You Have No Fucking Idea What You're Doing. That Might Be Your Biggest Advantage.

The day you decide to start a business is the day you become an expert at making things up.

You'll tell yourself you have a plan. You'll create a spreadsheet with projections. You'll workshop your positioning statement until it sounds exactly like everyone else's. And then you'll realize: You're just moving things around on a piece of paper while sitting in a coffee shop, trying to look like you belong there.

This is the space where most would-be entrepreneurs get paralyzed. They're waiting for permission. Waiting to feel ready. Waiting for the moment when they magically understand the game they're about to play. And then they never start.

But there's a different breed of person—the ones who start before they understand. Brian Tam is one of them. He looked at the innovation consulting world, saw agencies he admired, and instead of thinking "I could never," he thought something more dangerous: "Why not me? I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm doing it anyway."

What makes his story worth listening to isn't the part where everything worked out perfectly. It's the part where he failed miserably first, then figured out how to succeed in a market where he had every disadvantage: He didn't speak the language. He had no pedigree in consulting. He didn't even have a clear business model. All he had was an obsession about the future of innovation in China, a gift for talking, and the audacity to build something without a blueprint.

And that might be why it actually worked.

The Stupidity of Knowing Too Much

Here's what kills most entrepreneurial dreams: Knowledge.

Not the lack of it. The excess of it.

When you study the successful innovation agencies—IDEO, frog, Design Thinking Inc.—you absorb their playbooks. You see their clean processes, their polished portfolios, their established positions. And your brain does what brains do: It compares what you have (nothing) to what they have (everything) and concludes that you're too far behind to start.

Brian told me something that stuck with me: He loved studying those agencies. He tried to understand them. But he never actually tried to replicate them. Instead, he broke himself down into components—I can think. I can talk. I can facilitate discussion. I know a little bit about training—and built a business from there.

This is the opposite of most entrepreneurial advice. Everyone says "know your market, study your competitors, learn from what's working." And that's true. But Brian did something different. He studied them not to copy them, but to figure out what he couldn't copy. He recognized his limitations and built around them instead of pretending they didn't exist.

He didn't have a design background like most agencies. So he positioned himself differently—not as a designer, but as a businessman who understood creativity. He didn't speak Chinese. So his clients were multinationals. He didn't have a brand yet. So he articulated a vision so clear, so ambitious, that it became his brand: "Help create the next hundred years of innovation in China."

That's not a business model. That's a north star. And when you're clear about your north star, the right people find you.

The Only Business Model That Actually Works at the Beginning

Everyone wants to talk about business models. Scalability. Unit economics. Revenue streams. It's all important, sure. But here's what nobody wants to admit: At the beginning, your business model is just a story you tell people who might pay you.

Brian's early story was brutally honest. "I don't know what I'm doing," he basically said, "but I believe in this vision. Do you want to help me figure it out?"

His first clients didn't come from a perfected pitch deck. They came from conversations. He told friends what he was trying to do. Most of them said no—his family certainly did. But eventually, one friend had a problem he couldn't solve: A university wanted to run a hackathon in China. Nobody in his network knew how to do it. So why not ask the guy who won't shut up about innovation in China?

That first project—NYU's hackathon—became everything. Not because it made him rich, but because it proved something: He could organize complex creative experiences. And more importantly, it attracted a co-founder. One of the professors knew his exact mindset. Lei came from the same place—Chinese, American-educated, obsessed with doing something meaningful in China. They didn't need to negotiate their philosophy. They just knew they were aligned.

This is the thing about bootstrapping that nobody tells you: The cheapest business to start is one where people are willing to work for you because they believe in the vision, not because you can pay them. Brian didn't have the budget for salaries. So he found partners willing to share risk. Freelancers. Collaborators. People who saw possibility instead of a paycheck.

He minimized every fixed cost. No office. No fancy website. No staff. Just people, passion, and the absolute conviction that this mattered. And when you operate that way, you're not hoping for one big win to keep things afloat. You're surviving on margin. Which means you can actually survive.

Why Your Position Doesn't Matter. Your Clarity Does.

The innovation consulting world tried to sort itself into categories. Design consultants. Strategy consultants. Innovation consultants. And Brian refused to pick a lane.

He called himself a "creativity consultancy." Not because he'd figured out what that meant, but because it was honest. He loved philosophy. He loved psychology. He loved design and aesthetics. He loved business. And so he was going to do all of it.

This drove people crazy. His peers kept asking: "What's your niche? Who's your ideal customer? What problem do you solve?" All the good questions. All the questions that would make a good marketer say: "You need to narrow down."

But here's what Brian understood that most consultants don't: Clarity doesn't come from narrowing. It comes from being relentless about why.

He wasn't narrow about what he did. He was crystal clear about why he did it. The vision was the container that held everything together. If you worked with him, you were working on innovation for China's future. That one line filtered everything. It attracted clients who believed in that mission. It repelled clients who just wanted a quick consulting engagement.

He let clients figure out what he was. "I don't want to put a label on it," he told me. "I want to let the client fill in the blanks. This is who I am. These are my passions. If you want to work with me, you know what you're getting."

This is the opposite of positioning in most business advice. It's not about carving out territory. It's about being so clear about your direction that people either get on the boat or they don't. And when they get on, they know what they signed up for.

The Unfair Advantage of Talking Too Much

There's a small gift Brian kept mentioning that I think is massively underestimated: He has what he calls "a big mouth."

He came to China as an English teacher. He wasn't supposed to be there. Wasn't qualified in any traditional sense. But he learned to command a room. Learned to talk. Learned that standing in front of people and being clear about what you believe is a skill you can develop.

So when he decided to become a consultant, he didn't try to become someone else. He became the guy who could talk. He became the guy who could host the room. And he built a business around that gift, not around what he thought a consultant should be.

This is where the mythology around innovation breaks down. We celebrate design thinking. We celebrate creative frameworks. We celebrate the aesthetics of the work. But we don't talk about the fact that most innovation consulting is about being able to articulate complexity in a way that makes people feel like they understand it. It's about making invisible things visible. And that requires someone who can talk.

Brian didn't apologize for that. He leaned into it. His stage presence became the anchor point for his whole business. Everything else got built around that core strength.

The lesson here isn't "become a better talker." It's "stop trying to fix your weaknesses and start building with your strengths." Brian couldn't compete with established agencies on credentials, on process, on polish. So he competed on clarity, conviction, and the ability to make you believe in a vision. That's harder to teach than any framework. And it's damn near impossible to copy.

Why This Matters (Even If You Never Start a Business)

If you're not planning to launch your own agency in China, you might be wondering why any of this matters. And that's fair.

But the principles Brian lived by don't require you to be an entrepreneur. They require you to be honest about three things:

Your strengths are not what you think they are. Stop listing things on a resume and start noticing what you're actually good at—what you do without trying. For Brian, it wasn't consulting methodology. It was connecting people around a shared vision.

Your limitations are not disqualifications. The fact that Brian didn't speak Chinese, didn't have agency credentials, didn't understand the consulting game—those weren't reasons to not start. They were the shape of his path. He built in the spaces where he couldn't compete with incumbents.

Clarity about why beats clarity about what. If you can articulate why you're doing something with enough force that others want to help, the what tends to work itself out. Brian's vision was specific enough to guide decisions but expansive enough to grow with him.

Starting when you're unqualified is not reckless—it's the only way you'll actually learn. Everything Brian knows about consulting, he learned after he started. Not before.

This applies whether you're building a business, building a team, building a career, or building a life. The people who wait until they're ready rarely start. The people who start before they're ready become the ones everyone eventually asks for advice.

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The Real Conversation

If you want to hear Brian's full story—how he went from "that guy who keeps talking about innovation in China" to running an actual innovation agency, how he navigated the landscape of China's unique innovation ecosystem, how he built a team of local talent that became the future of what he was trying to create—listen to the full conversation on The School of Innovation podcast. It's a masterclass in entrepreneurial thinking that has nothing to do with spreadsheets and everything to do with conviction.

Because here's the thing about starting something: Everyone makes it sound so complicated. Brian made it sound simple. Not because it is simple. But because he understood that the only thing separating you from trying is the story you've told yourself about why you can't.

The question isn't whether you know enough. You don't. Nobody does. The question is: What are you willing to do without knowing?