Ask ten experienced business owners what you should do, and you will get ten confident, contradictory answers. All of them will be sincere. Most of them will be useless.
This isn’t because those people are wrong. It’s because advice and conversation are different things, and we mostly ask for the first when we need the second.
What advice actually is
Advice is someone else’s conclusion, transplanted into your situation.
It was formed in a different business, with different constraints, a different client base, a different appetite for risk, and a different person running it. When someone tells you to raise your prices, they’re telling you what worked in their circumstances. They’re not wrong about their circumstances. They just don’t have yours.
There’s a harder problem underneath that. You cannot evaluate advice without the judgement you were hoping to borrow. If you knew enough to tell good advice from confident advice, you’d probably have solved the thing already. So you end up choosing between competing recommendations on the basis of who sounded most certain, which is a terrible selection criterion and the one almost everyone uses.
Advisers also suffer from a specific distortion: they remember what worked and rarely mention the ten other factors that made it work. Somebody who raised prices 40% and thrived will tell you to raise prices. They may not mention they’d just landed a flagship client, or that their market was tightening, or that they lost a third of their customers and were fine with it.
What a conversation does instead
A conversation doesn’t hand you a conclusion. It helps you reach one, and that difference compounds.
It forces you to describe the problem out loud. This does more than people expect. A surprising proportion of stuck decisions resolve during the explanation, before anyone has responded — because the act of making it coherent for someone else exposes what you’d been carrying as a vague weight.
It surfaces what you left out. People describing a business problem almost always omit something, and it’s almost always the thing that matters. You’ll describe a pricing problem for two minutes and then mention, in passing, that you dread the client calls. That’s the actual issue, and you wouldn’t have written it down.
It tests your reasoning rather than replacing it. “Why do you think that?” and “what happens if you’re wrong?” are worth more than any recommendation, because they operate on your judgement rather than substituting for it.
And it leaves you better equipped next time. Advice solves one problem, if it fits. Understanding the structure of the problem means you can handle the next three yourself.
The exception, stated plainly
Advice is genuinely better in one situation: when there’s a correct answer and you don’t know it.
How to register the business. Which contract clause protects you. Whether this is a tax-deductible expense. What the notice period legally has to be. These have right answers, the answers don’t depend on your temperament, and someone who knows should just tell you.
Take the advice. Don’t have a conversation about it.
The distinction is whether the question has an answer that exists independently of you. “What’s the VAT threshold” does. “Should I take this client” doesn’t — it depends on what you want your business to be, and nobody else can supply that.
How to ask for the right one
Most people ask for advice by default, then feel vaguely unhelped. A few adjustments change what you get back.
- Describe the situation before asking the question. “Here’s what’s happening” produces something far more useful than “what should I do about X.” The context is where the answer lives.
- Say what you’re inclined to do. This feels like it invites criticism. It is exactly what you want. “I’m thinking of doing X, and I’m not sure about it” gets your reasoning examined. “What should I do” gets you someone else’s default.
- Ask what they’d want to know. “What would you need to understand about my situation before you’d have a view?” The questions themselves tell you which variables matter.
- Ask about their case, not yours. “What did you do and what happened?” gives you evidence. “What should I do?” gives you their opinion of your business, which they’ve heard about for four minutes.
- Notice if they answer too quickly. Someone who tells you what to do in fifteen seconds hasn’t understood your situation. That’s not expertise; it’s pattern-matching to the last person who asked.
Being on the other side of it
Worth saying, because most of us give advice more often than we receive it, and it’s the easier half to do badly.
The impulse when someone brings you a problem is to solve it. It feels helpful, it’s efficient, and it demonstrates that you know things. It is also frequently the least useful thing available, and it’s often about you rather than them.
What generally serves people better: ask enough questions to actually understand the situation. Describe what you did in the comparable case, including what went wrong. Say plainly when you don’t have a view. And resist the urge to be decisive on someone else’s behalf about something you’ll never have to live with.
That takes longer and is less satisfying. It’s also the difference between someone leaving with your answer and leaving with their own.
Which is the whole point
Good advice, on the rare occasions it fits, solves one problem.
A good conversation leaves you slightly better at the category of problem — which matters considerably more, because you are going to face a great many more of them, and nobody is going to be available every time.
More on why the courses don’t fix this either, and on building the room where these conversations happen.
