The Problems Everyone Else Has Learned to Live With: Joanne Frederick’s 30-Year Business Lesson

Excerpt

After more than 30 years in business, Joanne Frederick says some of the best opportunities are difficult problems organizations have become so accustomed to that they no longer see them clearly. Her experience offers entrepreneurs lessons about trust, preparation, credibility, pattern recognition and finding opportunities others overlook.

Entrepreneurs are constantly told to look for the next big thing. Watch the trends. Find a rapidly growing market. Spot the new technology before everyone else does. Get there first.

Joanne Frederick’s career suggests another place to look for business opportunities: the old problem everyone has stopped questioning.

After more than three decades working in government markets, Frederick, CEO of Government Market Strategies (GMS), says one of the most important turning points in her career was recognizing that she is drawn to difficult, interconnected problems—especially those that have existed for so long that people inside a system begin accepting them as simply “the way things work.”

Those problems can be unusually valuable because they require more than a clever idea. Solving them means understanding why the problem exists, which decisions created it, where the friction actually sits and what would have to change for a better approach to work.

That curiosity ultimately influenced the kinds of work Frederick’s business pursued. Instead of simply repeating what the company already knew how to do, she says it continued moving toward challenges that required the team to learn more, connect more pieces and question assumptions.

That approach offers a larger entrepreneurial lesson. You do not always have to invent a completely new problem to create a valuable business. Sometimes the opportunity is seeing an existing problem more clearly than the people who have learned to live with it.

Key Takeaways

• Valuable business opportunities are not always new problems. Some are old frustrations customers or organizations have normalized.
• Frederick’s business began with trust and difficult work rather than a carefully designed entrepreneurial master plan.
• An introduction may create a first opportunity, but repeated business depends on what happens after the introduction.
• Preparation becomes a competitive advantage when accumulated knowledge helps you recognize patterns other people miss.
• Good entrepreneurs look beyond what customers request and try to understand the underlying reason the problem exists.
• Credentials and certifications can create access, but they are not substitutes for usefulness, knowledge and delivery.
• Small businesses can often compete with larger organizations by staying close to the problem, moving quickly and questioning assumptions that bigger systems no longer notice.

Frederick’s Business Did Not Begin With a Perfect Entrepreneurial Plan

Founder stories often look much tidier in hindsight.

Years later, it can sound as though an entrepreneur identified an opportunity, wrote the plan, assembled the right team and methodically built the company that exists today. Frederick remembers the beginning differently.

“It started with trust,” she says.

A colleague had a personal connection who needed help with a major project as the government moved away from the CHAMPUS Reform Initiative demonstration program and created the structure that would become TRICARE. The working environment was radically different from today. Frederick remembers sharing files with elaborate paper check-in systems, tracking versions on 3.5-inch disks and spending years flying to client sites almost every Sunday before returning home late in the week.

No perfectly engineered entrepreneurial journey lay underneath it.

“There was a huge amount of work to be done, someone trusted our team to help do it, and we kept showing up and delivering,” she explains.

That is worth remembering in an era when entrepreneurship is often presented as a sequence of frameworks, pitch decks and launch strategies. Planning matters, but businesses also emerge because someone encounters a meaningful problem and discovers that people are willing to trust them to solve it.

The SBA’s guidance on market research and competitive analysis encourages entrepreneurs to examine demand, competition, market saturation and the specific needs they intend to serve. The research matters because an idea becomes commercially interesting only when it connects to a problem someone actually cares about.

Frederick happened to encounter that problem through a relationship. What mattered next was proving that the trust was justified.

Lesson 1: The First Opportunity and the Second Opportunity Are Won Differently

One of Frederick’s sharpest observations is about what happens after someone gives a young business its first chance.

“The first opportunity may come through a relationship, but the next one comes because you delivered,” she says.

That distinction applies to almost every service business.

Connections can make an introduction. A former colleague may recommend you. A friend might become a first customer. A conference conversation may lead to a meeting. A founder might happen to meet exactly the right person at exactly the right moment.

None of those events guarantee a durable business.

The second opportunity requires proof that the business can actually do what it promised. The third becomes easier when there are now two successful engagements behind you. Eventually, a company has enough evidence that customers no longer have to rely primarily on personal trust in the founder.

That is how a reputation compounds.

We saw a version of this in our LearningFromBigBoys profile of Groov founder Dan Cataldi and the process of building conviction through evidence. A brief opportunity put Groov’s product in front of NFL star Von Miller, but the encounter itself did not create the later relationship. The product had to work well enough that Miller became an authentic believer.

Different businesses, different markets, same principle: access creates the opportunity to prove something. It is not the proof itself.

Lesson 2: Credibility Is Built Before You Have a Long Résumé

When Frederick’s company was young, it didn’t have decades of organizational history to point to.

She says credibility initially came from the work itself: understanding the problem, being responsive, making good decisions and leaving the client in a better position than before. One successful assignment created confidence in the next until, eventually, the accumulated work became what businesses now call past performance.

This is useful for any founder who feels trapped by a lack of reputation.

A startup cannot make itself 20 years old. It cannot instantly manufacture hundreds of customers or dozens of case studies. What it can control is whether working with the company makes customers more or less comfortable using it again.

That includes the obvious things—quality, reliability and results—but also the less glamorous habits that often determine whether clients want another engagement. Respond when you say you will. Understand what the customer is trying to accomplish. Raise problems before they become crises. Make decisions thoughtfully. Finish the work.

PowerHomeBiz explores this idea in its guide to building a service business clients trust and recommend. Technical skill gets a company into the market, but reliability, communication and judgment often determine whether customers return.

For Frederick, credibility was never something created by saying the company was credible. It was the residue left behind by repeated delivery.

Lesson 3: Preparation Eventually Turns Into Pattern Recognition

Frederick describes preparation as one of the most important habits of her career.

She reads extensively because she wants to understand programs, policy, history, numbers, people and the operating environment around the work. Over years, she says, those pieces begin creating what she describes as a mental map. You start recognizing patterns because the latest development is not arriving without context; it connects to decisions and events you have seen before.

That kind of expertise is easy to underestimate because it does not always look dramatic.

The experienced operator may appear to reach a conclusion quickly, but the judgment behind it could be built on thousands of hours of prior exposure. The entrepreneur knows which customer request signals a bigger problem, which metric deserves scrutiny, which supposedly new trend looks suspiciously familiar and which opportunity does not fit the company’s strengths.

This is one of the benefits small companies can borrow from sophisticated larger organizations without copying their bureaucracy.

In our article about Kecia Hielscher’s move from Nordstrom, Williams-Sonoma and Disney to Formulary 55, Hielscher demonstrates a similar advantage. Years spent understanding customers, merchandising and brands gave her frameworks she could apply inside a much smaller company.

The point is not that experience makes someone automatically correct. Experience becomes useful when the entrepreneur continues learning instead of treating yesterday’s answer as permanent.

Lesson 4: Do Not Confuse the Customer’s Request With the Customer’s Problem

This may be the most valuable lesson in Frederick’s interview for consultants, agencies and other B2B businesses.

Government buying decisions, she explains, are often layered on years of previous policy, budget, technology, operational and mission decisions. If a business understands that context, it can look at a new opportunity and recognize what the organization is really trying to accomplish. Without that knowledge, a vendor may respond only to the surface of the request.

The same mistake happens everywhere.

A customer asks for a redesigned website. Is the problem actually the website, or is the company struggling to convert qualified traffic?

A retailer asks for more social media content. Does it really need more content, or does it have a weak product position that more posts won’t fix?

A company says it needs AI. Does it actually need artificial intelligence, or does it have a slow workflow, fragmented data or repetitive manual process that might have several possible solutions?

Strong service businesses learn to hear both parts of the conversation: what the customer requested and why the customer believes it needs it.

That is also why the SBA recommends that entrepreneurs define the specific problems their businesses solve and use market research and competitive analysis to identify where a meaningful advantage exists.

Selling the requested deliverable may produce a transaction. Understanding the deeper problem can create a relationship.

Lesson 5: A Credential Can Create Access Without Creating Value

Frederick makes this point when discussing women-owned businesses entering government contracting.

“One of the biggest misunderstandings is that being a woman-owned small business is a strategy. It is not,” she says. The designation may create access to opportunities, but the company still has to provide what the government needs and show it can deliver.

The lesson travels well beyond government procurement.

Companies accumulate all kinds of credibility signals: certifications, awards, degrees, partnerships, memberships, investor names, accelerator logos and recognizable customers. Those things can matter. They may lower perceived risk or help get someone into the room.

They do not create customer value by themselves.

A certification cannot rescue a weak offer. An impressive client logo does not make the next project successful. Being “AI-powered” does not matter if the technology fails to solve a meaningful problem.

Women interested in Frederick’s perspective on leadership and building credibility can read our sister site’s interview, Joanne Frederick on Women’s Leadership, Public Service and Building What Comes Next. Her advice there is consistent with her entrepreneurial experience: credibility grows when people step forward, prepare thoroughly and accept responsibility for meaningful problems.

Lesson 6: The Best Problem May Be the One Everyone Stopped Seeing

This is where Frederick’s most interesting business lesson emerges.

After decades of working in complex systems, she says she increasingly found herself drawn to challenges embedded in everyday operations.

“I think one of the biggest turning points was recognizing that I am most energized by difficult challenges—even the ones people inside the system have stopped seeing clearly,” she explains.

Organizations adapt to friction.

Employees create a spreadsheet to compensate for software that does not work well. Then another spreadsheet appears to reconcile the first one. A manual approval process takes five days, but everyone plans around the delay because that is how it has always worked. Customers repeatedly call with the same confusing question, and the company hires more support staff rather than asking why the question keeps occurring.

Eventually the workaround becomes normal.

That normalization is interesting territory for entrepreneurs.

Instead of asking only, “What is new?” ask:

• What wastes people’s time every week?
• What process does everyone complain about but nobody owns?
• Which workaround has quietly become permanent?
• Where are customers using several tools because no one tool solves the complete problem?
• What expensive service continues to exist mostly because buyers assume there is no alternative?
• What has changed in technology, regulation or customer behavior that makes an old approach worth questioning again?
• Which frustrating process would people gladly stop doing if a credible alternative existed?

Those questions can reveal opportunities a trend report will never show you.

Lesson 7: Do Not Chase Every Opportunity That Looks Like Revenue

Frederick’s new comments reinforce something she told PowerHomeBiz in an earlier interview: GMS tries to chase problems rather than merely chase contracts.

PowerHomeBiz explored that philosophy in Chase Problems, Not Contracts: A Smarter Way to Build a Consulting Business. Frederick’s argument is not that contracts or revenue are unimportant. It is that an opportunity makes more strategic sense when it is attached to a problem the company understands deeply and is well positioned to solve.

That discipline protects a business from becoming whatever the latest customer asks it to become.

Early-stage businesses understandably say yes a lot. Revenue matters, and every project can feel precious. But eventually, indiscriminate opportunity chasing creates a company with no coherent expertise.

A project can pay well while moving the business away from what it wants to become.

Frederick’s approach suggests a better filter: Does this work deepen our understanding of a problem we care about solving? Does it strengthen capabilities we want to own? Will the lessons from this engagement make us more valuable on the next one?

If not, the revenue may still be worthwhile. But at least the tradeoff is visible.

Lesson 8: Small Businesses Can Turn Proximity Into an Advantage

Large organizations possess obvious advantages: money, staff, established systems, recognizable brands and accumulated experience.

Small businesses have advantages too, but they often fail to use them deliberately.

A founder can sometimes speak directly with the customer who has the problem. A small team can change direction without negotiating through several layers of approval. Employees may see an entire workflow rather than one narrow piece of it. The company can test an idea before a large organization finishes scheduling the meeting about whether it should test the idea.

That proximity is especially valuable when the business is solving a problem that has been normalized.

Our LearningFromBigBoys story about how Rugs Direct has survived repeated waves of technological change reaches a related conclusion. The technologies changed repeatedly, but the fundamental customer problem—helping someone feel confident buying a difficult-to-visualize product online—remained much more stable.

Entrepreneurs should pay attention to that distinction.

Trends change. Tools change. Technologies change. The human or organizational frustration underneath them may persist for years.

The business that understands that frustration deeply can change its solution without losing sight of why the solution needs to exist.

Joanne Frederick’s Lesson Is Really About Curiosity

It would be easy to reduce Frederick’s career to a story about government contracting, healthcare consulting or navigating complicated public-sector markets.

The larger lesson is curiosity.

She describes wanting to know why something works the way it does, how it became that way and whether it could work better. That habit eventually pulled her business toward harder problems rather than simply repeating familiar assignments.

Entrepreneurs often talk about curiosity as though it were a personality trait. In business, it can be an operating method.

Pay attention when a customer says, “We have always done it this way.” Ask why a seemingly simple task requires five approvals. Notice when employees build workarounds instead of using the official system. Listen for the frustration customers repeat so often that everyone else has stopped hearing it.

Those observations may never turn into businesses, and they still have to survive the tests of demand, competition, economics and execution. The SBA’s market-research guidance is a useful reminder that seeing a problem is only the beginning; entrepreneurs still need evidence that enough customers care about solving it.

But the search for opportunities does not have to begin with whatever everyone is talking about this week.

Sometimes the better question is what everyone stopped talking about years ago because they decided the problem was simply normal.

That may be exactly where a curious entrepreneur should start looking.

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