Bobadilla v. Choosing a Name
On monkey tail trees, the work nobody notices, and why I named it what I named it.
Before you can open a business bank account, you need an LLC. Before you have an LLC, you need a name. That's where Understory Advising PLLC started. Not with a branding session or a focus group or a naming consultant. Sitting at the kitchen table, with a blank field in a Washington Secretary of State filing that needed something in it before I could move on to the next step.
I've started a business before. When I opened my Pilates studio, the name came from a bird. Hummingbirds are my favorite, the way they hit the brakes midair is stunning. That one was easy. This time I knew it had to be a tree.
The Monkey Tail Tree
I didn't learn about monkey puzzle trees from a book. I learned about them from my mom, on walks through Tacoma's North End, where she grew up. We always called it the monkey tail tree. I was a kid who loved the living world more than most kids I knew, and the monkey tail tree was the one that stopped me every time. It looked wrong by every standard I had for what a tree was supposed to look like. The branches spiral out in a pattern so dense and deliberate that it seems engineered by something that didn't get the memo about how trees work. It looks like it shouldn't. It has worked for millions of years.
Those trees were planted in the North End and the Stadium District by Tacoma's founding families in the late 1800s and early 1900s, people who were building neighborhoods they expected to last and chose a tree that would outlive them. Some of those same trees are still standing. I see them in University Place where we live now. I see them on walks around my office in the Stadium District. The tree that stopped me as a kid on walks with my mom, and is a favored waypoint on walks with my own kids, is now the tree in my firm's logo, which feels less like a branding decision and more like something that was always going to happen.
The monkey puzzle is now endangered in its native Chile. Here, in the neighborhoods where Tacoma's builders planted it a century ago, it's still growing.
The Layer Nobody Notices
The name came quickly. The thinking behind it had been accumulating for years.
The understory is the layer of the forest that exists below the canopy, in the shade, doing structural work that nobody up in the sunlight ever sees or thinks about. New growth takes hold there. The next generation of the forest establishes itself there. The canopy gets all the attention. The understory is what makes the canopy possible.
I spent over a decade as an in-house attorney. Most of that work was invisible by design. The contract that got negotiated correctly before anyone signed it. The compliance program that caught the problem before it became a problem. The governance decision that felt boring in the moment and prevented something expensive later. The forced checkbox in a new app that saved six months of rework. None of that work shows up in a press release. It shows up in what doesn't happen, in the lawsuit that wasn't filed, the regulator that didn't come knocking, the deal that closed cleanly because the paper was right. The structural work that gets ignored while everyone focuses on how things look leads to a lot of problems. I've seen it from the inside enough times to know.
Small business ownership has the same dynamic. The LLC that's maintained correctly. The offer letter that's properly drafted before the first hire. The vendor agreement that reflects the key terms of the relationship. None of it is glamorous. All of it matters more than it looks like it does.
The understory metaphor felt honest in a way that most firm names don't. It said something true about the work rather than something aspirational about the outcome.
The Gunner Who Skipped the Blazers
In law school they have a word for the students who raise their hand too much, who finish the reading before anyone else, who seem to be moving faster than the situation requires. They call them gunners, and it is not always a compliment.
I was a gunner. I moved fast, thought clearly, and made decisions while other people were still framing the question. That tendency, which I imagine occasionally annoyed my classmates, turned out to be a genuinely useful professional trait. It meant I never had to do the firm associate track that most lawyers my age spent years enduring. I never had to do work I found boring to earn the right to do work I found interesting. I fell into anti-money laundering and payment card industry compliance out of college, before I even had a law degree, and by the time I graduated I already had the substantive expertise that most lawyers spend years in firms trying to build. I haven’t owned a blazer since graduation, and I can’t imagine an occasion for which I could be convinced to buy one.
The thing about moving fast and thinking clearly is that people sometimes mistake it for shallowness. If something looked easy, maybe it wasn't hard. If the answer came quickly, maybe it wasn't thought through. That's backwards. The work that looks easy is usually easy to see because it's been thought through completely. The understory does its work quietly and structurally and without anyone noticing. That's not a sign that the work is simple. It's a sign that the work is done right.
One of the compliments I appreciate most is when someone observes that I'm both a deep thinker and a fast thinker at the same time. I've worked hard to be both. Just because it looked fast doesn't mean I didn't put a lot of thought into it. I'm good at this.
The Living World
I try to stay connected to the living world rather than the material one. It's something I work at and something I try to model for my kids. Life seems more joyful when you're paying attention to what's living around you rather than what you own or what you've accumulated. Birds. Trees. The particular way light moves through a forest understory in the late afternoon. The fact that the business cycle and the forest cycle run on the same logic, growth and competition and succession and the quiet structural work that happens in the shade while everyone's looking at the canopy.
The monkey tail tree that stopped me on walks through Tacoma's North End as a kid is the tree in my firm's logo. The layer of the forest nobody notices is the metaphor for the work I do. The name arrived quickly, the way things do when you've been thinking about something for a long time without knowing you were thinking about it.
That's what Understory Advising is named for. I think it was always going to be called that.
- m
