Drawn from a conversation between Jeremy Rivera and entrepreneur, professor, and author Brad Poulos on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast. Brad teaches entrepreneurship at Toronto Metropolitan University and has spent fifteen years watching how founders — faithful and otherwise — actually build businesses that last.
In 1995, Brad Poulos walked into a boardroom at Bell Canada with a business plan the size of a phone book.
It was full of spreadsheets. Detailed projections. Five-year forecasts. Everything you’d expect from a serious, well-prepared entrepreneur. He presented it to the board and walked out with two million dollars.
He had never spoken to a single prospective customer.
“Up until that point,” he told Unscripted Small Business Podcast host Jeremy Rivera, “I had never spoken to a prospective customer.”
The numbers were, in his words, “complete fiction.” Confident fiction, but fiction.
And here’s what makes this more than just a funny story about the way business used to work: it’s a story about what we reach for when we want to feel certain before we’ve done the hard work of actually listening.
The Business Plan as a Substitute for Humility
Christian entrepreneurs are often encouraged to plan in faith. Write the vision, make it plain. Count the cost before you build the tower. Have a strategy. Know your numbers.
All of that is good counsel. But there’s a version of it that subtly replaces listening with projection — that mistakes a detailed plan for actual knowledge of whether anyone needs what you’re building.
Brad describes the old playbook plainly: write the plan first, raise the capital second, find the customers third. The plan was a performance. It was designed to look like certainty, because certainty is what boards and investors and sometimes even well-meaning church communities reward.
The new playbook — what entrepreneurship education now calls lean startup — reverses the sequence entirely. Talk to people first. Understand the real problem before you design the solution. Validate that real human beings with real needs actually want what you’re proposing to build — before you commit significant time, money, or identity to building it.
“Nowadays we practice lean startup and we put sales ahead of anything. Talk to customers before you write a single number.”
— Brad Poulos
For a faith-driven entrepreneur, that inversion should feel familiar. It looks a lot like humility.
Listening Before Speaking Is a Biblical Pattern
James 1:19 — “be quick to listen, slow to speak” — is usually applied to conflict and relationship. But it’s an equally useful posture for the entrepreneur who wants to serve a real need rather than impose a solution.
The businesses that last, Brad argues, are the ones that begin by genuinely understanding the problem from the customer’s point of view. Not the problem as the founder imagines it. Not the problem as it looks on a whiteboard. The problem as the people experiencing it actually describe it — in their own words, with their own frustrations, using language the founder would never have chosen.
Proverbs 18:13 puts it starkly: “To answer before listening — that is folly and shame.” A business plan written before a single customer conversation is, in this sense, an answer before listening. Confident, detailed, well-formatted folly.
The lean startup framework isn’t just smarter business. For the entrepreneur trying to genuinely serve people rather than just sell to them, it’s the more faithful posture.
What Customer Discovery Actually Looks Like
Brad isn’t describing something mystical. He’s describing something concrete and reproducible.
Before you build anything — before you write a plan, project a revenue number, or pitch to anyone — go find ten people who represent the person you think you’re trying to serve. Have a real conversation. Not a survey. Not a focus group. A conversation.
Ask them how they currently handle the problem you think you’re solving. Ask what’s most frustrating about it. Ask what they’ve already tried. Ask what they wish existed.
Then listen to what they actually say — not what confirms your hypothesis, but what’s actually there.
What you’ll almost certainly discover is that the problem is slightly different from the one you imagined, that the language they use is different from the language in your pitch deck, and that the solution they’d actually pay for is not quite the one you planned to build.
That’s not failure. That’s the most valuable thing that could happen before you’ve spent a dollar of real money.
“Your vocabulary is wrong. Theirs is right.”
— Jeremy Rivera, Unscripted Small Business Podcast
The Democratization of Entrepreneurship — and Its Double Edge
Brad makes another observation that deserves attention from the faith community: the infrastructure required to start a business has collapsed almost entirely. What once required significant capital, regulatory navigation, and technical expertise is now genuinely accessible to nearly anyone.
Accepting a credit card from a customer used to require writing custom code that a bank had to individually approve. Now it’s a checkbox on Shopify.
This is genuinely good news for Kingdom entrepreneurs. The barriers that once gatekept business ownership to those with capital, connections, and credentials have largely fallen. The mechanic in rural Tennessee, the single mother in East Nashville, the recent immigrant with a skill and a market — all of them have access to tools that a decade ago required a venture-backed startup to afford.
Brad calls this “more democratic,” and he’s right. If the old world rewarded who you knew, the new world increasingly rewards what you actually know and can actually do.
But the same democratization that opens the door for the faithful entrepreneur opens it for everyone else too. Lower barriers cut symmetrically. Your competitors have the same Shopify checkbox you do.
What remains as a differentiator is genuine expertise, genuine relationships, and genuine service to a real need — none of which Shopify provides. Those have to be built the slow way. Through listening. Through iteration. Through actually serving people well over time.
The Niche Discipline That Connects Faith and Strategy
One of the most practically useful things Brad said in the conversation was about staying in your lane — what he calls dancing with the one that brung you.
The moment you start adding adjacent products, chasing adjacent markets, or trying to be all things to all people, two things happen: you start competing against players who have always lived in those adjacent spaces and know them far better than you do, and your original customers notice that you’re no longer focused on them.
“You’ve gotta make sure that you never lose focus on what your original mission was and don’t abuse the product that got you there.”
— Brad Poulos
There’s a faith parallel here that shouldn’t be missed. Calling is specific. The gifts God places in a person are not generic — they’re particular. They fit specific contexts, specific needs, specific communities. The temptation to expand, to generalize, to be bigger or more impressive or more comprehensive — that temptation exists for businesses and for ministries equally.
The entrepreneurs who build something genuinely excellent are almost always the ones who resisted the lure of adjacency and went deeper into the thing they were actually called to do. The ones who tried to be everything usually ended up being nothing in particular — no longer excellent at the original thing, not yet excellent at the new things, and slowly losing the customers and community they’d built.
Faithfulness in a niche is not small thinking. It’s often the highest-leverage form of Kingdom work available to a marketplace entrepreneur.
Starting Well
If you’re at the beginning of something — a business idea, a ministry venture, a product you believe God has put in your hands to build — here’s what Brad’s fifteen years in the classroom and a lifetime in the trenches actually recommends:
- Don’t write the business plan first. Write the customer conversation notes first. Find ten real people and ask them about the problem. Listen more than you talk.
- Don’t project revenue before you’ve had a paying customer. The numbers feel like faith but they’re usually fiction. Real faith says: let me go find out if this is actually needed before I build it.
- Don’t let the accessibility of the tools rush you past the slowness of understanding the need. Just because you can launch in a week doesn’t mean you should — not before you’ve done the listening work that determines whether what you’re launching is actually what anyone needs.
- Stay in the lane you’re called to. When growth comes and adjacency beckons, hold your mission statement up against the new opportunity and ask honestly: does this deepen what I was called to do, or does it dilute it?
The most faithful thing an entrepreneur can do at the beginning is not write a plan. It’s go listen. The plan can come later, informed by what’s actually real. That’s not a lack of vision. That’s wisdom that looks like humility before it looks like success.
Listen to the full conversation: Unscripted Small Business Podcast — Brad Poulos on Building SMBs That Run Without You
Watch: youtu.be/VZiorkvdUkM
Brad Poulos: bradpoulos.com · confidentoperator.com
Books: The Small Business Operator’s Manual · Most Problems Solve Themselves · From Pitch to Payoff
Podcast: Unscripted Small Business · Host: Jeremy Rivera