I hate to say it, but a lot of the business advice you’re googling for is either outdated, inapplicable – or both.
Let’s face it, there’s too much advice out there these days – and yes, I am only making the problem worse. From your closest network of friends and contacts, to the furthest extremes of the net, your world is most likely populated by gurus who are more than happy to throw a constant stream of wise words your way.
In day-to-day life, choosing which advice to follow is somewhat easier than when it comes to business. Of course, there are hard decisions to be made from time to time, but gut feeling and a strong sense of morality or principle are often enough to get you through. Not so in business. The entrepreneur’s path is continually bisected by a myriad of minute technical decisions that need to be made, all of which have a potentially explosive effect on business? Sell on Amazon, or not? Increase Adwords budget, or decrease? Go with product x, or choose product y. And that’s often where so many people turn to google. Try it now – go to Google, and type in the words ‘should I’ – what suggestions do you get? Currently, for me, it’s
- Should I stay or should I go
- Should I buy an iPad
- Should I text him
- Should I upgrade to Lion
Not that it’s of any relevance, but my advice would be ‘go, yes, no and yes’ respectively.
There’s a lot of people with a lot of doubts out there, but there are more than enough ‘experts’ available to fill the gap. But what do you do when your ‘advice stream’ gets overloaded with repeating, differing and contradictory statements? How do you identify what’s most applicable to you.
I have to constantly remind myself that everyone (including me, of course) writes or speaks from their own perspective born of their own experience married with their own values.
Back when man sat around fires telling stories and eating dinosaurs, the wisdom imparted to younger generations by the elders could pretty much be accepted without question. When food is plentiful, stash some away for winter. Don’t get into fights you can’t win. When faced with bear, run in opposite direction. Life didn’t change much from year to year, and what worked a hundred years before, probably worked a hundred years later.
But now we live in a world that changes at breakneck speed. What’s here today is gone tomorrow. What worked this morning, might not work this afternoon. So beware advice that comes from ‘years of experience’ as we so often hear. It might just be outdated.
This is especially true in the internet era, when business models are being creating destroyed in a continuous, rapidly moving cycle. An entrepreneur might extol the virtues of a model that has worked well for him or her, and you might be tempted to go the same way, but ask yourself first – does this still apply?
If you read, in isolation, some of the ‘first wave’ blogs written by internet entrepreneurs who started before about 2005, you’d be inclined to think that with a little work you could be bringing in $40,000 a month just through blogging. If you read some of the stuff written over the last year or two, you might come to the conclusion that blogging is dead in the water for income generation. Before taking anything you read on the internet to heart, take a look at the post date first. I’m not saying that absolutely all advice has a sell-by date; nor that everything that was written yesterday is more useful than that written a year ago. It just pays to think about the landscape that gave rise to any particular piece, and consider whether it might have changed significantly since then.
Of course, it’s not just the passing of time that gives rise to irrelevancy. An entrepreneur, when giving advice out of experience, speaks from a singular perspective. Perhaps you operate in the same industry, with the same products, even with the same client base. But your business is ultimately yours and represents your unique combination of past decisions and future aspirations. What works for him, may not work for you. In fact, the reverse might be true, it might do your business harm.
At the end of the day, a business, at its core, is just a system to produce profits for its owner(s). Engineers define systems with formulae and algorithms, with their constants and variables. Each unique system is defined and described by a unique formula. When trying to discover the formula that describes a particular system, a good engineer will certainly look to the past and to similar systems and their underlying formulae. But he will realise that the object of his attention is unique, that he must experiment, tweak and iterate in order to discover the inputs and outputs of his system.
Each business is unique, and so is the formula that describes it. Learn to identify the variables and separate them from the constants, the concepts and ideas that change very little as times passes. Good customer service, proper branding, effective marketing, solid financial control – these are all concepts that have shaped businesses for decades, if not centuries, and the best advice stands the test of time and applies to the vast majority of businesses. Variables – the combination of factors that make your business unique, are much more individual and transient. Only you can find out what particular combination of products works for you, how much you should spend on adwords, whether you should sell on Amazon, Ebay, both or neither. Searching for advice can help you envisage and set up the system, but the variables that have to be plugged in are yours to discover through experimentation, test, success and failure.
Take what others say with a healthy dose of skepticism. Accept the uniqueness of your business. Accept that what worked for others, even in apparently identical circumstances, won’t necessarily work for you. Experiment and find your own formula.