4 Types of Advice You’ll Get in Your Career

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to Founders Journal. This show has grown a ton since our relaunch. So for those of you who are new, first of all, thank you so much for giving me your attention. It is a gift I never take lightly. And second of all, for a brief reintroduction to the show, Founders Journal is my audio diary as an entrepreneur that I make public for the world 3 times per week. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I publish 10 to 20 minute episodes, all centered around making you a better business builder. Some episodes are actionable lessons related to my businesses; others are lessons from reading or watching the work of world-class entrepreneurs, and others are test formats like guest journals from some of my smartest founder friends. On today's episode, I give you an actionable framework for filtering advice since that becomes one of your most important. Jobs when building a company. Let's hop into it. This past week, I found myself receiving or giving advice constantly. I received advice from folks that have built ghostwriting agencies and shared their biggest lessons as I go about building mine. I gave advice to a few different founders whose companies I've invested in. I gave advice to one about how to engage with the media and think about PR. And I gave advice to another about how I would be thinking about their go-forward product strategy if I was them. And as I reflected on these conversations, I was struck by this thought that we spend so much of our time as founders getting solicited and unsolicited advice from others, which is obviously necessary. In the early days of Morning Brew, we needed advice, otherwise we would have been helpless. We were 2 undergraduate business students trying to build a media company despite having no media experience, and we took advice from everyone who would give it. But you quickly learn that as you build a business, not all advice is created equal. Some advice is perfect. It gives you an exact solution to a problem or an exact step-by-step for something you need to build. This type of advice makes all of the other worse advice worth it because it gives you a ton of leverage. It gives you the leverage of saving time and money. But for every conversation that leads to high-leverage, high-value advice, I believe there are 9 conversations that are at best unhelpful or at worst dangerous because they could lead you in the wrong direction with your business. I want to give you 2 quick examples of what I'm talking about. In the early days of Morning Brew, we knew nothing about the process of selling brands on advertising with a media company. What we ended up learning is that there are 2 ways that you can basically get a company to advertise with you. You can either sell a brand— in this example, it was Discover Card— you can sell them directly, meaning you're working with their marketing team and pitching business to them directly. Or more likely, especially with a big company, you are working with their media agency who's helping Discover, in this example, plan their multibillion-dollar marketing budget across tons of advertising channels. The very long story short is that in 2017, we pitched Discover's agency on a $250,000 deal advertising with Morning Brew, which for context was 10 times larger than any deal we'd ever done as a company. We ended up losing the deal, which was devastating at the time. It felt like $250,000 was dragged from under us. But we had a follow-up conversation with the main contact at the media agency that represented Discover, and we asked this person, how did the process of pitching agencies work? And this process was called an RFP process. And also we asked them, what should we be keeping in mind to make Morning Brew a more compelling partner down the road? That conversation was not only illuminating, but it literally saved us years of time making the same exact mistakes and losing more deals like this one with other brands. In this case, advice was worth its weight in gold. Now let me give you another example that shows the ugly side of advice. When we'd get connected to successful media entrepreneurs in the early days of Morning Brew, we typically ask them what they thought about Morning Brew and what they thought about the strategy of us staying maniacally focused on creating a newsletter business. And there are 2 very distinct answers we'd get. The first would be something along the lines of, guys, the media business is incredibly difficult. It costs a ton of money to run a newsroom. There are already massive business media brands like The Wall Street Journal or Reuters or Financial Times, and email is saturated with tons of newsletters already. The second type of advice would be something along the lines of, guys, newsletters are not the future. These social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram are putting tons of resources into video and they are rewarding the media companies that are going all in on video. So you should really think about going video first. If we actually listened to the first group of people, Morning Brew likely wouldn't exist because we would have quit building it because we would have thought it would have been an impossible endeavor. And if we actually listened to the second group of people, Morning Brew likely wouldn't exist also because we would have built a media business on a house of cards, which was video at the time, that could collapse with any algorithm change. And that leads me to the crux of this episode. Most advice you get is shitty. It doesn't mean you shouldn't solicit advice because every so often you will get advice that is an absolute game changer for your business. So the real question becomes, how do you sift through all of the noise and all of the bullshit so that you can better benefit from the great advice, the golden nuggets of advice, without being misguided by the bad advice. I came up with a very easy framework that you can use to suss out any advice you get moving forward. But before I share it, a quick word from the folks that pay the bills. There are 4 types of advice you will get in your career. Your goal is to identify which type of advice someone is giving you and if it's the type of advice that you should pay attention to. So let me walk you through the 4. First type of advice is selfish, uninformed advice. Selfish, uninformed advice can come from a few different types of people. It can come from someone who likes hearing the sound of their own voice and derives personal value from being able to say that they, quote unquote, advise others. It can also come from someone who lacks self-awareness to know that they are giving advice in something that they are not an expert in. The persona for this type of advice can be a career-long mediocre venture capitalist who thinks they're better than they are and gives advice to entrepreneurs regardless of if they are a true expert in the topic. And this type of advice can also come from a successful entrepreneur who maybe sold their business and they're semi-retired, and they believe they have the ability to advise on any topic related to building a business, even if it has nothing to do with the business that they built and had success in. The second type of advice is selfish, informed advice. Selfish, informed advice can come from someone who wants you to do something for their own benefit. Typically, that is for monetary benefit or ego benefit. The persona for this type of advice can be a founder or a salesperson trying to sell you something. And while they could be really smart about the thing that you need advice on, there is always a clear agenda that's always in service of the thing they're selling. Another persona for this type of advice can be a failed founder who tried to build something similar to what you are building. And while there can be helpful information in the advice they give, their agenda is to protect the ego associated with them not succeeding. The third type of advice is unselfish, uninformed advice. Unselfish, uninformed advice comes from someone who wants to see you win but isn't qualified to help you win. The persona for this type of advice is really anyone that is motivated by your success but doesn't necessarily have the tools to impact it. This can be family and friends in the early days of the business. It can also be a great employee who's talking to you about something that is outside of their domain of expertise. And the 4th and final type of advice is unselfish, informed advice. Unselfish, informed advice is generally where the golden nuggets come from. This advice comes from a subject matter expert or someone that has been in your shoes and wants to see you win. The persona for this type of advice is oftentimes a founder that has built a similar business to you but is 2 to 3 years ahead of you in their entrepreneurial journey. It's important that they're far enough ahead in the journey to not be competitive with you and all of a sudden be a selfish, informed advice giver who doesn't want to see you win. Another persona for this type of advice is a non-founder who has a very specific knowledge around a very specific challenge or goal that you are having, like the agency lead that I was talking about earlier, who I asked for advice from after losing the big marketing deal from Discover. So those are the 4 types of advice you will get while building a business: selfish uninformed, selfish informed, unselfish uninformed, and unselfish informed. Now, a few parting thoughts as you put this framework into practice in your life. First, Put lots of weight on the last group, the unselfish, informed advice giver, and put very little weight on the first group, the selfish, uninformed advice giver. Second, don't extrapolate trust. Really smart people can move from informed to uninformed depending on the advice you're seeking. Make sure you are constantly reassessing if someone has the skills or knowledge to be an informed provider of advice to you. Don't just rely on the fact that they've given you good advice in the past. And third, selfish, informed advice givers can actually be super helpful. A failed founder with battle scars can absolutely share learnings that can save you time and pain down the road. But you must also remember that the agenda behind their advice is saving their ego. And you should always ask yourself, what is their incentive for sharing their advice with me. In sum, advice can accelerate your business or it can take your business off course. Having the tools to separate the signal from the noise is crucial, and I hope this framework will do exactly that for you. If you got to this point in the episode, shoot me an email saying hi or what you thought about this episode or any future topics you want me to talk about. My email is alex@morningbrew.com. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll catch you next episode.