It doesn’t happen all the time. I wouldn’t even say it happens a lot. But when it does happen, it is — excuse the term — magical. Because all the bullshit that’s been thrown at them disappears and all the overthinking suddenly stops short.
It’s even better when it happens to an entrepreneur who has been at entrepreneurship for a while, maybe a long time, maybe as long as me. Because it still happens to me.
Yeah. After 20+ years and a bunch of wins and losses, I still fall for other people telling me how to run my company, or build my product, or market my product.
There are people out there who are smarter than you. Use them.
That’s not to say I don’t think that there’s anyone else out there smarter than me — or more experienced or otherwise better. In fact, I feel like it’s a 50/50 shot that you yourself are smarter than me.
The key to good advice isn’t in the knowledge — that’s just the minimum requirement to give advice.
The value of advice is in the delivery of the knowledge.
That’s a war I’ve been waging over the length of my career. And it’s one of the pillars on which I’ve built Teaching Startup.
I’m not doing this to let you in on any startup secrets. I will turn away and tell an entrepreneur we’re not for them if they come to us looking to get rich quick. There is no magical handshake to getting investment or signing a big deal with a large customer.
And sometimes — let me call it about 30% of the time — all we have to do is get entrepreneurs to unlearn the wrong thing they learned and accepted as fact on face value.
Sometimes the question isn’t even the real question
We’ve gotten really good at identifying when this happens. And it’s happened twice in two weeks. In today’s issue of Teaching Startup (an “issue” is new answers to new questions, delivered over email, and all the old answers are in a knowledge base on our website), I answered a question about buying business insurance.
But the real question wasn’t about business insurance. It was probably only about business insurance because someone told this entrepreneur they needed business insurance. Maybe it was a business insurance agent. I don’t know.
The real question was about liability, risk, and fear.
And while I answered the question and gave the entrepreneur some ideas about what kinds of insurance are necessary and what kinds are just there to give you a false sense of security, I also said I’d rather see the entrepreneur spend an equal amount of time researching, defining, and reducing their liability — whether through their tech, their product, their hiring, whatever.
Risk is hard to take when risk is undefined. So when people go to get advice on risk, the answer is usually, in one form or another, “Talk to an attorney.”
And for the record, I did tell the entrepreneur that eventually they would need to talk to an attorney, I just wanted to make sure they knew their shit first.
The same thing happened last week, only it was about writing contracts for large customers and how to get started. And while I went over what most parts of a standard business contract are for, I also answered the question that wasn’t asked.
How do I not get screwed?
I know that both of these entrepreneurs knew that the question they were asking wasn’t the question they really needed the answer for. Otherwise they could have just typed either of those questions into Google and gotten a policy quote or a contract template within a few seconds.
There’s an added bonus here, because those answers, published in the newsletter, got even more entrepreneurs thinking about their own liabilities and their own useless contracts. And hopefully they will revisit them, and hopefully make more money, employ more people, and change more lives for the better.
Like I said, it doesn’t happen often, but at Teaching Startup, I want to fight lazy information with real information — affordably, honestly, and using experience over platitudes.
So when someone smarter than me tells me that Teaching Startup should be hosting Zoom classes or partnering with universities or interviewing VCs for a podcast, all I have to do is go back to the root of why I stood up Teaching Startup in the first place.
That’s worth more than a hundred useless get-rich-quick startup secrets.
This article was originally published on Medium by Joe Procopio
Joe Procopio is a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. He is the founder of startup advice project TeachingStartup.com and is the Chief Product Officer of mobile vehicle care and maintenance startup Get Spiffy. You can read all his posts at joeprocopio.com
If you want more direct advice and answers, look into Teaching Startup.
