Move Fast, Move Blind?
Move Fast, Move Blind?
Monday 7th September
Move Fast, Move Blind?
An opportunity turns up that feels time-limited, a lease on the right site, a supplier offering good terms if you commit now, a gap in a new market that looks like it won’t stay open. Moving fast feels like the advantage. Waiting feels like the risk.
Often it is. Genuinely time-limited opportunities exist, and hesitating can cost you the good ones.
But there’s a question worth separating out before the decision gets made, because the two get conflated constantly. Is this actually a speed problem, where waiting genuinely costs you the opportunity? Or is it a validation problem wearing a speed costume, where the urgency is real but the checks that would tell you whether the opportunity is actually good are the very things getting skipped in the rush?
Those are different problems with different solutions. The first genuinely calls for moving fast. The second calls for moving fast on the parts that are actually time-sensitive, while still validating the assumptions underneath the decision, because skipping that step doesn’t save time. It borrows it, at a much higher rate, from a future version of the business that has to deal with the consequences.
There’s a reason this distinction is so easy to blur under pressure, and it’s worth naming plainly. Genuine time pressure and manufactured time pressure feel identical from the inside. A landlord saying another tenant is interested creates the same adrenaline response whether or not it’s true, and whether or not, even if true, the specific site is genuinely irreplaceable. Learning to separate the felt urgency of a moment from the actual, structural urgency of the decision is a skill most owners have never explicitly practised, because most of the decisions in a normal week don’t require it. A few, a handful a year for most businesses, genuinely do.
If there's a decision like this sitting in front of you right now, a 30 minute discovery call can tell you fast whether it's genuinely urgent or just feels that way.
Why Fast Decisions Skip the Checks That Matter Most
Nobody skips validation because they’re careless. They skip it because urgency makes the wrong things feel optional and the right things feel like they’re already answered.
The checks that get skipped are rarely the obvious ones. Almost every owner checks whether they can afford a new lease, a new hire, a new production line, the finance question gets asked because it’s the one that feels dangerous to skip. The checks that get skipped are the harder-to-see ones underneath the finance question, is the demand actually there, at this price, in this location, at the scale the business plan assumes. Will the customers this expansion is built around actually behave the way the plan assumes they will, once the novelty wears off and a competitor responds.
Urgency makes assumptions feel like facts
This is the real mechanism worth naming. Under time pressure, an assumption that would normally get tested, “there’s clearly demand for this in the new market,” starts to feel like a fact simply because there isn’t time to question it. The opportunity’s own urgency becomes the argument for not checking whether the opportunity is actually as good as it looks. That’s backwards, the more time-pressured a decision is, the more valuable it is to know quickly whether the core assumption holds, not less.
This doesn’t mean every expansion decision needs a six-month feasibility study before anything moves. It means separating what’s genuinely time-limited, the lease, the supplier terms, the window on the opportunity itself, from what isn’t, whether the underlying assumption the whole decision rests on is actually true. The first can move fast. The second needs to be checked fast, not skipped.
It’s worth being specific about what a fast validation check actually looks like, because the phrase can sound like it implies months of work when it often doesn’t. A handful of direct conversations with prospective customers in the new market, testing whether the demand assumption holds up under real questioning rather than polite agreement. A look at what actually drove the previous operator’s success in the location, relationships, reputation, pricing, or something else entirely, and an honest assessment of which of those the new business can genuinely replicate versus which it’s simply assuming will transfer. A conservative version of the revenue model, built assuming the optimistic assumptions are wrong, to see whether the numbers still work at all. None of this requires months. It requires days, sometimes a couple of weeks, spent asking questions that feel like they’re slowing the exciting part down, when really they’re the only thing standing between excitement and an expensive mistake.
How This Plays Out in Practice
Picture a business that identified what looked like a genuinely strong opportunity, a new regional market with an underserved customer base and a competitor who’d recently exited, leaving what looked like clear runway. The opportunity felt time-sensitive, the gap in the market wouldn’t stay open indefinitely, and the business moved to secure a location and commit resources within a matter of weeks.
The finance question got checked properly. The lease was affordable, the capital outlay was modelled, the numbers on paper worked if the demand assumptions held. What didn’t get checked, because there wasn’t time and because the opportunity felt self-evidently good, was whether the demand that had supported the previous operator actually transferred to a new entrant, or whether it had been specific to relationships and reputation the exiting competitor had built over a decade that this business didn’t have.
The gap showed up slowly, then all at once
The first few months looked survivable, some demand, enough to avoid an obvious red flag. But volume never reached what the business plan assumed, and it became clear the market wasn’t simply waiting to be served, it required the same years of relationship-building the previous operator had put in, which hadn’t been part of the model at all. By the time this was undeniable, the lease commitment, the fit-out costs and the working capital already tied up in the location meant walking away wasn’t a quick decision either, it was its own drawn-out, costly process.
None of this was unknowable in advance. A proper feasibility check, even a fast one, testing the actual transferability of that regional demand rather than assuming it, would have surfaced the gap before the lease was signed, not eighteen months into a struggling location.
There’s a detail worth adding, because it’s the kind of thing that’s obvious in hindsight and genuinely easy to miss in the moment. Several of the early customers who did show up in the new location, enough to create that initial sense of validation, turned out to be existing customers of the business’s original location, curious to check out the new site rather than genuinely new demand the market had been waiting for. That distinction, existing customer curiosity versus new market demand, is exactly the kind of thing a proper validation check is built to catch, and exactly the kind of thing that’s invisible from inside the excitement of watching early sales numbers look promising.
Before your next expansion decision gets made, a 30 minute discovery call can help you separate the genuinely time-sensitive parts from the ones that just feel that way.
The Cost of Being Wrong Compounds
This is the part that makes unvalidated speed genuinely expensive, not just occasionally disappointing. The cost of moving on a bad assumption doesn’t stay fixed at the size of the original mistake. It grows.
There’s the direct cost, the lease, the fit-out, the working capital committed to a location or product line that isn’t performing. There’s the opportunity cost layered on top, capital and management attention tied up in the underperforming bet is capital and attention not available for the next genuinely good opportunity that comes along while this one is being managed or unwound. And there’s the hardest cost to quantify, the compounding difficulty of the exit decision itself, walking away from a sunk commitment is always harder and more expensive than not making it in the first place, which means the business often persists longer than it should, hoping the numbers will turn, and loses more in the process.
Sunk cost makes the second mistake worse than the first
The original decision to skip validation is mistake one. The instinct to keep funding an underperforming commitment because so much has already been invested is mistake two, and it’s usually the more expensive of the pair. Owners rarely walk away from a bad expansion decision quickly, because doing so means admitting the capital already spent is gone regardless. That reluctance is exactly what turns a contained mistake into a compounding one.
It’s worth naming why this particular trap is so hard to see from the inside, even for owners who understand sunk cost intellectually. Every month the underperforming location stays open, there’s a plausible story available for why next month will be different, a new marketing push, a seasonal uptick, a competitor’s pricing mistake that might send customers over. Each individual story is reasonable enough to justify one more month. Strung together, they can justify a year or more of a location that was never going to work, because the decision to close it never gets made in one clear moment, it gets deferred one plausible month at a time. Breaking that pattern usually requires someone outside the day-to-day optimism of running the location, looking at the numbers with enough distance to see the trend rather than the latest month’s story.
Feasibility Work Is Cheap Insurance
Here’s the comparison worth putting side by side plainly. A proper feasibility check, testing the actual assumptions a decision rests on rather than the ones that feel comfortable, typically costs a small fraction of what an unvalidated wrong decision costs once a lease, a fit-out and eighteen months of underperformance are added up.
This isn’t an argument for moving slowly. It’s an argument for validating fast rather than skipping validation entirely. The genuinely time-sensitive parts of an opportunity, the lease, the supplier terms, can often still move on the same timeline. What needs to happen alongside them, not instead of them, is a fast, honest check of whether the core assumption the whole decision rests on actually holds, before the capital is committed rather than after.
There’s a useful way to frame this trade-off for anyone tempted to see validation purely as a cost or a delay. A fast, focused feasibility check is priced against the decision it’s protecting, not against an abstract standard of thoroughness. A relatively modest lease commitment might only need a few days of focused checking. A significant capital commitment, a new production line, a major market entry, warrants proportionally more. The point isn’t that every decision needs the same depth of validation, it’s that the depth should be chosen deliberately, based on what’s actually at stake, rather than skipped altogether because the opportunity felt too good, or too urgent, to slow down for even a few days.
The businesses that expand well aren’t the ones that move slowest. They’re the ones that know, before they commit, which parts of the decision are genuinely time-critical and which parts just feel that way under pressure. A proper feasibility study is built to answer that second question fast, not to slow the first one down.
It’s worth naming what this looks like as a repeatable habit, rather than a one-off checklist pulled out only for the biggest decisions. Businesses that get genuinely good at this build a simple, standing discipline, before any significant new commitment, someone explicitly names the core assumption the decision rests on, and someone, ideally not the person most excited about the opportunity, is responsible for testing it. That second part matters more than it might seem. The person championing an opportunity is rarely the best person to stress-test it objectively, not through any fault of character, simply because enthusiasm and scrutiny are difficult to hold at the same time. Separating those two roles, even informally, tends to catch far more than either role could catch alone.
Move Fast, Move Blind?
Speed and validation aren’t opposites, whatever the pressure of the moment makes them feel like. The fastest path to a good decision is a validated one. An unvalidated decision isn’t actually faster, it just defers the real cost to later, with interest, in the form of a commitment that’s much harder to unwind than it would have been to check in the first place.
If there’s a decision sitting in front of you right now that feels urgent enough to skip the checking, that’s exactly the moment worth pausing on, not to slow the whole decision down, but to make sure the assumption underneath it has actually been tested before the capital moves.
It’s worth ending with the more useful version of the original question. Not “are you moving too fast,” which invites a defensive answer, but “do you actually know why this feels urgent, and have you checked whether the thing you’re assuming is true actually is.” Most owners, asked that second question honestly, already have a fairly good sense of whether they’re standing on solid ground or on an assumption nobody’s tested yet. The businesses that expand well are the ones willing to sit with that answer, even when it’s inconvenient, rather than letting the excitement of the opportunity answer the question for them.
Book a 30 minute discovery call before the next big commitment, not after.
Further Reading
If this post resonated, these articles go deeper on the themes it covers: