What Elizabeth Holmes Teaches Real Businesses About Trust
If you’ve been anywhere near a movie theater or a group chat lately, you have probably heard about You Can See Everything, the new Elizabeth Holmes documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. It is strange, it is long, and everyone seems to be talking about it.
Underneath all the strangeness, it’s a story about how easy it is to look real without being real. Theranos had the polished brand, the glowing press and the famous board. What it didn’t have was a product that worked.
Most of the business owners I work with are the opposite. They have the real thing, built one client at a time, and they’re usually too busy doing the work to show it off. That difference starts with how a business gets built in the first place.
Boots on the ground vs. money up front
There are two very different ways to start a business. Most of the owners I work with started with boots on the ground: one client, then a referral, then a few more, with the business growing at the speed of real people actually paying for real work. It is slower, and it is often exhausting, but every step of growth is proof that the thing works.
The other way starts with investor money, and that comes with a particular kind of pressure. When you have raised a lot, you are expected to look big before you are big, and to show growth on a schedule whether or not the product is ready. Plenty of honest companies raise money and handle that well. But it is the pressure that bent Theranos: the story had to keep getting bigger, so the appearance got ahead of the reality and never caught up.
If you built your business the slow way, that is not a weakness to hide. It is the most trustworthy thing about you. Your job online is simply to make it visible.
Red flags when starting a new business
After 15 years of watching businesses start, grow and sometimes fall apart, I’ve noticed the same warning signs show up again and again. Whether you’re starting something yourself or sizing up someone else’s new venture, these are worth taking seriously:
- No profit in five years. Plenty of businesses take a while to get going, and that’s normal. But if five years in there’s still no profit, and the plan is to raise more money rather than sell more of the thing, the business is being kept alive by its story instead of its customers.
- Too many owners at the table. Several investors, partners or co-owners can sound like strength, but group decisions move slowly, everyone pulls in their own direction, and when things get hard, the group can combust. The more people who need to agree, the less likely anyone is to say “this isn’t working.”
- Obsessing over the first logo. A new business that spends months perfecting its logo, before a single customer knows it exists, is focused on looking like a business instead of being one. Your first logo just needs to be good enough. It will change, and that’s fine.
- Assuming launch day means customers. Opening the doors, publishing the website or posting the announcement doesn’t bring people in by itself. Nobody can book a business they can’t find, and getting found on Google takes steady, unglamorous work over time.
Notice that every one of these is about the gap between appearance and reality. Theranos is just the most expensive example.
Green flags when starting a new business
The good news is that the green flags are just as easy to spot, and none of them require a big launch or a pile of investor money:
- Selling something before building the perfect website. A real customer paying for a real thing is worth more than any homepage. The website can catch up.
- Knowing who you serve before the final branding. Nail down who you help, what you do for them and how it’s packaged first. The logo and colors are much easier to get right once you know who they’re for.
- Moving forward even when it isn’t perfect. Done and improving beats perfect and stuck, every single time.
- Meeting new people regularly. Most businesses are built on relationships long before they’re built on marketing.
- Being consistent. Showing up week after week, even quietly, is what turns a new business into a trusted one.
- Taking care of your body, mind and soul. You’re the engine of the whole thing. A burned-out owner can’t build anything that lasts.
- Learning every day. Reading business books, asking questions and staying curious keeps you growing along with the business.
None of these are about looking impressive. They’re about being real, and letting that show over time.
Theranos had the look without the substance
Theranos told the world it could run a long list of medical tests from a few drops of blood. It could not. What it did have was everything that makes a company look trustworthy at a glance:
- A polished brand and a confident, quotable founder
- Big-name press coverage and magazine covers
- An impressive board and well-known partners
- A story so good that people stopped asking for proof
That last one is the lesson. People decide who is real using shortcuts, because nobody has time to investigate everything. Holmes understood those shortcuts and borrowed them. She was eventually convicted of defrauding investors, but for years the shortcuts worked.
The people who got burned had something in common: at some point, something did not feel right, and the shortcuts talked them out of it. That is worth remembering any time you are sizing up a new business, whether it is a vendor, a partner or an agency. If it does not seem right, it probably is not. Promises that sound too fast, results that are guaranteed, a story that is bigger than anything you can actually verify: those are the moments to slow down and ask for proof.
The flip side matters just as much. Your future clients are running that same gut check on you. Give them nothing that feels off, and plenty they can check.
The real problem: real businesses that look less real than the fakes
Here is the part nobody says out loud. Those same shortcuts are how people decide whether to book you. A new patient choosing a pediatrician, someone looking for a counselor, a family comparing attorneys: none of them can see your skill from the outside. They can only see the signals.
And the internet is now full of businesses that are very good at signals and not much else. Fake listings, review farms, AI-written websites that sound impressive and say nothing. People have learned to be suspicious, which is healthy, but it means a quiet, honest business with a thin online presence can get filtered out with the fakes.
AI search makes this sharper. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overview for a recommendation, those tools are making the same trust judgment, just faster and at scale. If your signals are missing or inconsistent, you are not compared and rejected. You simply never come up.
You have probably tried a few things already to fix this, and I have a pretty good idea how that went. The good news is that real trust signals are not tricks. They are just the truth about your business, made easy to see.
Let them see everything
The title of the documentary is a little ironic, because for years people could not see what was really going on at Theranos. Your situation is the opposite. Everything about your business is real, and the work is simply letting people see it: a complete Google Business Profile, reviews that sound like real people, the same details everywhere, real faces and credentials anyone can check, and years of doing good work for real clients.
If you’re still in the early, messy stage of building something, my free guide, How to Run a Business That Doesn’t Drive You Crazy, is a good place to start.
If you are not sure how your business looks from the outside, that is exactly what we look at in a free consult. You will see your own visibility report, what is working, what is not, and what we would do about it, in plain English and without a pitch deck.
