The Trick To Tell What Advice You Should Take Seriously
You're going to get tons of advice as a startup CEO. The challenge is determining the good advice from the bad advice.
In this short video, I'll give you a simple tip I use to determine what advice I take more seriously than other advice. I hope you like it.
Read the video transcript below:
How do you know what advice is good advice when you're raising money, because you'll get advice. There's no doubt about it. Most of it will be horrible. Every once in a while you get some good advice, but most of it will suck.
So how do you know the good advice from the bad advice? There's a simple trick that I like to use. Here it goes. The more detailed the advice is, the more specific the advice is, the more seriously I take the advice. So, for example, if somebody is telling, you know what? You're going to change your pitch from X to Y and that's all they tell you, I'm probably not going to take that very seriously at all. I'll probably just move on because you know what? There's not much to it.
But let's say that somebody says to me, you know what, Brett, you should change from X to Y and here's the reasons why.
And they go into very specific detail about what's wrong and why it's wrong and why I need to change. That I might take seriously. Then you also have to take into account that everybody has their own prerogatives in what they want and sometimes what investors want and what you want are different.
So for example, when we were raising money, we were accused of what's called financial engineering, you know, by well meaning VCs that wanted us to change our pitch from what we were doing to something different. And they wanted us to ditch part of our plan.
So they kept saying, why are you doing this? It's just financial engineering and they didn't get the business. And I knew it. And this is where you have to stay true to yourself because if investors don't get what you're about and you do, don't change your plan. Because it's just going to ruin you at the end of the day. I know it's tough. I know it's hard out there, but this is the balance, right? You have to balance between what you're hearing, what's true, what's real, and what you need to change because of your business. And what you shouldn't change because of your business.
Because if you try and be something that you're not, I can almost guarantee you that you will fail. I'm Brett at Brettjfox.com. Have a great, great day.