Corporate != Clueless

“I’d highly reject anyone buying a business if they haven’t built one.”

That was the opening line of a recent post I saw on LinkedIn, followed by this pointed question: “Where is your point of reference if you haven’t built a company before?”

As someone doing exactly what this person is skeptical of—leaving corporate to pursue entrepreneurship by acquiring a small business—it got me thinking: Why do I believe I have the right skills and experience to succeed, even if I’ve never built something from scratch?

It’s easy to see both sides. On one hand, I come from corporate believing I have transferable skills. On the other, founders who’ve built businesses from the ground up may question how someone like me could understand what they’ve lived through. Both perspectives carry truth.

But here’s where I land: corporate doesn’t always mean clueless.

I’ve spent much of my career dropping into new environments, often with no subject matter expertise, and being expected to help. As a process improvement engineer in healthcare, I started with zero clinical training. At first, I heard the familiar “you’ll never understand what we do” refrain from clinical staff. But after years of observation, collaboration, and curiosity, I reached the point where people asked how long I was a nurse before moving into engineering. (Spoiler: Never. I just put in enough reps to be credible.)

The whole consulting model is built on this same mindset: bringing fresh eyes to longstanding problems. I can't tell you the number of times I have come into a situation, found a solution to a problem just to hear 'we have tried that before and it didn't work.' I also can't tell you the number of times I then worked with stakeholders to make the 'it won't work' solution actually work. Solutions to problems require many things, sometimes you need the right people and the right time to implement the right solution. In a recent conversation with a small business owner I’m helping, they told me,“I’ve been doing this so long, I can’t see it clearly anymore. You’re helping me look at it differently.” That’s not fake value—that’s earned insight, accumulated over years across multiple industries, disciplines, and roles.

Back in my healthcare days, a mentor once told me that the best career path was bouncing between hospital operations (the business) and corporate. You stay grounded in the day-to-day realities of the business, while also understanding the bigger picture. It’s the same in entrepreneurship: ideally you need both perspectives.

So when I think about the “buy, then build” path, I don’t believe lack of true startup experience disqualifies someone. I’ve built systems, teams, and products inside massive organizations, often from scratch, with all the ambiguity and hustle that implies. I’ve created from nothing, but more often I’ve been handed underdeveloped initiatives and asked to turn them into something scalable and real. That’s my point of reference.

If you’re scratching your head and thinking, “Didn’t you start a company with your wife?”—yes, I did...so astute of you! We built a physical product business. But I get that the original post wasn’t aimed at side-hustle e-commerce founders, it was about those building something of magnitude. Still, I know what the hustle feels like at the small scale, how tightly coupled effort and outcome are (and how many hats you wear) when you're starting from scratch, and I’ll carry that with me into future ventures along with the deeper foundation I’ve built over decades.

And for those wrestling with the corporate vs. entrepreneurial decision (as many college grads are doing these days), I say: don’t dismiss corporate just because it’s corporate. Another mentor once told me, “Large companies are ecosystems full of startup-like opportunities: projects spin up, get pitched for funding, and teams form around them.” That always stuck with me—especially when I almost left corporate to join a startup. Corporate roles can be a surprisingly fertile training ground, if you approach them with the right mindset. Ohh, and the learning and mistakes are on their dime, not yours.

It’s no surprise that many people make their entrepreneurial move in their late 30s or 40s - not because they’re running away from something, but because they’ve been building the muscles all along and are finally ready to exercise them in a new way. But just because you take the leap, doesn't mean it's easy, as I wrote about last week.

Until now, I’ve focused on experience. But there’s also the matter of personality. In Entrepreneurial Leap by Gino Wickman, he outlines the traits of successful entrepreneurs: Visionary, Passionate, Problem Solver, Driven, Risk Taker, and Responsible. Many of us in corporate have those traits - we just lacked the exposure, courage, or timing to make the leap earlier. So maybe personality often precedes experience.

Regardless if it is experience or personality, not everyone is wired to build 0-1. Just like not everyone is wired to scale what already exists. But both paths require skill, humility, and vision. The more you have of both, the better the chances at entrepreneurship you probably have.

For me? I’m more of a builder than a starter. My strength isn’t the blank canvas - it’s making something better than how I found it.