Curiouser and Curiouser

Your tea just hit that perfect point between too hot to swallow and so cold you have to take it to the microwave. There’s six inches of snow outside, which brings you an unquantifiable joy because you grew up riding chair lifts and sailing down steep tree runs for fun. Even though you’re at the computer instead of up on the slopes, you’re just as excited.

Why? Because right now is when, after a year of job hunting and not getting hired, you’ve changed tack. You are finally starting the business you’ve been flirting with creating for a decade.

Back then, you’d found yourself on a chairlift drinking a mediocre half-steeped green tea already gone cold and asked, “Can’t we do better?” And it struck you—instant pre-made tea pods that heat up on the go with the pull of a string.

You’re ready to roll, but how to start? You spin out on Google, and soon that enthusiasm is suffocated by questions about regulations and confounding forms—should you be your own registered agent? Do you need a second cell phone line?

The business landscape moves fast with new tech, shifting regulations, and changes like AI, bringing challenges and innovation to every facet of our lives. Keeping up your enthusiasm and staying curious can feel daunting. But it’s also essential to staying relevant.

At Corporate Tools, we can give you a few insights about filing your paperwork and staying compliant, but we don’t pretend to have all the answers. That said, we do know how to go looking for them. We also offer many of the tools a new business needs.

That’s because we want to help you stay curious and answer the questions that matter to you and your customers, not go down endless rabbit holes about compliance and random start-up tools you don’t need.

To do that well, we believe in taking time to experiment, welcoming questions (especially the awkward ones), and saying no to “know-it-all” culture because a curious company is a future-ready company.

Curiosity Brings Relevance

Tech shifts fast. Regulatory bodies shift… weird. But businesses have to keep up with both. In business, staying curious isn’t just a nice quality to have. It’s how you adapt, survive, and thrive.

We’re going to date ourselves here and talk about cell phones for a minute. If you’re lucky enough to remember when your landline became your second option to dodge your weird uncle’s calls, you might recall how many people thought cell phones were the death knell of humanity. They were radioactive and caused brain tumors. They let big tech watch your every move. They were addictive. Watching people drive as they check out the latest on Vin Diesel’s D&D character Kaulder via YouTube might make you think they were right.

But death knell of humanity or not (it’s probably still too soon to say), some 30 years on, cellphones are a major part of life. Most of us will spend hours on them today alone.

Those folks in business who approached them with curiosity went on to create apps like Instagram and TikTok. To innovate and make them fold, and then to make them square and not fold. To give them touch screens. And then to make them fold again, and so on.

Even here at Corporate Tools, where our phones go into the communal safe when we roll through the door in the morning, we’re asking, “How do we help new businesses navigate the hassle of setting up multiple phone lines?” That question led us to offering our phone services so you can have multiple phone lines in one easy place.

Once you have the question, it’s up to you to roll up your sleeves to find out. Whether we’re wondering about the latest AI breakthrough or an emerging marketing tool that’s gaining traction, we stay curious to stay ahead.

They say change is the one constant in this world. The second you decide you’ve seen it all, the industry changes, and you’re the cautionary tale in someone else’s blog post. Curiosity keeps us experimenting, learning, and just a little uncomfortable in the best possible way.

The “Know-It-All”

If you’ve ever worked with someone who pretended to have all the answers, you already know that they’re typically just masking their insecurity with a louder voice. And that can kill good work.

When curiosity is replaced with posturing, teams can wind up afraid to ask questions, and they ultimately stagnate. That can be crippling in the business world, where the landscape and expectations shift daily.

This shallow confidence can also undermine collaboration. If you’re in an environment where admitting that you don’t know something is thought of as a weakness, people will stay quiet. They don’t speak up when they’re stuck, they don’t challenge the status quo, they don’t find out what new opportunities are on the horizon, and they definitely don’t take risks.

A “know-it-all” culture leads to more mistakes. If people don’t feel good saying “I don’t get this” or “I don’t know,” small issues fall through the cracks. Small gaps in understanding become annoying bugs and lead to delayed launches or missed opportunities.

At Corporate Tools, we’d rather admit we don’t know something and then go learn it than pretend and let our customers pay the price.

How to Keep Curious

Curiosity is something you cultivate. We like to make it a habit. Like any good tea (or weird houseplant), it needs the right conditions: sunlight, space, a little trial-and-error, and the occasional spilled genmaicha. It’s messy. But that’s where the good stuff happens.

Here are four tips to cultivate the habit.

1. Create space for tinkering

Some of our best tools started while we were troubleshooting issues with third-party products at 4:30 PM on a Friday, and we asked, “What if we could just make this, but better?” We give people time to tinker, experiment, and poke. Teams at Corporate Tools are encouraged to explore new tools, pick up unfamiliar skills, and take the scenic route.

It’s not wasted time. It’s where the seeds of innovation get planted. Giving people room to play shows we trust their instincts and value their curiosity. It’s how we stay future-facing, even when the future is fuzzy.

2. Fail fast on purpose

Part of tinkering means trying out new ideas on the fly, even if they’re unconventional, even if you’re not sure they’ll work. The sooner you try the wrong thing, the sooner you learn something new. And better to fail eight out of ten times than to spend six months polishing the thing no one needed.

Every failure is an opportunity to learn. And the sooner we learn, the better our next attempt gets.

3. Questions are like oxygen

We love questions. From “Should I already know this?” to “Is this year’s 30% uptick in sales a wider economic trend or the result of simplifying our user journey?” Asking isn’t a sign of weakness—it’s how everything starts to happen, from growth to breakthroughs.

Every new hire here gets a notepad and a pen to jot down any questions. Many of us have a messy document where we just have a running list of them.

We also believe in keeping the channels open, so people can hop on a chat to talk through blockers or untangle the things that don’t quite make sense yet. If you aren’t asking questions, you’re probably not taking the kind of smart risks that lead to big results. Years ago, we asked, “Shouldn’t a registered agent have tools to do more than collect mail?” We’re still answering that question with website hosting, phone service, and a bit of snark.

4. Celebrate the messy bit in the middle

Half-built ideas. Whiteboards with too many lines and partly filled-in product maps. That bit of duct tape is holding your new prototype together for now. Just a few of our favorite things.

Everyone loves a shiny final product, but innovation is born in the mess. The sketch that didn’t work, that lets you draw the one that almost worked.

To get to that shine, you have to have something to polish.

Stay Curious with Us

OK, it’s two hours later, you’re still at your computer without forming your business because you got too far down the rabbit hole that is new business formation on the internet. Should Cheshire Tea be an LLC? A BCORP?

You take a break. You warm up that tea you stopped drinking 15 minutes into white knuckling your Secretary of State’s dubious formation website, and you’re ready to get back to it. Cheshire Tea is coming, hell or high water.

Maybe along the way, you also asked yourself, “Is wading through all these regulations really the best use of my time? There has to be an easier way to get this business set up and find all the tools I need to get it rolling, right?”

There is. We’re here for you. We’re also the kind of people who tinker and wonder and ask “Why not?” The folks who have too many tabs open and just can’t help but dig a little deeper.

That curiosity is how we build tools that actually help businesses do business. It’s how we’ve created a foundation that is about our products, not selling your data to third parties for quick bucks.

If that sounds like your kind of partner, well… you’re our kind of person. Our goal is to make starting your business as simple as possible, so you can get back to asking and answering the questions that will make your dreams come true.