Have you followed a piece of business advice so religiously, believing it would bring you big success, but brought you bigger problems instead? There are some business myths people still adhere to these days that could be sabotaging your strategies. Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo discuss four of these pervasive lies many entrepreneurs continue to pass around today that sound motivating and logical but actually lead to burnout, bad decisions, and unnecessary failure. Find out if you are doing these things in your own business, as well as what you can do to finally correct them.
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Business Myths: Why Common Business Advice Might Be Sabotaging Your Success
If you are someone who has followed business advice that everyone swears by, only to find yourself more exhausted, more stressed, and somehow further from the success that you were promised, this episode is for you. What Gwen and I are doing is what I like to think Gwen does especially better than the rest of the world, which is calling out some of the most pervasive lies that entrepreneurs are told. These are myths that sound motivating. They sound like good logical advice, but they actually lead to burnout, bad decisions, and, in our experience, unnecessary failure. If you have ever sat there feeling like you are doing everything right, but you’re still struggling, and it still feels like it’s all coming out wrong, you want to keep tuning in.
Why Problematic Business Myths Still Persist Today
Gwen, while we’re talking, I’m super excited. This is a little bit more of a casual outline where we’re just going to go back and forth. What excites me most about the myths that we’re talking about is that they’re annoying, but they’re actually harmful. You have seen business owners driven to tears, to feeling like they are horrible and they had no business being in business to begin with, because of their failures. More often than not, you would have seen that coming had you known them sooner. What I’m hoping you can do is set the stage for why these particular myths that we’re going to talk about are so problematic.
The thing is that it is so pervasive. These ideas are so pervasive. We believe them to be true. We don’t question them. Because we don’t question them, we use them as truths. Using them as truths, we make decisions based on the assumption that they’re true. Often, those are bad assumptions. It leads us down paths that can be okay. Because any of these types of things that are so pervasive, there are elements of truth to them. Back to yes, once again, context matters. It depends on the context. When we follow them blindly, which is where the issue is, that is us going blindly down a path. It may or may not be anywhere close to what we want to go, and often is not in alignment with who we are and what we’re actually trying to do and build.
I’m so glad you said that. I want to pull at that because my follow-up question was going to be this. If these are myths and if these are so bad, why do they continue to persist? You answered that as well. I would almost label this all as their sacred cows that give spoiled milk. They are so commonly touted as truths that even the people who do them and have them do not come out to be successful, see how bad they were, and are afraid to say anything, because they think they’re the only person who failed at it.
Part of the issue is that they often started with someone who is highly successful that everyone respects, because that was true for them.
Myth 1: Trading Time For Money Is Bad Business
Let’s start with the first myth because I want to spend some time on these. That means we have no time to waste with pleasantries here, my friend. Trading time for money is bad business. Here’s the lie I hear. In fact, somebody said these exact words to me.
We talked about it, which is how we said, “We need to do an episode.”
You need passive income, or you’re not a real entrepreneur.
Not that passive income isn’t good. I am not saying that at all. The first thing is that very little passive income is truly passive. We’ve got to start there. That’s like a whole other myth because there’s this belief of, “We just said it and truly forget it. Nothing has to be done.” That’s almost never true. Passive income really is that I sit and mail in money just shows up. I don’t have to pay anyone to monitor the thing.
My favorite quote is, “Entrepreneurship is the only business where you work 125 hours a week to make money while you sleep.”
Entrepreneurship is the only business where you work 125 hours a week to make money while you sleep. Share on XThat’s the first piece of it. The real issue is this whole trading time for money. We are always trading time for money. It’s just how much money. Where a lot of people get caught is, are people seeing you at a rate that isn’t appropriate for the value that you’re actually providing? It’s not that you’re not trading time for money. How much is the value of the work that you’re providing? Trading time for money can be at $20 an hour. Trading time for money can also be at $500 an hour. Trading time for money can also be at $10,000 an hour.
In all of those cases, we are still, in fact, trading time for money, but different amounts of money. We’re trading time for money. The problem is when people start saying, “I don’t want to trade time for money,” is the work you’re actually doing so brief, but with such huge value, that we can’t let them know how much time it took? I’ve got a friend, a client who has moments, not all the time, where she can not trade time for money.
She has such an incredible depth of very niche, highly valuable knowledge that she can say something that may be a 15 or 30-minute conversation that could save an organization tens of millions of dollars. That’s really not trading time for money. That’s trading wisdom for money. Often, if they come up with a question, she’ll wait a day to respond, just so they think that she had to think about it. She knows that she could have answered it right then, right there. She also needs them to value her wisdom. That is not her business model.
She also does things that are more typical of consulting, where they trade time for money. I’m spending an hour working with you, and you’re going to pay me for that hour. They are not paying her $20 an hour for that hour. It is back to deep experience and wisdom, but there is this whole belief that we can’t trade time for money. The problem is we generally aren’t good about understanding how to scope, how to stay in scope, and how to set boundaries. We’ve used this as the excuse for not trading time for money.
“I’m just going to charge you for the project.” You’ve still got a certain number of hours. I don’t look at a project and say, “I’m going to charge you $100,000 for that,” just because it’s a random amount of money. We’re actually looking at it and saying, “It’s going to take me 100 hours. I want to get paid $1,000 an hour-ish.” It may not be 100. It may be 80. It may be 90. It may be 120, but I’m going to charge you $100,000. I think $100,000 makes sense. We’re still looking at the time. We’re still putting time into the project. It’s how much money we are making at the time. When we start looking at a project, most folks lose money because they’re not good at managing scope creep.
Let’s pause here for a second. I feel like you’re talking about a lot of different ways that people trade time for money. It can easily get conflated in people’s minds. When we hear, “Don’t trade time for money,” we usually hear it as a justification for project-based pricing over hourly based pricing. That’s one instance. That’s what you were talking about just now. We also hear it as an argument for what they call leveraged offers.
That would be working with groups, having a group program instead of working with people one-on-one, or having a course instead of working with people one-on-one, or even having a group. Some courses can be live delivery. Some courses can be DIY. The idea is you build out the course, and then people buy the course, whenever they buy the course. They go through the course whenever they go through the course. You are making a profit on that, regardless of whether you’re showing up for live delivery or not. There are all these different ways that we trade time for money.
One of the points that is important to make and is true in all of those instances is that not only are you always trading time for money. It is important to be fair that sometimes, we’re not necessarily trading our time for the money. Sometimes, we’re trading somebody else’s time for the money. We’re trading our customer service provider. We’re trading their time because they’re the ones answering the emails back and forth, or maybe we have a coaching team under us. Maybe we have a sales team.
When we do not trade our time for money, we could be trading somebody else’s time for it. Share on XHopefully, we’re still paying them.
We are trading their time for the money. We still may be making a higher profit. I can go sit margaritas on the beach if I want while my team is working. That could make me feel like I’m not trading time for money, but I am because I’m paying my team to deliver. The other piece is when we talk about not trading time for money. Here’s what gets my goat. I have to be using old school imagery here. It’s when we act like the course just appeared out of nowhere. I’m going to say this specifically for a course. The course just appeared out of nowhere. It was downloaded to my brain from the universe.
It is instantly worth $1,000. Everybody is going to come clamoring for my thousand-dollar course that was downloaded for my brain. We discount the years of knowledge, education, experience, and service delivery that we had to go through in order to amass the knowledge that actually could make up a fulfilling course, a valuable course. Once that course is created and out there in the world, whether it’s a video or not, and it doesn’t matter, there’s still time and energy that has to go into selling it. It is because nobody is born knowing your course exists. You’ve got email marketing, sales pages, social media, and whatever else, maybe Facebook ads or whatever, but there is time and money associated with those activities, too.
There is also an actual creation of the course.
Just because you put the time in 2019 and you’re getting paid on it in 2025 does not mean to some degree you’re not charging or you’re not trading time for money.
The bigger piece is that you may not be trading your time anymore, but most likely, somebody is trading time for it. Can we create leverage things? We absolutely can, but it isn’t magic. Most of the time, when I hear people saying, “I don’t want to trade time for money,” they really are looking at, “What I don’t want to own is how much time it’s taking for the money that I’m getting.”
Myth 2: Growth Is Always Good
It’s, “I don’t want to feel resentful. I don’t want to feel like I haven’t gotten a raise in five years.” There are all these reasons. I do want to move on to our second point because I feel like we got about ten minutes per myth max here. The second point allows me to use an example that also points to the first point. This is when you and I first started working together. The second myth is that growth is always good, just so you can start preparing for that, Gwen. The lie is that if you’re not growing, you’re dying.
When I first started working with you, you let me sit in on a coaching call with a client who had hired you because she was sitting at mid-six figures, and she just couldn’t hit seven. She was trying to hit seven. She’d been working with some other people to help her hit seven. Everybody’s like, “We’ve given you our best. It’s just not good enough.” In the course of the conversation, what you helped her to appreciate is that she could totally hit seven figures, but hitting seven figures would require her to pay herself less, back to the trading time for money.
She could totally run a seven-figure business, but it would mean paying other people to do some of the stuff that she was doing at the mid-six figures, because her business was very satisfying at mid-six figures. She was working the number of hours she liked working. She was doing the stuff she liked doing. She didn’t want to work more to get to seven figures. The only answer then is if we want to bring in more revenue and serve more people, then we’ve got to hire people to do it.
Hiring people to do the level of service at the level that she was used to providing wasn’t going to cost $5 an hour. She’d have to take a pay cut to herself in order to deliver this extra half a million in service. She wasn’t really interested in that. You made the point that that’s okay because it is perfectly okay to say, “I’m happy being a solopreneur. I’m happy in the mid-six figures if it means I get to pay myself $250,000 a year.” This is fine to be like, “I’m at capacity. I won’t have space for a new client for six months or whatever.” I imagine you weren’t born with that realization.
You weren’t born with that knowledge. I also imagine, based on the look on this particular client’s face, when you shared that, that you’re used to shocking people with such a statement. She was shocked, but you were not. You’re like, “I know, but it’s true.” You could tell she was doing the math in her head. She was going, “You’re totally right. That is totally true.” Let’s talk about this growth is always good. Where does that come from? How do you fight it?
This is one of those places that we go with a nature analogy that if you’re not growing, you’re dying. That isn’t actually a great example. I’m looking out my window. I’ve got a tree out here that we got as a little tiny tree when we first bought this house. It’s now this big giant, but a behemoth. If it weren’t continuing to grow, would it be dying? Yes and no. What we think of as growing is getting bigger and bigger. If you really look around, a lot of things, once they hit a size, don’t continue growing in that bigger way. They do continue growing in that this leaf dies, a new leaf comes in, this leaf dies, and a new leaf comes in. It isn’t, “We grew 15 feet this year.”
What we forget is that’s also growth. This leaf died. This new leaf came in. We only assume size, which is a bigger size. The analogy of nature that if you’re not growing, you’re dying is true. We need to realize that the term growing can have a huge range of definitions, which could be, “I am getting new and different clients as other clients finish service.” That may not mean that my revenue changes at all. My revenue may stay steady. It doesn’t mean I’m not growing because I’m still actually creating some new clients. Some clients are going away, and some new clients are coming in. That can also be a growth.
We don’t see that as growth. We only think of it as bigger. There’s a point you can’t get bigger. You just can’t. We forget that as well. Most of the time, we’re talking with early-stage entrepreneurs who will see that huge growth. As I look at this tree, we trim it way back because it’s one of those really fast-growing trees. It got a huge amount of its height very quickly. It’s not growing at the same pace as it was now that we’re six or seven years in. Not that it’s not still growing. It is still growing, but it’s not growing at these big, giant numbers.
That’s also part of the challenge that we have with these conversations. We’re also saying, “What is growth?” Is growth 1% growth? It is because 1% growth is still growth. If we aren’t seeing 50%, 100%, or 200% growth, it’s like, “That’s not really growth.” No, that’s also growth. How we define growth is the problem. We’re only defining it in one way, most of the time. When we’re talking about it, people are thinking about it in that one way. If they aren’t growing 100% year over year, or whatever else, they’re failing.
I feel like this myth can look a variety of ways. What you’re saying is that sustainable success actually comes from finding your sweet spot and staying there. If you’re a service provider, that can look like being fully booked out at premium rates and not needing to have a team, just being a solopreneur, shop of one, and managing it all. For a retailer, it could simply be, “I am going to make the most use of the square footage I have. I’m not going to look for a bigger shop. I’m not going to look to extend my hours.
I’m not going to look to have more salespeople on the floor. I’m only going to have as many staff as I absolutely positively need. I’m only open as many hours as I absolutely positively have to. I’m going to use the square footage I have as best as I can. I’m not going to worry about the big box store down the way or what everybody else says I could have, should have, and would have done. I’m just going to make the most of what I have.”
What we’ve seen, and this is what led to the conversation we were having, is that we see these business owners who are convinced that they have to grow. If they don’t grow, they’re dying. They grow beyond their capacity. Ultimately, what happens is quality suffers. The quality of the delivery suffers. They’re under more stress. They can’t perform their best. They can’t make as good of decision when they’re under that much stress. It always affects profitability. It may not affect revenue, but it always affects profitability. Sometimes, the higher revenue hides the lower profitability for a long time if they’re not paying attention to their numbers.
The reason we get fixated on it is that revenue is an easy thing to track. Everything else actually takes some math. Ask any business owner at any point in time, “How much did you make last year?” They will know. If you ask them what I call the nut, “How much are your expenses every month?” Most of them stare at me and go, “I have to look that up.” That’s a more important number, quite honestly, than your revenue number.
It helps to know your revenue number, but it’s one of those things that’s actually a critical number to know. The fact that you can’t rattle that off is problematic. When we talk about growth, we take the most simplistic answer of growth, which is bigger, bigger, bigger. It isn’t necessarily what growth has to be. We say, “What’s the easiest number to look at bigger?” It is revenue.
Myth 3: Business Owners Must Be Present In Day-To-Day Operations
Myth three, business owners must be present in day-to-day operations. This oftentimes plays out in a brick-and-mortar environment, a retail environment, but it can play out in a practice. It can also play out in agencies. It is this idea that if the owner isn’t on the sales floor, isn’t involved in client calls, and isn’t reviewing every detail, they’re not really in charge.
It can be true because we’ve seen both sides of it. I’ve seen environments where we have an absentee business owner who is so absentee. It’s like, “Yes, you are a stockholder, just like I can be a stockholder in Ford. Technically, I’m a business owner of Ford.”
I really don’t know how to put a car together.
Even though I had a mechanic as a father, and I probably know more than a lot of people, no one wants to go to Ford and make decisions for them on their line and how to put cars together. There can be a fully absentee version. That can totally work. Even in a retail shop, one of the shops that I worked at years ago had a fully absentee owner. She had a whole different career that she loved and that she did all the time. Her manager was functioning in the role that we think of as the owner role, but it’s true.
Her fingerprint wasn’t on anything. There are a lot of environments where the owner can still be in charge without necessarily being involved in the day-to-day delivery. One of the things that I say a lot is that there are two things that if you’re not going to be a fully 100% absentee owner, the owner has to be responsible for. It is the health of the business, and it is the culture. You don’t have to be in the place doing the things all the time to manage that, but you do have to pay attention to it. Generally, what I have noticed is that you can’t be fully absent. It also doesn’t mean that you have to be 100% present.
There’s an in-between.
Most of our clients fall in that in-between spot. They are not the only ones doing the thing, but they also are not only showing up once every three months and peeking in the door. They are helping make decisions, driving culture, and doing some of those things, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be the one who has to deliver the services. You do need to make sure that the people who are delivering the services are qualified people delivering the services, back to the health of the business. Are you actually delivering the services and providing the products that you want to be providing based on who you are, what you’re bringing to the business, and what your values and culture are that you’re bringing?
There’s a difference between being present and having your finger on the pulse of the business. We were having this conversation with one of your clients, where they were saying that they were less in the weeds than ever before, but much more informed about the details. That’s an example of them recognizing that their actual presence wasn’t nearly as important as them being aware of the details of what’s going on.
What happens sometimes is that business owners get burned out. They check out. They’re both not physically present, but they’re also not paying attention to anything. What happens is they conflate those two different interactions with their business as being combined. If you don’t want to be present, you don’t have to be present, but you still have to be aware of what’s happening and why it’s happening. As you said, you have good people in charge. You trust them. They can carry things out. Part of that comes from a culture of accountability, standards of presence, and all of that. Fourth one, or do you want to say something more?
Just one other thing. The trick there really is understanding when the physical presence makes a difference. Are you actually holding your people accountable? When we had our LinkedIn Live with Nicole, one of the things that we came up with was you’ve got to transfer trust to your people, but you have to verify that they’re doing the work.
Business owners must transfer trust to their team while verifying they are doing the work. Share on XMyth 4: It Is Better To Be An Entrepreneur Than To Have A Job
The fourth one is our final one, but this is a big one. I’m going to hold us tightly to time on this one, Gwen. It is always better to be an entrepreneur than to have a job. If you shut down your business to go get a job, you’re a moron. You’re dumb. Insert a word because nobody says anything nice about those people.
You’re a failure. That’s what everyone says in their head. It is such a wrong word. Being an entrepreneur is way better than being an employee and all of those things. It’s just different. Things that we’ve heard of are things like, “When you’re an employee, you’re dependent on somebody else. When you’re an entrepreneur, you have complete control over everything.” My first thought is, “You’ve obviously never actually been an entrepreneur if you’re saying that.” There are so many things that are always out of our control, whether we’re an employee or an entrepreneur. I can’t control who is going to buy my service.
If I could, I would be 100% booked with all of the perfect clients, exactly who I wanted all the time. That is not within my control. They decide whether or not they want to work with me. Can I provide a good service? Yes, absolutely, but I don’t have control over that. I don’t have control over what’s going on in society and economics. I don’t have control over what’s going on in nature that may be affecting my supply chain. There are so many things I don’t have control over. Where the lie gets started and told is, “When you’re working for somebody, they have all this control over you, and you have none.” That’s not true at all. There can be environments, but that just means you’re probably in a really bad work environment. Go find another job.
What we hear is, when you have a job, you’re paid to put in hours, usually. Not every job is like this, but most jobs are. We’re only going to pay you for twenty hours of work. We’re only going to pay you for 40 hours of work. We’re only going to pay you this much for that work. You’re not in control of your salary unless you have open-ended overtime. You’re not in control of how many hours a week you work. The thing is, even as an entrepreneur, you can set your rate, but you can’t make anybody pay your rate.
Just because you want to make $500 an hour working twenty hours a week does not mean anybody will pay you $500 an hour to work twenty hours a week. Again, back to the control thing. I have a friend who says, “Entrepreneurship is the only thing where everything falls under your responsibility. When it all goes wrong, everything is your fault, yet you have no control over any of it.” It is because you can do everything right as an entrepreneur. The other thing is this idea that if you’re an entrepreneur, you can’t be fired. That’s not true. As you said, your clients can fire you at any point in time.
Entrepreneurship is the only thing where everything falls under your responsibility, even the things you cannot control. Share on XClients can fire you all the time.
This idea that you have complete control, you also have complete responsibility. You don’t have to worry about making payroll when you’re an employee. You just have to worry about, “Is your check going to clear?” If your check doesn’t clear, you can go work for somebody else.
You have legal ramifications if your check doesn’t clear the first time.
We know a lot of business owners who skip paying themselves just to make sure payroll clears. This is what we talked about. I want to make sure that we get this in the episode. Not everybody is wired for the uncertainty of entrepreneurship and the hard decisions that are required by entrepreneurship.
The piece that you’ve said, which is the most important piece, is that you get to make all the choices potentially, but you have to own the outcomes of every single one of those choices. By the way, if you have staff, you get to own those outcomes, too, not just your choices. It is because one of your choices was hiring that staff and keeping that staff employed. This is the place where a lot of people say, “I’ll have time freedom, flexibility, this and that, and the other thing,” which could be true, but it doesn’t mean that that’s not possible in the job market, especially these days.
Things have changed so drastically since COVID in 2020. You could have flexibility. Maybe you can, but you probably could. As entrepreneurs, we also have requirements that we have to fulfill, which means, in some cases, we have less flexibility than we did before. The phrase that used to be used a long time ago, you don’t see it as much now, is that as an entrepreneur, I just get to decide what the 60 or 80 hours of work I do each week are, as opposed to being told what the 60 hours are.
As an entrepreneur, nobody gets mad at me for checking email while watching my kids practice, whereas if I had a job, they would say, “You can’t be checking email while you’re watching your kids practice. That’s in the office.”
“We expect you to check your email while you’re watching your kids practice, depending on the work environment.” There are some choices there, but there’s a lot of responsibility that goes with it. That’s the piece that nobody talks about. Every entrepreneur that I have worked with at some point, and across the board, needed to let someone go in some capacity, whether it was an employee, a vendor, or a customer. There was somebody who struggled in doing, often for months, at their detriment, because they weren’t prepared for that hard part of entrepreneurship.
They were prepared for the upside. They were prepared for making decisions, being able to make choices about what we do and what we don’t do, and some of these things. When it came to some of the harder choices, which are often about people, it’s like, “I wasn’t actually prepared for that.” Some will say, “If you’re an employee, if you’re high enough up, you still have to deal with that.” Yes, but usually, you have someone else who will help you with it.
Here’s what I think is true. Most of the time, employees make the same amount of money or more than an entrepreneur doing the same thing with less stress. We are all doing the world a disservice if we don’t at least acknowledge that there are benefits to employment, which include predictable income and, in some cases, benefits like medical coverage, dental coverage, and vision coverage. Not true everywhere, but can be. Somebody else is handling the parts of the business that you don’t like.
You don’t take a job doing stuff you hate. Somebody else is handling the operations. Somebody else is handling the accounting and the HR. Somebody else is handling the marketing. There are clear boundaries. As a W-2 employee, there is a start time and there is an end time. There is an agreement about nights, weekends, and being on call. Those agreements are a lot more blurry for the entrepreneur.
They are. Where we get caught is that we think we’ll make more money as an entrepreneur. Yes, the people who are absolutely at the very top of the income hierarchy are all entrepreneurs. We can name them. It’s Bill Gates, the Jeff Bezos, the Elon Musk, and the Richard Branson. The list goes on and on. We can list those. That’s also a tiny percentage of all the entrepreneurs out there. What we can find is that a lot of times, when you actually look, where do you make more money? You can make more money in the job than you can as an entrepreneur because you’ve got all the other expenses, all the other support things, and all the things.
It’s not just about I’m charging X amount per hour, but it’s all the other things that go with it. We had one of our long-term clients who decided to shut down her business and is functionally working at a job. She’s like, “I work way less hours. I have way more control over my time. I’m making way more money than I ever did for ten years as an entrepreneur.” She is a successful entrepreneur, not someone who just failed, and not someone who started earlier this year and has given up already. No, this is someone successful who did it for a decade and is seeing that right now in this space and time, the job is a better answer.
A Quick Discussion Wrap-Up From Tonya
Here’s what I want to do. I want to summarize our myths. I want to just offer a few tips for our readers on how they can evaluate business advice critically. I know these aren’t all the myths. These are just the ones that you and I encounter the most. All of us need to sharpen the skill of critically evaluating the advice that we’re given because all advice, as you said, somewhere has a kernel of truth. There’s a basis from which it comes that is good, but not all of it applies to each of us.
The first myth that we addressed is that trading time for money is bad business, or the idea that you need passive income to be a real entrepreneur. The truth, as you said, Gwen, is that everybody trades time for money in some way, even those who say they have passive income. Consider this your permission that if hourly or project-based pricing works for you, go with it. It’s legitimate. It is a perfectly fine way to do business.
Second myth, growth is always good. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. The reality is that sustainable success comes from finding your sweet spot and just taking charge. Take up that space. It’s okay. If you can define success as sustainable and satisfying instead of bigger, you are five steps ahead of a lot of other people who are just trudging along. The third myth was that business owners must be present in day-to-day operations.
If you’re not on the sales floor and you’re not on the client calls, then you’re not a real business owner, or you don’t know what’s really going on in your business. Gwen, what you were saying is, yes, the most effective CEOs focus on strategy and vision, but they also stay plugged into what’s going on. You don’t need to work in the business all the time. You definitely can work on the business, but you have to make sure that you have an awareness of what’s going on in the business.
The fourth one was that entrepreneurship beats having a job. Being an employee does not mean you have settled. It does not mean you lack bravery, courage, or anything else. There is absolutely no shame in choosing stability over the instability of entrepreneurship. You can go back and forth between entrepreneurship and employment if that works for you. Sometimes, it’s a seasonal thing. There are times in your life when you need medical coverage. A W-2 job is the best way to get it for most of us. There are other seasons in your life where you need more flexibility. You can handle income instability to get it. Choose your lane.
I was talking about that with a client and saying I have had at least three or four businesses that I have closed down and gone to a job at different times because it’s what the season of my life required, what was going on in the world, and all of the other things. It didn’t mean that it was a failure. It was an opportunity to get a different set of skills and a different piece of knowledge. The next time I started the next business, I had that added to my belt of tools. One is not better than the other. They’re just different.
How You Can Evaluate Business Advice Critically
Gwen, let’s go into just briefly how to evaluate business advice critically. I’ll do one, which is to consider the source. I find that sometimes the least successful people are the ones who give me the loudest advice on what is required to be successful. I consider the source. If they are somebody whom I view as successful, what’s their business model? How close is how they are running their business to how I want to run my business? I do think what they do that works for them may or may not work for me. Your turn.
Success looks different for everyone. The right way to run your business aligns with your own values, capacity, and definition of fulfillment. Share on XThe other things that I would always say, and they’re very much in parallel to what you’re saying, are that for me, context matters because it’s a big thing. That really is to say what is true about what they’re saying and what may not be true that maybe they don’t even know is not true. It’s hard for us to disengage with our own context to say the reason that I was able to do XYZ is because of these eighteen things, some of which may have happened when I was ten years old. How do we pull that together? That’s hard for us to be able to disengage from that. It is thinking about what elements are true and what elements may or may not be true.
One of the others that I am always a big fan of is bouncing it against multiple other people’s experiences or stories. How often are we actually seeing this to be true? I’m going to pick on the “growing is better” thing. How many people have you seen grow and then fail? That means growth isn’t just the end-all. Compare it against other stories and say, “Is this truth as a truth really true? Can I find places where it’s not true?”
If I can’t, then that’s also a place where I can say, “Does that mean that that truth would be true for me? Is it possible that that truth may not be true?” The other is to actually understand that all of these will start with an element of truth. It is looking for where that nugget is. What is that piece in there that is true? How can I do my own extrapolation to take it to the point that it becomes true for me in my situation? The last piece is to realize that at any point in time, all of those answers may change.
Episode Wrap-Up And Closing Words
This brings us to a close. To just wrap a bow around it all, let’s call it the business advice industrial complex. I feel like there are some people who think they are in the business of telling everybody else how they should run their businesses. Meanwhile, they need to sweep their side of the street. The business advice industrial complex loves to sell us on the myths that create urgency, that give us a fear of missing out, and that force us to add unnecessary complexity to our businesses.
The truth is so much simpler. To your point about context matters, success looks different for everyone. The right way to run your business is the way that aligns with your values, your capacity, and your definition of fulfillment. My definition of fulfillment is not the same as Gwen’s. Gwen is not the same as me. I bet our definitions are way different than yours, whoever is reading right now. You don’t have to follow every piece of conventional wisdom. In fact, what I love about Gwen is that she always says, “Best practice is actually just common practice.” It’s not best for everybody.
Questioning the advice you get might actually be the best thing that you could be doing as a business owner for the health and sustainability of your own business. If this feels over your head, if this feels hard, or if you’re confused because you’re like, “I feel like I’m trying to decide between two viable decisions,” get some help. Get some advice. We would love to talk to you. You can have a call with Gwen. All you have to do is go to EverydayEffectiveness.com/Clarity. You’ll get right onto Gwen’s calendar. You guys can chit-chat about it. It’s not a sales call. It’s a true conversation, but you can figure out in that conversation what success really would look like for you, versus what everybody is blathering on and on about.
Mentioned in This Episode
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
