There’s a peculiar trap that catches many entrepreneurs: they know they’re building in the wrong location, but they convince themselves that careful, deliberate work will somehow compensate for the fundamental disadvantage. This is backwards thinking.If you’ve realized your business is in a suboptimal location—whether that’s geographical, market-wise, or strategic—your response should be the opposite of what intuition suggests. You need to move faster, not slower. You need to be more aggressive, not more cautious.
The mathematics of bad locations are unforgiving. Every day you spend there is a day where the structural disadvantages compound against you. Maybe you’re in a city where talent is scarce and expensive. Maybe you’re in a market where customer acquisition costs are three times what they’d be elsewhere. Maybe you’re operating in a regulatory environment that adds friction to every transaction. Whatever the specific disadvantage, it’s charging you rent every single day.
Moving slowly in a bad location is like trying to swim upstream while also stopping to perfect your stroke technique. You’re expending energy fighting the current while the current continues to push you backward. The longer you stay, the more energy you burn, and the further behind you fall relative to competitors who chose better.
This creates a cruel dynamic. Time spent in the wrong place doesn’t just cost you the direct disadvantages of that place. It also costs you opportunity cost as better-positioned competitors pull ahead. It costs you team morale as people grind against unnecessary obstacles. It costs you investor confidence as they watch you struggle with problems others don’t face. These secondary costs often exceed the primary ones.
The counterintuitive move is to compress your timeline dramatically when you’re in a bad spot. If you originally planned to spend two years validating and building, cut that to six months. If you thought you’d methodically test ten approaches, test three and pick one. Make decisions with 70% of the information instead of 90%. Accept that you’ll make more mistakes per unit time but understand that you need to escape the bad location before it bleeds you dry.
Speed becomes a compensating advantage. When you’re fighting structural disadvantages, velocity can be your edge. You can’t out-resource competitors in better locations, but you might be able to out-hustle them. You can’t eliminate the friction in your environment, but you can move fast enough that it doesn’t accumulate into an insurmountable barrier.
This applies whether you’re literally in the wrong geography or metaphorically in the wrong market position. Maybe you launched a product in a category that’s being disrupted and you need to pivot. Maybe you raised money at terms that are slowly strangling you. Maybe you hired for a strategy you’ve since abandoned. In all these cases, the clock is your enemy and speed is your ally.
The psychological challenge is real. Working fast in difficult conditions is exhausting. It’s tempting to slow down, to be more methodical, to feel like you’re building something sustainable. But sustainability in a bad location is often an illusion. You’re not building a foundation; you’re trying to reach escape velocity.There’s also the sunk cost fallacy at play. You’ve already invested time and effort in this location or strategy. Surely working harder and longer will eventually pay off? But this thinking ignores the opportunity cost of staying versus the benefit of relocating or pivoting. The relevant question isn’t what you’ve already spent, but what your next unit of time will yield here versus elsewhere.
The right mental model is triage. You’re not trying to build the perfect business in a bad location. You’re trying to get to a better location, and everything should be subordinate to that goal. Build the minimum viable product that lets you prove something. Acquire the minimum viable traction that lets you raise the next round. Reach the minimum viable scale that lets you relocate or pivot from a position of strength rather than desperation.
Some founders confuse this advice with recklessness. Moving fast doesn’t mean being stupid. It means being ruthlessly prioritized. It means making reversible decisions quickly and irreversible decisions as late as possible. It means testing assumptions through action rather than analysis. It means accepting good enough when perfect would take too long.
The hardest part is often admitting you’re in a bad location in the first place. Pride and optimism can blind you to structural disadvantages. You want to believe that hard work conquers all, that your unique insight or capabilities will overcome environmental headwinds. Sometimes that’s true, but more often it’s a recipe for grinding yourself down.
If you find yourself working significantly harder than competitors for worse results, that’s usually not a skill issue. That’s a location issue. And the solution isn’t to work even harder in the same place. It’s to work faster to get somewhere better.
The goal is to spend the minimum time necessary in the bad location to gather what you need—proof points, revenue, learning, connections—and then move. Think of it as a sprint through hostile territory rather than building a permanent base. Get what you came for and get out.
This is why you see successful companies sometimes make moves that look rushed or half-baked to outsiders. They recognize they’re in an untenable position and they’re optimizing for exit speed, not local perfection. They launch products that aren’t quite ready. They enter new markets before fully conquering old ones. They pivot before completely exhausting their current approach. To observers it looks impulsive, but it’s often the result of clear-eyed assessment of their position.The ultimate irony is that by trying to be careful and thorough in a bad location, you often end up having to work harder and suffer more than if you’d just moved fast and gotten out quickly. The careful approach extends your exposure to the disadvantages. The fast approach minimizes it.
So if you know you’re in the wrong place, don’t hunker down. Don’t try to make it work through sheer determination. Set a tight deadline, move with urgency, and focus everything on reaching a better position. The bad location will still extract its price, but you can minimize how much you pay by minimizing how long you stay.