Bobadilla v. The Blank Page
On starting a business, the SEAP program, and why a lawyer asking questions is worth more than a coach with answers.
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from sending out hundreds of job applications and hearing nothing back. Not rejection. Nothing. The modern job market has produced a strange and demoralizing dynamic where a single posting can generate thousands of applications, recruiters are buried under volume they can't possibly process, and a qualified person can spend months doing everything right and still feel invisible. It's not a personal failure - it's a structural one. And for the person sitting in that silence, deciding to build something for themselves instead of waiting for someone else to choose them isn't giving up. It's making a different (and arguably braver) bet on their own judgment and their own work.
That bet deserves the right foundation. Building a business is one of the most meaningful things a person can do with their time and energy, and the early decisions matter more than most people realize. The entity structure you choose, the contracts you sign, the way you set up your employment practices and protect your intellectual property, these aren't administrative details you get to circle back to later. They're the foundation. And like any foundation, they're much cheaper to get right at the beginning than to fix after the structure is already up.
What SEAP Is and Why It Exists
Most people have never heard of the Washington State Self-Employment Assistance Program. SEAP is a state program that allows eligible unemployment recipients to continue receiving benefits while building a business instead of conducting a traditional job search. It exists specifically for the person who has decided that self-employment is the right path and needs structured support to get there. Rather than requiring participants to document job applications they may never hear back on, SEAP redirects that energy into building something real.
Eligibility is determined by the Washington State Employment Security Department. If you're currently receiving unemployment benefits and considering starting a business, it's worth checking whether you qualify. The program is underutilized largely because most people don't know it exists, which is one of the reasons I applied to become an approved provider.
Business Law Foundations for New Entrepreneurs
Understory Advising PLLC is an approved SEAP provider offering the Business Law Foundations for New Entrepreneurs program, a structured curriculum designed for people in the early stages of starting a business who need foundational legal and operational knowledge to move forward.
The program is offered in two tracks. The group track consists of six two-hour sessions, meeting in a small cohort of no more than seven participants, covering the core curriculum together with room for real-time discussion and customization based on what's actually in the room. The individual track consists of twelve one-hour sessions scheduled one on one, moving at the participant's pace and focused entirely on their specific business.
Both tracks cover four core topics. Getting Legal: which covers entity structure, the corporate veil, business bank accounts, registered agent requirements, and the practical setup steps required to actually open and operate a business. The Paper: which covers contract fundamentals, the clauses every business owner needs to understand, and how to read an agreement before signing it. The People: which covers the legal distinction between employees and contractors, what needs to be in an offer letter, and the most common ways small businesses create liability through their hiring practices. And The Risk Map: a guided inventory of the participant's own business to identify where their legal and operational exposure actually is.
Cohorts and individual participants also choose two elective topics based on their specific business needs, from a menu that includes commercial leases, insurance, intellectual property and branding, vendor and client contracts, regulatory compliance, and what to do legally when a business isn't working and needs to be wound down or restructured.
One on one business counseling with me is available to all participants throughout the program. Technical assistance on specific legal and operational questions is also available at a reduced rate for program participants.
Why I Never Used a Coach
I should be honest about something before I tell you why having a lawyer in your corner is different. I've never used a business coach. Not because I think coaching is without value for everyone, but because it was never the right fit for how I think and what I actually needed.
The coaching I encountered tended toward talking more than asking. It came from a place of already knowing, offering frameworks and formulas and one size fits all advice that didn't account for the specific shape of my specific situation. Work harder. Show up more on social media. Manifest the outcome. None of it addressed the actual operational and legal questions I was sitting with, and none of it expressed much genuine curiosity about what was actually going on in my business before offering a prescription.
What I needed (and what most early stage founders actually need) wasn't someone to cheer for my idea. It was someone to ask good questions about it. Someone who wanted to understand what was written down versus what was just institutional knowledge rattling around in my head. Someone who would give me a different way to think about a problem rather than tell me not to worry about it. Someone not bogged down in the way things have always been done.
That's a different kind of support. And as it turns out, it's exactly what a lawyer with a genuinely curious and slightly contrarian brain is built to provide.
What A Lawyer Actually Does In That First Conversation
When a new entrepreneur comes to me with a business idea, I spend most of the first conversation asking questions. What's written down? What exists only in your head? What have you already decided and what are you still figuring out? What does the business look like on paper versus what does it look like in practice? Who else is involved and what have you told them?
I'm not doing this to be difficult. I'm doing it because the answers to those questions tell me where the gaps are. And in a new business, the gaps are almost always where the problems eventually surface. The contract you wrote yourself because you just needed to get started and you figured you'd clean it up later. The verbal agreement with a partner that felt solid at the time but has no documentation behind it. The intellectual property you created before you had an entity, which means it may not belong to the entity at all. These aren't hypotheticals. They're the things I see consistently in businesses that are otherwise being run by smart, hardworking people who just didn't know what they didn't know at the beginning.
I'd rather give someone a different way to think about a risk than tell them not to worry about it - an approach that’s comfortable in the short term and occasionally very expensive later. A different framework for thinking about the risk, one that accounts for the actual shape of their business and their actual exposure, is more useful even when it's less comfortable.
The Thing About Having Someone Find The Holes
Having someone in your corner whose job it is to find the weaknesses in your plan requires a specific kind of trust. It's not the same as having someone who's enthusiastic about your idea. Enthusiasm is easy to find and feels good in the moment. Someone who asks the hard question, who points out the clause you missed or the assumption you haven't tested or the gap between what your contract says and how you've been operating, is doing something different. They're trying to make the thing stronger and they're doing it because they want it to succeed, not because they want to be right.
That relationship is thrilling when it works. It's also the most useful thing you can have in the early stages of building a business, when the decisions are still reversible and the foundation is still being poured. Later is harder. Later is more expensive. Later is when the gap between what you thought you had and what you actually had becomes visible in a way that costs real money.
You worked hard to get to the point of building this. You're doing it in a moment when the traditional employment path isn't working the way it used to, when the promise of send enough applications and something will come through has stopped being reliable for a lot of people. You deserve to build it right. With someone who's genuinely curious about what you're creating, genuinely invested in making it structurally sound, and genuinely willing to ask the question that makes you stop and think before you sign something you can't unwind.
That's what this program is for. And it's available to you whether you're navigating SEAP eligibility or just ready to build something with the right foundation under it.
How To Enroll
If you're a Washington State unemployment recipient interested in the SEAP program, start by confirming your eligibility with the Employment Security Department at esd.wa.gov. Once you've confirmed eligibility, you can enroll in the Business Law Foundations for New Entrepreneurs program at understoryadvising.com/seap.
If you're not a SEAP participant but you're in the early stages of building a business and want the same foundational legal and operational support, the program is available to you as well. Same curriculum, same one on one access, same commitment to asking the questions that make your business stronger before something else does.
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