More False Starts Than I Can Count — Ten Years in Business

Spoiler: the perfect plan never showed up. We moved anyway, tripped a lot, and learned—again and again—that momentum beats mastery.

I’m not one for victory laps, so my first instinct was to ignore the “decade in business” badge and keep grinding. But pausing to lookback feels worthwhile if it helps someone else skip a few of my mistakes. I’ll spare you the click-bait “10 things in 10 years” list and offer five hard-earned truths.

1. Expectations vs. Reality — Pick Your Hard

At 25 I mapped out a neat climb: design awards by year 3, a glossy studio by year 5, passive income by year 7. The actual route? A mortgage-sales detour, two years in Amsterdam, and pivots from BIM consulting to point-cloud scanning to medical-centre fit-outs. Every wrong turn banked insights the “ideal” route never could. Everything is hard—so choose the hard that matters to you.

2. Start Before You’re Ready

I’ve burned days chasing the “right” software or niche. Jim Collins’ hedgehog finally landed: pick something, move, refine on the run.We’re all a bit lost; some just fall forward faster. You won’t out-think every problem—emotional steadiness and decisive action win the day.

3. Small, Boring, Daily

Breakthroughs rarely arrive in caffeine-fuelled bursts. Voxell’s biggest leaps came from templates, checklists, and micro-processes: Revit families pre-loaded with Enscape materials, Grasshopper scripts for recession planes, a living wiki of lessons learned. Five minutes saved pertask, across ten projects, equals a week of design time. Consistent marginal gains beat sporadic brilliance—and if you can’t teach the detail, you don’t own it yet.

4. Discipline Over Inspiration

My worst productivity slumps weren’t caused by bad tools but by me, “doom-researching” instead of building. Real progress only showed up when I stuck with the detail until I could explain it to someone else. IP comes from rare genius (not me) or compounding hard work (definitely me).

5. Vision with Patience

I’m still restless—AI-accelerated massing, a three-city footprint, an 80-person studio—but every “overnight success” I admire hides years of incremental effort. Hold the long-range picture; attack the next24-hour task list. Or, as my old man says, “Run up the hill and rest on the way down.”

Everything I once wished for I already have in some form today. The only way here was face-planting into problems, not analysing them from a distance. Start, stumble, collect the lesson, keep moving. The buzz is in the doing.

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