Welcome to The Enemy of Good

If you’ve ever held something back because it wasn’t quite ready yet, welcome. You’re among friends. I held things back for years, right up until I learned that “not quite ready” is usually just fear wearing a work shirt.

My name is Joe. I spent more than a decade in corporate consulting, where nothing leaves the building until it’s been reviewed, aligned, and polished to a standard that would make a museum curator nervous. Then my wife, Chrissy, and I started Celeste Naturals, a bath and body business, and I learned in a hurry that every instinct I’d spent my career sharpening was now actively working against me. You cannot run a two-person soap company like a client engagement. I tried. The soap did not care about my quality gates.

You’ll see plenty of “we” around here. Chrissy and I made most of our best decisions together and nearly all of our worst ones, which means we split the lessons too. Some came from smart calls. More came from mistakes. A few came from confidently doing something that felt right at the time, only to realize later… yeah, that wasn’t it.

This blog is the running record of all of it: what I’ve learned, and am still learning, as a small business owner who does not have it all figured out and isn’t going to pretend otherwise.

What this blog is (and isn’t)

It’s a field journal, not a how-to manual. I write about what actually worked and what didn’t, the thinking behind the decisions, the mistakes made in the name of speed or momentum, and the things I wish someone had told me before I paid to learn them myself.

Most examples come from Celeste Naturals, because it’s the business I’m building and therefore where most of my scars are. But the lessons aren’t soap-specific. If you’re selling candles, consulting services, digital products, or something that only exists in your notes app right now, the same walls are waiting for you. I’d like to at least mark where the studs are.

One more thing I bring to the table besides consulting scar tissue: 20 years of poker. It shows up more than you’d expect. Running a small business is mostly making decisions with incomplete information and real money on the line, and poker is the best training for that I’ve ever found. When I write about risk, odds, and knowing when to play a hand versus fold it, that’s where it comes from.

Why “The Enemy of Good”?

The name comes from the old line that perfect is the enemy of good, and it earned its spot the hard way. Perfection is expensive and usually unnecessary. The most consistent lesson of our first stretch in business is that waiting for perfect delays progress far more than it improves outcomes. Our best results came from shipping the good-enough version and improving it in public. Our worst delays came from overthinking decisions that didn’t deserve that much oxygen.

There’s a lot more to say about that phrase, enough that it’ll get its own post down the road. For now, take it as the operating principle behind everything here.

What to expect

The entrepreneurship lessons here rotate through three lanes. There’s the head-game stuff: fear, risk, perfectionism, and the psychological warfare of leaving a stable career to sell things you made with your hands. There are post-mortems, where a product or decision died and we do an honest autopsy instead of a quiet burial. And there’s the practical layer: pricing, markets, operations, and the strategic thinking behind what we do and skip.

Some posts will be lessons I’ve fully digested. Some will be things I’m actively wrestling with while I write. All of them have the same goal: to be useful to people building something real, without the performative certainty that infects most business content.

Whether my opinion is worth listening to is your call to make, and you should make it after reading, not before. All I’ll promise is this: everything here actually happened, the numbers are real, and when I screw up you’ll hear it from me first and funniest.

You’re willing to learn from my mistakes. I’m willing to keep making them at a rate that ensures fresh content. That’s the deal.

Welcome to The Enemy of Good.