Founder Friday is a weekly guest post written by a founder who’s based in or hails from the Silicon Prairie. Each month, a topic relevant to startups is presented and founders share lessons learned or best practices utilized on that topic. October’s topic is learning from mistakes.

About the author: Christopher Kingsley is the founder and CEO of 42, a digital agency and software lab in Lincoln.

You know that thing you totally need to do the next step, and when you get it everything will be great and you’ll finally be able to do stuff at a higher level? That new machine is gonna make everything possible, the new sales channel is gonna change everything, and this new update is right around the corner and everything will be different. Sure, others don’t understand why the thing is so important, but you know it will change the game.

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Simply put, my biggest mistakes in business have all revolved around the belief that any one thing is going to make all the difference. After eight years in business, our company has done many different things and we have succumbed to this mistaken perception multiple times in our history.

Back in 2007-08, when our company was predominantly producing immersive tours of golf courses, real estate and private aviation, there was this revolutionary device that we just had to have in order to get to the next level. The PanoScan Mark 3 was the most advanced panometric scanning device on the market, a 22.5mm 6-foot fisheye robot capable of capturing a high-dynamic range, 360-degree image at 120 megapixels in under eight seconds! This thing is a monster, like military-grade, crime-scene scanning, haunt your dreams, Johnny Five is Alive type of a monster.

We waited months for ours to be built, so excited about what we could finally do once we had the PanoScan. Only thing was, we didn’t need all that power to shoot beautiful immersive panoramas, we had been doing that for years with other cameras and the robot wasn’t a game-changer. We have used the camera system far less than we anticipated and could have done everything we were doing and did since without the $50,000 device depreciating on our books, gathering dust.

Our second mistake of that ilk was needing more staff to do more things and that bigger is always better. By the middle of 2012, our team had swelled to more than 26 full-time people doing everything from our most important client work to playing video games for half the day. Our payroll jumped and we had to take on more and more other work to accommodate our hungry bottom line. We had spent six months building out our new office space and knew that with all the new team, investment and new space that everything would change into high gear.

Over time we realized that almost half our team, while awesome people and friends, were not as expert nor as committed to the grind as our core group that slaves away for our success. As we are not corporate thugs and don’t just hand out pink slips, we went about securing jobs for 12 different team members at other companies and it was a heart-wrenching process.

Needless to say, the office is cool, but didn’t make the difference, the extra team ended up being more of a burden than a catalyst, and the investment was mostly consumed by the poor decision to have such a massive overhead because bigger is often not better at all. Better is better, nothing else matters.

My friend, investor and mentor, Steve Kiene of Nebraska Global often reminds people that the “just around the corner” mentality has ruined many otherwise great companies that could not get past the stage of thinking something was going to happen. If you and your company can consistently make it happen, then no one corner matters more than another and you can gain clients, lose clients, have good days and bad, without betting the farm all the time.

Over the years we have learned the most valuable lesson I could impart to any entrepreneur in any field: Any one thing that changes your company is luck or chance and rarely lasts. Building a strategy that gets applied and modified to make things happen consistently over time at your company is how you make a business grow and last. No machine, person, idea or fancy software is going to make all the difference that can only come from a united team working toward long-term goals. Take your time, remember that everything is an interconnected system and not just islands of vision and execution.

Our company has just finished the three best quarters in our history, we have the most powerful team we have ever had, with more expertise, growth and commitment than we have seen before, and 2014 will be our most profitable year yet. With the right attitude, expertise, persistence and counsel you can get through any of the storms, have dreams, but as they say, “Vision without execution is just hallucination.” We don’t have as much daily fun as we used to—fewer nerf guns, video games and RC cars—but we have better lives, more consistent advancement, produce better work and we rarely believe the hype.