Learning from the Best: What Advice to Follow in Business
Whether you’re just starting out in business or you’ve been going at it for a long time, there will always be times when you face an unfamiliar situation. When this happens, you understandably want to seek advice from those well versed in these areas to help you determine what you should do next.
Something that’s both a blessing and a curse of the modern information age is the sheer number of perspectives that you have access to. This is undeniably valuable, but at the same time, it can threaten to overwhelm you, leading to decision paralysis if you can’t decide which direction to go in.
The Unique Status of Your Business
What’s important to understand before you start listening to advice from each and every sources is that your business is in a unique position—as is every business. Even if two businesses seem extremely similar to one another, there will be factors that make them unique, and those factors can add up to the point where nothing can be absolutely guaranteed. It might seem as though listening to the most regularly cited business gurus is a sure path toward success, but in reality, this might distract you from the specifics that matter, making you follow a course which doesn’t make any sense for where you’re at.
Getting to the heart of the raw data—your business analytics—can provide you with a window into the kind of action you should take in different areas.
Getting Advice Without Changing Course
It’s also important to recognize that just because you cast a wide net and get different opinions from podcasts or books, that doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily going to completely alter your trajectory to align with this new information.
In fact, it can be incredibly beneficial to get a wide range of opinions (so long as you don’t find yourself completely drowning in the many possible directions), the more information you have, the better you might find that you’re able to position yourself. It also doesn’t mean that you should stubbornly stick to what you’re doing no matter what—it’s a delicate balance of analyzing the information you get to take a sensible course of action.
The “Right” Expert Voice
Of course, even if you’ve identified an expert whose advice you find useful, who’s to say that what this person has to say is any more correct than what someone else has to say? By listening to any piece of advice—regardless of how closely you think it matches your specific circumstances—you’re still taking a leap of faith.
However, the times when this expert advice might be more directly and immediately actionable could be when you’ve consulted them on a matter that you’re unfamiliar with, like marketing or security. In the case of the latter, experts can assess the situation that your business is in and offer you a path that makes sense for you, like managed detection and response solutions that can consistently improve themselves through repeated tests and checks.
