There is a particular kind of business owner I meet constantly. She has bought the courses. She has the frameworks, the templates, the recorded masterclasses she fully intends to finish. She can explain her own problem more articulately than most consultants could.
And she is completely stuck.
Not because she lacks information. Because information was never the thing missing.
What courses are actually good at
I want to be fair to them first, because this isn’t an argument that learning is worthless.
Courses are excellent when you need a procedure you don’t have. How to set up the bookkeeping. How the tax filing works. What the legal structure options are. These have correct answers, the answers are the same for everyone, and somebody has already written them down properly.
If you don’t know how to do a thing that has a known method, buy the course. It will be faster and cheaper than working it out.
What they’re structurally unable to do
The problems that actually stall a business are almost never procedural.
Should I raise my prices, given this particular client list, in this market, with my current capacity? Should I fire this person, who is good at half the job? Is this opportunity worth taking, or is it the kind of revenue that eats a company? Am I underpricing because the market is soft, or because I’m afraid to ask?
No course can answer any of those, and not because the course is bad. Because the answer depends entirely on specifics the course doesn’t have access to — your numbers, your people, your appetite for risk, the thing you’re avoiding.
A course gives you a framework. What you need is someone who will look at your situation and tell you what they see.
Why we buy the course anyway
This is the part worth being honest about.
A course is purchasable. It has a price and a checkout. You can acquire it in ninety seconds. A useful conversation requires finding the right person, building enough trust that they’ll be frank, and then sitting in the discomfort of describing your problem out loud.
A course doesn’t judge you. Nobody watching a video knows your margin is embarrassing or that you’ve avoided a conversation for eight months. Telling a person means being seen not knowing something.
And buying a course feels like progress. It goes in the calendar. It’s an action. It produces the sensation of having addressed the problem without any of the risk of actually addressing it.
Which is why the courses pile up unfinished. They were never really bought to be watched. They were bought to relieve the anxiety of being stuck, and they do that job the moment the payment clears.
What a good conversation does instead
Four things, none of which scale, which is precisely why nobody sells them to you at 2am.
It works on your actual situation. Not the general case. Your client, your number, your employee. Specific advice about a specific problem is worth an enormous amount more than excellent advice about a hypothetical one.
It surfaces the thing you left out. People describing a problem out loud almost always reveal something they hadn’t planned to say — usually in the third or fourth sentence, usually the actual issue. That doesn’t happen while watching a video, because nothing is listening.
It gives you a real number. The single most valuable thing another owner can tell you is what they charge, what they pay themselves, what their margin actually is. Courses deal in ranges and principles. A peer tells you the figure, and the figure is what recalibrates you.
And it can tell you that you’re wrong. A course has no opinion about your plan. A person who knows your business can say “that won’t work, and here’s why” — which is uncomfortable, and is the entire value.
What I’ve seen across 77,000 members
I run the Women’s Entrepreneur Network, which has grown past 77,000 women in business, and the thing that surprised me most is how specific the useful questions are.
Nobody arrives asking for support in general terms. They arrive asking whether $3,000 is too much to charge for a particular package. Whether to keep a client who pays reliably and treats their staff badly. How to word a message to someone who owes them money without damaging the relationship.
Those questions have answers. The answers just live in other people’s experience rather than in a curriculum — and in almost every case, several women in the room have faced precisely that situation and can say what happened.
That’s not inspiration or encouragement. It’s information you cannot buy, because it isn’t written down anywhere.
How to get better conversations
Practical, because “find your people” is the sort of advice that sounds complete and helps nobody.
- Ask a specific question, not a general one. “How do I price better?” produces platitudes. “I charge $2,400 for this and it takes me eleven hours — what would you charge?” produces an answer.
- Say the embarrassing part. The useful conversation usually starts at the sentence you were planning to leave out. If you describe a tidied-up version of your problem, you’ll get advice about a problem you don’t have.
- Find people at a similar stage, not just people ahead of you. Someone two years further on has forgotten what this felt like. Someone six months ahead remembers exactly.
- Make it regular rather than intense. Three or four people you speak with monthly will outperform any one-off intensive, because businesses change and a single conversation captures one moment.
- Return the favour properly. Answer other people’s specific questions with your real numbers. This is what makes a room worth being in, and it’s the part most people take from without contributing.
The honest summary
Buy the course when you need a method you don’t have.
But if you’ve bought several and you’re still stuck, more information is not the missing ingredient. You already know most of what you need. What you’re short of is someone who knows your situation well enough to tell you the truth about it — and that has never been available at any price, only through relationships you build before you need them.
There’s more on why smart leaders still need peer support, and on the leadership side of it more broadly.
