In most situations, we are taught to plan first and act later. Building a house? Better start with some blue prints. Taking a road trip? It makes sense to select a destination and the roads you’ll take to get there. However, when you are starting a new business, planning should follow action.

Imagine you are sitting in a dark room. There is no sound. There are no windows. The air is scentless. Now answer one question, “Is it raining outside?”

Seems ridiculous, right? How can you know the weather if you are cooped up in a room with no sound, light, or smell?

Yet, I am too often confronted with a similar absurdity when I talk to hopeful entrepreneurs. They hand me a business plan with pro forma financial statements, a ten point marketing strategy, and an appendix for endless charts and graphs. It’s spiral bound and covered in plastic to protect it from coffee stains. It’s gorgeous. But I don’t care about this document, unless of course, the company is selling business plans.

Instead I ask one simple question:

“How many customers have paid you to solve this problem?”

The standard answer:

“Well, none yet, but…(insert excuse followed by inflated statistic that supports the value proposition)!”

ACTION is the only way to prove a business opportunity truly exists. Without action, a business plan is at best an educated guess and at worst a money pit waiting to swallow you whole, along with any investors naive enough to fund your hypothesis. Only after you have cash in hand and a line of happy customers high fiving the other, should you begin to plan the next five years of exponential growth for your thriving startup.

Now go take action and start something awesome!