Donna Genie (entrepreneur) discusses the limits and risks of free advice for new business owners. She urges listeners to evaluate the advisor’s motivation and expertise, verify important guidance (especially legal/contract/entity decisions), and consult qualified professionals when necessary; paying for correct expert advice early is usually cheaper than fixing costly mistakes later.
Oh, free advice. Alright. Everybody loves some free advice, don't you? Well, I'm here to tell you you should take that free advice with a grain of salt and be very careful what you do. When you're starting a business, everybody has advice for you. They've got tips, they know exactly what you should be doing. Well, I'm not so sure. Is that free advice really worth much? Well, I'm going to discuss how you can sort out which advice is valuable and which isn't. As a successful entrepreneur myself, I advise business owners all the time on things relating to their finances, their strategies, setting up their entities, their sales operations. We dive into a lot of issues. However, if they ask me about a contract, I may be able to look at it, but I'm also going to remind them that they should have that run through an attorney to take a look. I'm not going to step into places and offer 100% guidance and advice on something I don't know anything about. Sometimes you got to leave this to the experts. So advice can come in all sorts of places, from family, friends, strangers on the Internet. Everything on the Internet's right. Right. It's easy to get caught up in this, but I want you to think critically about any advice you receive before you use it. What's the motivation of the person who told it to you? Are they an expert in that field? What's their background? Have they built successful businesses in the past? Think about why you want to take that advice and how you would want to implement it. Or better yet, how to verify it before you use it. One of the most common problems I see is that people take entity strategies from friends, from family. Oh, you should be an S corp. Oh, you should have an llc. When I ask the question, what made you choose that? Most of the time I get, well, my uncle told me I should or I read something about it on the Internet. It said the S Corp is the best thing. It isn't the best thing in a general sense. It might be the worst thing for you. So please take your time. When you're getting started in business, don't do things wrong and lead yourself down the wrong path because you have bad advice. It's much cheaper to pay for good advice once than to pay to fix mistakes and take wrong directions that may not be able to be recovered from. I'd be happy to help. If you are in the mood for starting a new business or need advice, lean on us. We're here to help you.
