Advice and Advisors

Getting great advice can be critical to your startup and help you be sucessful in life. If the advice is received at the right time, it can propel you further forward then if the advice is poorly timed. There is also subtle differences which are hard to detect. Such as good advice versus bad advice or good advisors versus bad advisors.

Great advice should be tested and then taken. Bad advice should be ignored. But, how do you differentiate between good and bad advice?

Finding Advisors

When seeking advice, identify people suited to answer the specific question you have. If they have already solved the problem for their business, and your businesses are aligned, they are a good target to seek advice from.

Many people attempt to seek advice or get advisors which aren’t suited to give them advice. A simple test to identify if the person should give you advice is this. Have they solved this problem before? This is the definition of an advisor. An advisor is someone who has already solved this problem.

For instance, would you ask a car mechanic how to start a business? Probably not.

However, what if the mechanic owned his business and franchised the business out. In addition, there was a 6-month wait to get your car into his shop? If you are seeking advice on franchising, customer acquisition strategy, or having a service people love, he may be the right person to seek advice from.

Read. Then Seek Advice.

You can also seek advice from people’s written word rather than their mouth. If they have a blog, read every article. If they have written a book, go read it. Then read it again. Search the pages and chapters for your answer.

If after reading the book twice you still have unanswered questions, drop the person an email or tweet explaining you’ve read their works attempting to find an answer but can’t find an answer to this specific question. If you reach out to potential advisors this way, it will pay off in spades.

Diversify and Conquer

You should also seek advice from people who have large domain knowledge about things you don’t know. I know a weakness of mine is business, marketing, and sales. I find people to learn about these subjects on a daily basis. I recently sought advice on channel sales and partnerships. The advice I received was eye-opening and perfectly timed.

I also seek advice on subjects that I already know well. Having a group of peers that I can bounce ideas off and ask advice to is incredibly important. The more I learn about any subject, the more I realize how little I actually know about the subject. This is why having a group of peers with similar interests and knowledge bases are important. As your knowledge paths fork, you can benefit from knowing one another.

Bad Advice

I have received advice in the past which seemed important, but, once tested didn’t hold true. The execution and expectations weren’t realistic. This may be true for the advice I recently received. However, I have developed a framework for differentiating between good and bad advice.

Bad advice has the following format:

You should do A, because of B and C.

Alternatively, this is the form of good advice:

You should do A, because this paper by Gartner says B, and I know this other company is looking for solutions that do A. Let me put you in contact with them in order for you to hash those ideas out.

It is a subtle difference, but, good advice has supporting evidence. Keep in mind, actual advice is different than things disguised as advice, such as feature requests. Also, good advisors can still give bad advice. If an advisor gives bad advice, try to ask probing questions to understand the evidence they have for stating B and C.

Also remember even bad advice could be good advice, cleverly disguised. The bad advice could be dead on, but you, not the advisor will have to test this advice to see if it is true.