I don’t give business advice because I’m not qualified to give people business advice. I get hit up with new business ideas at least a couple of times a week. Some people have new ideas and other people want to know about reducing churn rates or increasing the LTV of their current customers. Weird, businessy stuff.
Trust me, I’m flattered that people value my opinion enough to ask, but the reality is that I’m new at this too. I know how to do some businessy things in my business, but whether or not my methods work for your business is a totally different story.
No one should know your business better than you do.
I can share my opinion or give you some feedback based on the information I have, but I’m not in your business every day. You are.
What’s mildly frustrating is that a lot of the people asking these types of questions are people who aren’t spending enough time on their business. They’re reading articles on Forbes and chatting it up in GrowthHacker threads. They’re spending a whole lot of time strategizing and thinking that they can somehow skip over the difficult steps.
There’s no replacement for doing the work. You can’t growth hack your way past busting your ass.
Stop asking me about your personal brand, and start doing some work - Gary Vaynerchuk
Poetic, isn’t it?
That quote is an excerpt from one of the more epic posts I’ve ever seen on Instagram.
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Full post at https://instagram.com/p/5m_Dwvo-dC/ Full post at https://instagram.com/p/5m\_Dwvo-dC/\[/caption\]
Gary goes on:
For the first decade of my professional career, I kept my damn mouth shut.
Seriously, go and Google it. You won’t find a single piece of content from me that pre-dates WLTV (Wine Library TV).
So what the hell was I doing?
I was working. It stuns me that people keep asking about how to start a personal brand; how to be a “YouTube personality” without having a clear understanding of what comes before that, which is actually knowing something about something. It’s this notion that is so prevalent right now, which is that you can just come out of nowhere and build your brand through various tactics. To position yourself as an expert is difficult, but most people aren’t asking the first important question, which is: expert in what? What do you want to provide people with? What are you great at? What do you love? What is your legacy going to be (because legacy is always above currency)?
Knowing Something Is a Requirement
Seriously, it’s not a difficult concept, but it seems to be completely foreign to so many.
Know. Your. Shit.
We shouldn’t be opening our mouth to anybody until we know for a fact that we can be considered an authority in our respective realms.
I’m definitely not an expert when it comes to business, so I don’t give business advice. Period.
Become a true expert in your field. Don’t be a ninja or a rock star or a guru. Be an expert. Learn more about [insert awesome thing you love] than anybody else. Then you can open your mouth.
Sadly, platforms like Clarity are growing at breakneck speed. If you’re not familiar with Clarity, it’s this really awesome service that lets seemingly anyone charge anyone else for their “expertise” or advice.
https://twitter.com/rob\_neu/status/575775499063951361
Never mind that none of the people charging 900 number rates for a fraction of the satisfaction have any vested interest in your success, and have absolutely nothing to lose by giving you bogus advice.
I guess you could leave them a bad review. That might sting for a minute until they start preying on the next insecure sucker willing to pay $8.99 a minute for a roadmap to failure.
I don’t necessarily believe that everyone giving advice on Clarity has bad intentions, but I also know that my lawyer wouldn’t ding my credit card for 24 bucks after hanging up the phone. Be weary of where you seek professional counsel.
Be Confident and Trust Your Gut
You know your business.
I repeat.
You know your business.
No one knows your business better than you do.
You should seek advice and feedback from people you trust, but blindly giving priority to the opinion of a stranger over your own intuition is ludicrous.
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. The faster you make mistakes, the faster you’ll find a clear path to succeeding in big ways. Endlessly “growth hacking” is never going to move you forward, but confident decisions and hard work will.
I’m at least 7 years away from being able to call myself an expert in entrepreneurship, so if you’d like to get on my calendar now for a Clarity call in 2022, I’ll try and keep my schedule open.
Or I’ll just continue to keep my damn mouth shut.
I’m guessing it’ll probably be the latter.
Awesome business monkey graciously donated by Pascal