Be Careful Who You Take Advice From: How to Evaluate Industry Training and Business Advice
Today I have a very serious and important message: be very careful who you take advice from.
There are a lot of people who will give you advice. There are a lot of people who will try to teach you something before they have enough experience doing it themselves.
If you are building a business, managing employees, serving customers, or trying to improve the way your company operates, the advice you follow matters. The wrong advice can cost you time, money, customers, and opportunities. It can also affect the people who work for you and depend on the decisions you make.
Before you change the way you operate based on something someone teaches you, take the time to understand who you are learning from and how much real experience they actually have.
Experience Matters When Choosing Business Training
People come to our classes all the time. I have seen people go through a class once or twice and immediately think they know the material.
That is not how learning works.
When you go through a basic presentation, training, or course, you are going to forget a large percentage of what you learned very quickly. Within the first week, you might forget 70 percent of the material. Within a couple of weeks, you may forget even more.
This doesn’t mean the training failed. It means learning something once is very different from mastering it.
For the person receiving training, this matters because:
Repetition helps you retain information.
Repeated practice helps you apply information correctly.
Experience helps you understand what works in different situations.
Going through training multiple times can reveal information you missed the first time.
Mastery requires doing the work, not simply hearing the information.
Learning Something Is Different From Being Qualified to Teach It
When somebody is trying to teach you something, one of the most important things to consider is how many times they have actually done it.
It takes a long time to master something.
You have to repeat the process many times. You have to work through different situations. You have to see what happens when something works and what happens when it does not work. You need enough experience that you understand the reasoning behind what you are teaching.
A lot of people attend a training program a couple of times. They go to a conference. They travel somewhere and listen to someone speak. Then they come home and begin teaching other people what to do.
The problem is that they may not have perfected it themselves yet.
Before following someone’s advice, look at:
How long they have been doing the work.
How many times they have personally completed the process they teach.
Whether they have applied it in real businesses.
Whether they can explain why something works.
Whether they have tested their recommendations.
Whether their results can be demonstrated consistently.
Whether they are teaching from direct experience or simply repeating information they heard somewhere else.
These things matter because your business should not become somebody else’s experiment.
Bad Business Advice Can Hurt More Than One Company
Unfortunately, inexperienced people teaching other people can hurt an entire industry. A few years ago, I attended my first conference. I am not a big conference guy, but I was sitting there listening to several people on a panel giving advice.
Unfortunately, some of the advice was terrible.
On one project they were telling people how to increase car count. On the next one, they were telling people to cancel appointments or say no to customers. Those are two counterproductive ideas. You cannot tell a business to focus on increasing car count while also recommending practices that unnecessarily turn customers away.
I was sitting next to someone during the panel. I could not say anything because I wanted to be respectful, so I sent him a message.
The message said:
"Thank you for saving me from this."
I meant it.
At one point, I was young and inexperienced too. Everyone starts somewhere. The concern is not that someone does not know everything yet. The concern is when someone who does not understand the fundamentals begins presenting themselves as the person other businesses should follow.
The person listening may also be young or inexperienced. They may assume the speaker knows more than they do. Then they can take bad advice back to their business and make decisions based on it.
The consequences can include:
Losing customers unnecessarily.
Reducing revenue.
Creating inefficient processes.
Training employees incorrectly.
Damaging customer relationships.
Spending money on strategies that have not been properly tested.
Creating confusion inside the company.
Having to undo processes later when they realize the original advice was wrong.
Check the Credentials of the People Giving You Advice
Be careful who you listen to. Look at their credentials. In other professions, we already understand the importance of qualifications. If someone is performing a complicated medical procedure, there are educational requirements, training requirements, residencies, certifications, and years of experience behind that person.
In many industries, someone can start teaching without that same level of oversight. That puts more responsibility on the person receiving the advice. You need to evaluate the person teaching you. Credentials do not always have to mean a formal certificate. In many businesses, real operational experience matters just as much.
Useful credentials can include:
Years of direct industry experience.
Experience managing real customers and employees.
A significant number of completed projects.
Experience operating multiple locations.
Documented results.
Tested systems and processes.
The ability to explain the reasoning behind a recommendation.
Examples of situations where the process has succeeded and failed.
Continued involvement in the work they teach.
The goal is to learn from someone who understands what happens when their advice is applied in real life.
Choose Training Based on Real-World Experience
In our classes, we teach real-life lessons. We give you material that shows you exactly how things work. We also give you the reasoning behind the process because we have been there. We have done these things thousands of times throughout our locations and throughout our experiences.
We have tested things. That testing matters. There is a major difference between saying, "This sounds like a good idea," and saying, "We have done this repeatedly, we have seen the results, and we understand why it works." When you invest in training, you should be getting more than somebody’s opinion.
Good training should help you:
Understand exactly what to do.
Understand why you are doing it.
Apply the process inside your own business.
Avoid mistakes other people have already made.
Improve consistency.
Make decisions faster.
Train your employees more effectively.
Protect your customer experience.
Improve business performance over time.
Do Not Confuse Confidence With Competence
Recently, I saw someone in one of the classes struggling with some very basic information. That is completely fine. We all did not know something at one point. The problem was that this same person was also trying to teach other people. If you are still learning the basics, you need to continue learning the basics. There is nothing wrong with being a student. There is a problem when someone presents themselves as an expert before they have enough experience to support the advice they are giving.
As a business owner or professional, do not assume that someone knows what they are talking about simply because they speak confidently, post frequently, attend conferences, or teach a class.
Look at the actual experience behind what they are saying.
Protect Your Business by Being More Selective About Advice
For most of us, this is our career. This is our life. We put our money, effort, and time into what we are building. We employ people. The decisions we make affect their careers, their income, and their families. That means we need to take professional advice seriously.
People can spend a lot of time researching where they are going on vacation, where they are going to dinner, or what they are going to buy. The decisions you make about your career and business deserve at least as much consideration.
Before you implement somebody’s recommendation:
Check their experience.
Look at their actual results.
Understand where their information came from.
Find out whether they have personally done what they are teaching.
Look for consistency between what they teach and how they operate.
Make sure the advice fits the goals of your business.
Understand the reasoning behind the recommendation before changing your process.
Continue learning instead of relying on a single class, conference, or teacher.
The Right Advice Can Save You Time, Money, and Mistakes
The benefit of being selective is not simply avoiding bad information. The right training can save you years of figuring things out on your own. When you learn from somebody who has already completed the work thousands of times, tested different approaches, made mistakes, corrected those mistakes, and developed a repeatable process, you get the benefit of that experience. You can make better decisions without having to personally make every mistake first.
That can help you:
Avoid expensive operational mistakes.
Protect your revenue.
Serve more customers effectively.
Build better systems.
train your team with greater consistency.
Reduce unnecessary trial and error.
Identify problems earlier.
Make more confident decisions based on tested information.
There will always be people willing to give you advice. Your responsibility is deciding whose advice deserves your attention. Take your business seriously enough to learn from people who have done the work, tested what they teach, and have the experience to support what they are telling you.