, who built the next breakthrough, who disrupted an industry before anyone else could. Speed still matters. But after several years leading Celleste, the company behind the world’s first chocolate bar made from cell-cultured cocoa butter, working to strengthen the long-term future of cocoa, I’ve found myself asking whether speed still tells the whole story.

Working at the intersection of deep science and one of the world’s most established industries has gradually changed the questions I ask about innovation. Our conversations extend far beyond the lab, into manufacturing, global supply chains, consumer trust and the resilience of an industry facing a rapidly changing world. What interests me is that these conversations aren’t unique to cocoa. The same themes are surfacing across artificial intelligence, healthcare, energy and manufacturing.

From building what’s next to preparing for what’s next

Businesses today look very different from the ones many innovation strategies were built for. Artificial intelligence is reshaping business models in months rather than years. Climate volatility is forcing companies to rethink long-term planning and access to critical resources. Cybersecurity has become a boardroom issue, and geopolitical uncertainty keeps exposing vulnerabilities across global supply chains.

As the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report puts it, “today’s biggest business risks are increasingly interconnected. Technology, geopolitics, environmental pressures and economic uncertainty no longer exist in separate categories. They reinforce one another, creating an environment where change is constant rather than occasional.”

In an environment like that, moving fast is no longer enough. Companies also need to become more resilient. A question I’ve found myself asking is this: Does this innovation make the broader ecosystem more resilient, or only my company? That question is becoming just as important as questions about speed or novelty.

The strongest innovations answer a problem the industry already has

That raises a second question: Which innovations are actually built to last?

In my experience, the answer has less to do with how novel an idea is, and more to do with where it starts.

Some innovations begin with remarkable technologies searching for the right application. Others begin with a challenge the industry already knows it needs to solve. The latter often find their way into the market more naturally because they strengthen systems that already exist rather than asking industries to reorganize themselves around something entirely new.

It can also become one of the shortest paths to product-market fit. When the problem already exists and is already understood by the people who will use your solution, you are not creating demand from nothing. You are meeting demand that was already there.

This also changes disruption. We often associate innovation with replacing what came before. But some of the most valuable technologies may do something different: help established industries evolve without losing what already works. That requires understanding not only the technology, but the infrastructure, economics and relationships around it. For founders, that means spending as much time understanding the system they are entering as the solution they are building.

So ask yourself: Are you building toward a problem your industry already recognizes, or a solution that is still looking for one?

Resilience depends on how fast you can adapt, not only on what you built

There’s a third piece, and it has less to do with the innovation itself than with the organization behind it.

However well designed something is on day one, conditions eventually move: a supplier changes, a regulation shifts, a market reacts differently than expected.

The real test often comes later: how quickly the team behind it can adapt. That capacity comes from the people and habits of a company that treats change as normal rather than an emergency.

Organizations that build this capability are often the ones whose innovations remain valuable long after launch. So the question isn’t only whether what you built can withstand change. It’s whether your team can move fast enough to keep up with it.

That adaptability also depends on how organizations make decisions. Teams need enough structure to stay focused, but enough flexibility to question assumptions when reality changes. Building that balance early can prevent companies from becoming locked into decisions that made sense under yesterday’s conditions. In fast-moving industries, the ability to reconsider, learn and adjust may become one of the most important competitive advantages a company can build.

Resilience, then, is not something you design once. It is a capability you keep building. The companies that understand this will be better positioned not only to respond to disruption, but to find opportunity inside it.

What this means for founders building today

The next time you review your roadmap, don’t only ask what a feature does for your company. Ask what it also does for the industry you’re part of. It’s a small shift in the question, but it changes what you end up building.

Speed and boldness still matter. They always will. Resilience isn’t a replacement for either. The real question is whether what we build will continue creating value as the world around it changes.

For decades, innovation has been measured mostly by speed: who launched first, who built the next breakthrough, who disrupted an industry before anyone else could. Speed still matters. But after several years leading Celleste, the company behind the world’s first chocolate bar made from cell-cultured cocoa butter, working to strengthen the long-term future of cocoa, I’ve found myself asking whether speed still tells the whole story.

Working at the intersection of deep science and one of the world’s most established industries has gradually changed the questions I ask about innovation. Our conversations extend far beyond the lab, into manufacturing, global supply chains, consumer trust and the resilience of an industry facing a rapidly changing world. What interests me is that these conversations aren’t unique to cocoa. The same themes are surfacing across artificial intelligence, healthcare, energy and manufacturing.

From building what’s next to preparing for what’s next

Businesses today look very different from the ones many innovation strategies were built for. Artificial intelligence is reshaping business models in months rather than years. Climate volatility is forcing companies to rethink long-term planning and access to critical resources. Cybersecurity has become a boardroom issue, and geopolitical uncertainty keeps exposing vulnerabilities across global supply chains.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

In 1872, Toronto printers went on strike demanding a nine-hour workday. The standard at the time was 12 hours a day, six days a week. Their strike inspired annual parades across Canada, which an American labor leader witnessed in Toronto in 1882 and took back to New York. By 1894, both Canada and the United States had declared the first Monday in September a national holiday. Labor Day exists because workers fought for the right to stop.

One hundred and fifty years later, the people least likely to take it are the ones who need it most. The holiday exists. The permission to actually stop does not. The advice arrives every Labor Day weekend like clockwork. Disconnect. Set boundaries. Do not check email. Step away and come back refreshed.

For most people running at high output, that advice lands like a joke. They step away, the quiet arrives, and something that was manageable on a Wednesday becomes unbearable on a Saturday. The anxiety rises. The restlessness kicks in. By Sunday evening the dread is already there. And by Tuesday morning they are back at their desk wondering why four days off left them feeling worse than four days of work.

The long weekend did not cause that. It just removed the one thing that was keeping it manageable.

The bill that was always coming

Think of the body like a business running on a line of credit it never checks.

Every sprint draws on it. Every deadline pushed through. Every Saturday worked. Every vacation cut short. The account keeps getting drawn down and the body keeps extending the credit because the adrenaline, the dopamine and the cortisol are co-signing every charge. The system stays in performance mode. The work gets done. The numbers look fine.

Then the long weekend arrives and the co-signers clock out.

That is when neuroscientist Bruce McEwen’s concept of allostatic load becomes impossible to ignore. The measurable biological cost of sustained stress does not disappear while you are pushing through it. It accumulates. And the moment the chemistry that was covering it drops, the balance comes due all at once.

The quiet did not create the anxiety. It just stopped covering the bill.

And because almost nobody teaches people to understand what that actually feels like, the most common response is to decide the weekend was a mistake.

So they go back to work.

Going back to work teaches the wrong lesson

Opening the laptop on Saturday resolves the discomfort almost immediately. Dopamine reactivates. The target reappears. The anxiety lifts.

But what just happened is the brain made a payment on the credit card with next week’s balance.
Every time that happens, the pattern tightens. The brain learns one more time that the solution to discomfort is output. The tolerance for stillness shrinks. The person who could sit with a quiet Saturday for a few hours can barely manage an hour the next time. The executive who used to enjoy long weekends starts dreading them by Thursday. The cost carries forward unprocessed and the next Labor Day hits a system that is already more depleted than the last one.

This is the pattern that post-success psychology is built around. Not a single crash. A cycle that compounds with every loop that runs without a real landing. According to NIH research on chronic stress and the HPA axis, sustained output leads to a predictable biological progression: elevated cortisol followed by exhaustion and suppressed cortisol levels. The crash is not a choice. It is a sequence. And pushing through it with more work does not stop the sequence. It charges the card again and delays the statement until the system stops asking nicely.

What actually helps

Do not wait until Friday to slow down. The system running at full output does not have an off switch. Going cold into a long weekend is not rest. It is a crash with a holiday label on it. Put something on the calendar each day that counts as effort without draining anything. A walk with a destination. A conversation that matters. A task that closes a loop without opening a new one. Not doing nothing. Teaching the system how to wind down instead of forcing it to stop cold.

Do not be surprised if you get sick. This is one of the most reliable and least discussed consequences of running too hard for too long. While you are pushing, cortisol tells the immune system to wait. The moment you stop and the chemistry drops, the immune system starts collecting on everything that was deferred. You stop. You immediately feel terrible. Your throat hurts. You are exhausted in a way that sleep does not seem to touch.

Most people assume this means they are unhealthy or not taking good enough care of themselves. They are not entirely wrong. But no supplement fixes a pattern that never gets a real recovery built into it. The sickness is not a sign you should have kept going. It is the deferred balance arriving. That is not an interruption of recovery. That is what recovery actually looks like when the account has been overdrawn for too long.

The restlessness that shows up on a Saturday is not a productivity problem. It is the pattern asking to be noticed. Most people respond by opening the laptop. That teaches the pattern that the only way to be heard is to get louder. Which is exactly what it does. Every long weekend it gets a little harder to sit with, a little heavier to carry into the week that follows.

This weekend, instead of reaching for the laptop when the restlessness hits, write down what it is interrupting. Not a task list. Not a business problem. What specifically feels unbearable about not working right now. One sentence. You do not have to solve it. You just have to name it. That is the beginning of understanding which pattern is running the discomfort, and what it actually needs instead of another sprint.

Labor Day was never just a day off. It was a declaration that the people doing the work deserved the right to stop without it costing them everything.

That right still exists. Most people are still paying interest on the last time they tried to use it.

In 1872, Toronto printers went on strike demanding a nine-hour workday. The standard at the time was 12 hours a day, six days a week. Their strike inspired annual parades across Canada, which an American labor leader witnessed in Toronto in 1882 and took back to New York. By 1894, both Canada and the United States had declared the first Monday in September a national holiday. Labor Day exists because workers fought for the right to stop.

One hundred and fifty years later, the people least likely to take it are the ones who need it most. The holiday exists. The permission to actually stop does not. The advice arrives every Labor Day weekend like clockwork. Disconnect. Set boundaries. Do not check email. Step away and come back refreshed.

For most people running at high output, that advice lands like a joke. They step away, the quiet arrives, and something that was manageable on a Wednesday becomes unbearable on a Saturday. The anxiety rises. The restlessness kicks in. By Sunday evening the dread is already there. And by Tuesday morning they are back at their desk wondering why four days off left them feeling worse than four days of work.

I landed in commercial nuclear power operations at the tender age of 18, and it did not take long to discover that I had an aptitude for the work. By 22, I was a licensed Reactor Operator — nearly unheard of at the time. By 25, I had earned my Senior Reactor Operator license and continued climbing through shift operations, supervision and management.

By 38, however, I had the uneasy sense that I had mastered the profession and done about all there was for me to do.

Then I was introduced to the idea of “unlimited income potential.” Sales and business ownership seemed to offer something my utility career could not: a direct connection between effort, skill and financial reward. So I did what, in retrospect, looks almost reckless. I left a secure utility career after 19 years, moved from Michigan to Washington, D.C. and discovered very quickly that reality is where you land when the bottom falls out of your world.

It became clear that competence as an employee inside a large organization does not guarantee success in an entrepreneurial setting.

From the outside, sales and entrepreneurship can look like freedom. Plenty of books, seminars and programs will show you how simple the transition can be. I know because I read many of those books and went through several of those programs.

Over the years, however, I learned that moving from employee to entrepreneur requires passing three very different tests — tests that do not get nearly as much attention.

1. Can you survive the transition?

Before making the leap, I would ask four questions:

1. What is your “why?” A sufficiently powerful reason can sustain you when the early excitement wears off. For me, I wanted to resolve a concern that had bothered me for years: If I lost everything, could I build it back again? Not everyone thinks this way, but more than a few nuclear operators do.

2. What are your income sources? My wife worked full-time and had benefits, which helped smooth some of the many income troughs I would experience.

3. What condition are your household finances in? We maintained varying levels of liquid reserves and had utility pensions waiting in the distance. We also sold our Michigan home and rented for several years, both to reduce expenses and free up cash.

4. Is your spouse ready for the concessions and uncertainty ahead? Entrepreneurship rarely affects only the entrepreneur. Income volatility, delayed gratification and changing priorities become household issues very quickly.

2. Do you have the skills required to engage the market?

The next test is whether you have the skills required to engage the market. There are many, but four deserve special attention.

1. Can you persuade people? I thought I was very good at this. Inside a large organization, I had developed a reputation for being competent, direct and strong-willed. I could tell people what needed to be done, and most of the time they did it. When they did not, there was always a supervisory chain available to compel action. Try that in the marketplace. Customers do not report to you. Prospects do not care about your title or the initials after your last name. You must earn their attention, their trust and ultimately their willingness to act.

2. Can you sell something — anything? The ability to sell a product or service is the lifeblood of any venture. Mark Twain is often credited with the observation that a person who has carried a cat by the tail learns something that cannot be learned any other way. Sales works in much the same way. You can read books, study techniques and attend seminars, but eventually you have to convince someone to buy.

3. What is your valuable skill? My early answers were nebulous: high standards, strong leadership, problem-solving ability. Those qualities look good on a résumé, but they are not particularly useful in a marketplace crowded with choices. A customer needs to understand what you can actually do for them.

4. What market need can your valuable skill satisfy? I am a serious math guy. In nuclear power operations, that ability had an obvious home. Outside that world, I had to discover where those same skills created economic value. Eventually, I realized I could use them to solve financial and tax problems. Put another way: Where is the starving crowd, and what can you offer that it already wants?

3. Can you endure the uncertainty long enough to succeed?

This is a reality that few gurus spend much time discussing. I had to grind for roughly 10 years before I really mastered what I needed to understand. These questions matter because they test emotional makeup more than academic or intellectual ability.

1. Can you persevere until you finish? This applies in both small and large ways. You need the perseverance to get to “done,” not merely stay busy and try hard. That was one of the biggest lessons in moving from employee to entrepreneur. The market does not pay for effort. It pays for completed work, solved problems and delivered value. You finish one job, then another, then another, until eventually there is a business where there was once only an idea.

2. Can you handle rejection? Rejection can sting badly enough to make you question your decisions, your offer and sometimes yourself. I had to learn that rejection is also information. The market may be telling you that the offer is wrong, the audience is wrong, the timing is wrong or the message is unclear. The challenge is learning from rejection without allowing it to define you.

3. How do you cope with ambiguity? My unofficial motto was, “Hold on, let me overthink this.” I had to learn that entrepreneurs rarely get complete, verified information before making important decisions. At some point, you gather what you can, weigh the risks and move.

4. Can you come back from setbacks? To paraphrase Rocky Balboa, life is not about how hard you can hit, but how hard you can get hit and still keep moving forward. I have replayed that idea in my head more than a little. Every entrepreneur eventually takes some hard hits. I know I have. The question is whether you can absorb them, learn from them and keep moving.

Before you make the leap from employee to entrepreneur, understand that being good at a job and being prepared for entrepreneurship are two very different things.

It is easy to watch Shark Tank, read a success story or attend a seminar and imagine yourself on the other side. What you usually do not see are the years of uncertainty, rejected offers, financial compromises, wrong turns and lessons that came before the success.

That does not mean you should not make the leap. It means you should take inventory before you do. Can your household survive the transition? Do you have the skills to engage a market and persuade people to pay for what you offer? And do you have the temperament to keep going when the answers are unclear and the results are slow to arrive?

The encouraging part is that you can prepare for much of this. You can strengthen your finances. You can learn to sell. You can sharpen a valuable skill and find the market that needs it. You can practice making decisions with imperfect information. And you can begin testing yourself before your paycheck disappears.

Entrepreneurship has ultimately given me much of the freedom and opportunity I hoped it would. It has been nothing short of life-changing. But it took far longer, and required far more of me and my wife, than I imagined when I walked away from that secure utility job.

Before you ask whether you are ready to become an entrepreneur, ask a better question: Who do I need to become to build the business I imagine?

I landed in commercial nuclear power operations at the tender age of 18, and it did not take long to discover that I had an aptitude for the work. By 22, I was a licensed Reactor Operator — nearly unheard of at the time. By 25, I had earned my Senior Reactor Operator license and continued climbing through shift operations, supervision and management.

By 38, however, I had the uneasy sense that I had mastered the profession and done about all there was for me to do.

Then I was introduced to the idea of “unlimited income potential.” Sales and business ownership seemed to offer something my utility career could not: a direct connection between effort, skill and financial reward. So I did what, in retrospect, looks almost reckless. I left a secure utility career after 19 years, moved from Michigan to Washington, D.C. and discovered very quickly that reality is where you land when the bottom falls out of your world.

The college closure crisis is getting harder to explain away as a series of isolated institutional failures. Higher education institutions are facing a difficult mix of declining enrollment, rising operating costs, mounting debt, financial deficits and accreditation pressures across the country.

The challenge is that these pressures rarely show up one at a time. A college may start by losing students, but fewer students quickly means less tuition revenue. Add rising operating costs, debt, limited financial reserves, changes in government funding and growing competition from online and alternative education, and the pressure starts to compound. 

For smaller, tuition-dependent institutions, there may be very little room to absorb years of enrollment decline. In many cases, a closure isn’t the result of one bad year. It is the end point of financial and enrollment pressures that have been building for years. 

The college closure crisis is bigger than it looks

According to an Inside Higher Ed report, at least 16 nonprofit institutions announced closures in 2025 because of enrollment and financial challenges.

The pattern suggests that 2025 was not an anomaly. It was another year in which institutions found that their existing financial models could no longer absorb sustained pressure.

The historical data make it harder to dismiss this as a recent problem. An analysis of federal data by The Hechinger Report found that 28 degree-granting institutions closed in just the first nine months of 2024, compared with 15 during all of 2023. 

The current wave of closures didn’t come out of nowhere. Nearly 300 colleges and universities offering associate degrees or higher closed their doors between 2008 and 2023. And this trend goes back much further: 861 colleges and 9,499 campuses closed between 2004 and 2022. 

So, perhaps the more important question is not whether the enrollment crisis is coming, but how long it has already been here. The demographic cliff may be making the problem more visible, but the underlying pressures have been building for years. For colleges with little financial cushion, fewer students aren’t simply a demographic challenge. Instead, they can quickly become an existential one. 

And 2026 isn’t looking much different. University Business reported previously this year that another group of institutions is heading toward closure, including University of Valley Forge, Anna Maria College, Hampshire College, Lourdes University and California College of the Arts. 

The numbers behind some of these closure announcements are even more telling. University of Valley Forge has lost half its enrollment since 2007. Limestone University fell from 3,214 students in 2014 to roughly 1,600 in 2025 and was facing a $20 million deficit. Hampshire College brought in just 168 new students against a target of 300, while carrying $21 million in bond debt.

At what point does declining enrollment stop being an admissions problem and become an existential business problem? For an increasing number of colleges, that line appears to be getting closer. 

Delineating the reasons behind college closures 

It is tempting to look at a college closure and say the problem was simply a lack of students. But the more you look at what is happening across higher education, the more complicated the picture becomes. Declining enrollment sits at the center of the problem, but it rarely works alone.

When an institution depends heavily on tuition, has rising operating costs, limited financial reserves or significant debt, losing students can quickly become a much bigger financial problem. 

In the CNBC discussion, Robert Franek of The Princeton Review points to the coming “enrollment cliff” and notes that roughly 95% of U.S. colleges rely on tuition revenue. Fewer students, then, don’t just mean fewer people in classrooms; they mean less revenue to support the institution. But demographics are only part of the story.

Emily Wadhwani, a senior director at Fitch Ratings, describes the challenge as an “unsustainable operating platform”, one where costs continue to rise while enrollment and tuition revenue become harder to sustain. Colleges can’t keep raising tuition indefinitely, particularly as students and families scrutinize the value of a four-year degree more closely.

What makes the situation more difficult is the cycle that follows. Colleges facing enrollment pressure may offer more financial aid, increase marketing, add new programs or invest in the student experience to remain competitive- all of which cost money. 

If those investments don’t generate enough additional enrollment, the financial gap widens further. That is why I don’t see the closure crisis as simply a demographic story. It is also a test of how resilient an institution’s operating model is when growth can no longer be taken for granted. 

A college may have enough students to remain open today and still be heading toward trouble if its costs, debt and revenue model aren’t aligned with the size and needs of its future student population. By the time a closure makes the news, the underlying problem may have been building for years.

The enrollment problem is also becoming a financial planning problem. A 2025 Inside Higher ed survey of 169 college chief business officers found that enrollment declines ranked among the top financial risks facing institutions, alongside rising personnel costs and infrastructure and deferred-maintenance expenses. 

More than half of respondents were also concerned about the sustainability of their tuition discount rates. The question, then, isn’t simply whether colleges can attract students. It is whether they can attract enough students at a price that makes the institution financially sustainable.

Then there is the cost side of the equation. A college can lose enrollment without being able to proportionally reduce its expenses. In fact, Inside Higher Ed’s 2026 survey found that seven in 10 chief business officers believe their institutions have too many academic programs for their current enrollment, up from 59% the previous year. 

Academic offerings were also the most commonly cited source of cost-revenue misalignment. That raises a difficult question for higher education: how long can an institution continue maintaining programs, facilities and infrastructure designed for a larger student population?

And then there are pressures colleges have less control over: changes in federal funding, international enrollment, student financial aid, state support and changing perceptions of the value of a degree. In 2025, 42% of chief business officers said they were concerned about structural cost imbalances, while 46% identified enrollment declines as a top financial risk. At the same time, students have more alternatives than they once did, from online degrees and short-term credentials to workforce pathways that don’t require a traditional four-year experience.

A deeper enrollment crisis is awaiting

What if the next enrollment crisis isn’t just about fewer students entering the market, but colleges failing to connect with the students who are already interested? As the pool of prospective students gets smaller, every inquiry becomes more valuable. Yet the basics are still getting missed. UPCEA’s 2025 Enrollment Process Review, based on 1,000 inquiries to higher education institutions, found that 44% of prospective-student inquiries received no response at all. For those that did, the average wait was 14 hours and 23 minutes.

And speed isn’t the only issue. Students want relevance, too. A 2024 Niche survey found that just 15% of students said colleges were sending information that was very relevant to them. That should give enrollment leaders pause. If students have more choices and are comparing institutions based on the experience they receive, how much patience do colleges really have for generic emails, delayed answers and disconnected interactions?

Think about what an inquiry actually represents. A prospective student has taken the time to raise their hand and say, I’m interested. Tell me more. What happens next matters. If the response arrives too late or doesn’t address what the student actually needs, that initial interest can quickly disappear.

This is why personalization and responsiveness are becoming enrollment issues, not just marketing issues. Colleges can’t control the size of the future student population. But they can control how they respond to it. They can make it easier for students to get answers, understand their options and know what to do next. When every student matters more, perhaps the biggest missed opportunity isn’t failing to find another student, it’s failing to recognize the one who already found you.

The college closure crisis is getting harder to explain away as a series of isolated institutional failures. Higher education institutions are facing a difficult mix of declining enrollment, rising operating costs, mounting debt, financial deficits and accreditation pressures across the country.

The challenge is that these pressures rarely show up one at a time. A college may start by losing students, but fewer students quickly means less tuition revenue. Add rising operating costs, debt, limited financial reserves, changes in government funding and growing competition from online and alternative education, and the pressure starts to compound. 

For smaller, tuition-dependent institutions, there may be very little room to absorb years of enrollment decline. In many cases, a closure isn’t the result of one bad year. It is the end point of financial and enrollment pressures that have been building for years.