The Worst Business Advice of 2026 (please don't do this)
In this video Ryan Deiss critiques seven pieces of popular business advice that can cripple companies that are already generating $2‑10 million in revenue and aim to scale to $20‑100 million. For each piece of “bad advice” he explains why it’s misleading or dangerous, then offers concrete, experience‑based alternatives. He starts with meetings, arguing that eliminating them is unrealistic and instead provides four rules (agenda, outcome, expert, scorecard) to make meetings purposeful. He then discusses hiring philosophy, urging founders to hire people they like and who align with core values in early stages, rather than forcing diversity for its own sake. He warns against hiring for personal weaknesses, recommending hiring for strengths and later adding peers to cover gaps. He debunks the myth that sales alone solves problems, emphasizing cash flow, profitability, and systems before aggressive growth. He challenges the “only A‑players” mantra, suggesting companies should build systems that enable B‑ and C‑players to succeed, which in turn attracts A‑players. He rejects the “hire fast, fire fast” culture, outlining a “hire slow, fire fair” process that includes clear role definition, value‑chain mapping, documentation of how and what success looks like, and a fair performance‑improvement plan. Finally, he argues culture should not be the primary focus; instead, delivering surplus value to customers, maintaining profit margins, and aligning employee incentives naturally creates a sustainable culture. Throughout, he stresses practical, trenches‑tested guidance over buzz‑word platitudes.
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A lot of popular business advice just flat out sucks. It sounds smart, but in a lot of cases it's the exact opposite of what you should actually be doing. So today I'm ranking some of the most common business advice that I'm hearing that's ranging from, nah, this isn't so much wrong, it's just maybe incomplete, to holy crap, for the love of God, please, I'm begging you, do not do this. It has the chance to completely bankrupt your entire business and what you should be doing instead. And specifically, I'm doing this with entrepreneurs in mind who are running businesses in the $2 to $10 million range who want to scale to the $20 to $100 million range. If that's where you are, then you are exactly who I made this video for. So let's get started with bad advice. Number 1: Meetings are a waste of time and should be eliminated. I'd say it seems like every other week there's some Forbes story about some other startup founder who supposedly, you know, killed all of his meetings and moved every bit of communication to something asynchronous. We're only doing emails, we're only doing Slack and stuff like that. And they wind up touting all of their productivity gains. But here's what they don't say. More times than not, within about 6 months or so, most of these founders just go back to doing their meetings again. And I know because I know some of the guys who've been featured in some of these articles. Imagine a professional sports team that just doesn't meet together. It doesn't make sense. I mean, meetings work because done right, meetings produce decisions. They create accountability. They create forward motion. They give teams an opportunity to actually connect in real time to address real issues. The key is you need to have more good meetings and you need to have less or ideally no bad meetings. And to do that, I'm gonna recommend the following 4 rules. So rule number 1, no agenda, no meeting. Every single meeting must have a stated purpose. And specifically, I wanna see what is the starting time, what is the ending time? If somebody can't send me a Here's what I'm looking to accomplish and what we're gonna be discussing, then for me it's a, hey, I, I gotta pass on this until I get an agenda. Rule number 2, no outcome, no meeting. We need to be meeting because there needs to be some type of change. What is the thing we're doing right now that we need to be doing something different? In other words, what is the outcome? If there's no outcome, I'm not gonna have a meeting. Rule number 3, no expert, no meeting. In other words, we must have the person in the room who can actually make the call. If we're going to have a meeting, is the person who needs to be there, all the relevant parties, are they going to be in the room as well? If one of them can't make it, then I'm, I'm certainly not going to be there either. And then rule number 4, and this really is the biggie, if you get this one right, you can kind of screw up all the others. No scorecard, no meeting. If I'm going to be meeting with my team, I want to know what's the scorecard that we're looking at? What are all the numbers that everyone agrees to be true What are the metrics that matter and what does everybody agree that they are? If you'll abide by these rules and if you will maintain a consistent and predictable meeting rhythm so that team members know when they're going to have an opportunity to connect next, what you're going to wind up with is fewer but better meetings. Bad advice number 2: Don't hire people you like. Hire people who are different from you. This advice comes from a really good place. This usually comes from the idea that if you hire people who are different than you, who think differently than you, that that's going to introduce a diversity of thoughts and ideas. As team sizes, as company sizes get over 50 people, I really do think that this becomes essential. This is when you start to have professional managers on teams that they can focus on hiring and building a true diversity of teams. But what about when you're less than 50 people? At that point, vibes matter. It is important as the founder of the company, as the person running the company, that you are hiring people who, yes, you like, that you vibe with, you're not excited to spend time with them, then you should not add them to your team. Does that sound mean? Does that sound narrow-minded? Sure. But here's the reality. Running a business is really, really, really hard. It takes a lot of energy. And if in addition to running a business and dealing with kind of all the, you know, spears and arrows that are coming at you just in the day-to-day of running a business, if in addition to that, you also have to deal with somebody who, yeah, they're maybe talented and yeah, they bring a diversity of opinion, but you really, really don't like 'em. They sort of just grind you from a personality perspective. It's just not worth it. In the early days, hire people you like. That being said, you should never, ever, ever hire somebody, even if you like 'em, who they don't align with your company's core values. Bad advice number 3, hire for your weaknesses. Is let's get everybody else to do the things that you are bad at. Sounds right. And this is one of those things that sounds very logical. In reality though, more times than not, the The exact opposite is true. When you hire for your weaknesses, you don't know what great looks like, which means you wind up hiring somebody who also isn't very good at it because number 1, you don't know what good looks like. And number 2, you're just desperately trying to get somebody. Bad hires are incredibly expensive. Not only do you have the cost of what you're paying this person, but you also have the cost of what they're not doing, what they're doing poorly, bringing down the company from a productivity perspective, what they're doing bringing down the company from a culture perspective. Effective, but also it doesn't buy you back any time because you're also having to come back around and clean up their messes and you're having to clean up their mess in an area where again, you are not very good at it. The other area we can mess up when we hire for a weakness is we wind up hiring helpers, somebody who's entry level, somebody who's also not very good at it. When we do this, what does that mean? Well, it, it means that we have to train them and we have to manage them. The problem is, again, we don't know enough about it to train them. Hire for your strengths. Double, down on the things that you're good at. Because number one, you know what great looks like. So we're doubling down, not just on a strength of yours, but likely on a strength in the business. And in doubling down on the strength of the business, what this is doing, it's going to drive additional growth. It's also usually going to buy you additional time and margin. And that margin is key to be able to hire a true peer, a true professional to take over for your weakness. And that's what I'll tell you. If when hiring for your weakness, If the person that you're looking to hire isn't someone that you would work for, if it weren't your company, then you probably shouldn't make that hire. Bad advice number 4: sales solves all business challenges. Just build that rocket ship on the way up. Now, this is one of those things that's pretty great advice, uh, if you're a startup. It's really, really terrible advice at scale. I mean, from zero to probably about a million dollars in revenue, this is dead on. At around $2 million in revenue, this advice can be flat out deadly. And the reason is simple. When it comes to scale and when it comes to success in business, cash is the fuel of business. Cash fuels growth. Growth in and of itself is not fuel. And growth doesn't equal cash. Growth actually eats cash. Growth consumes cash. And if you run out of cash, this is when you come crashing down, no matter how fast you were going. And if you don't believe me, just consider this. According to a study put out by Inc Magazine, 67% of those companies still fail. Inc. 5000 companies, believe it or not, actually fail at a slightly higher rate than normal companies. And they're not failing because of a lack of growth. Very often they're failing because they grew too fast. So anybody who says like, oh, growth solves all challenges, no. Growth very often is going to exacerbate. It's, it's gonna multiply those things that are happening. And if what you have is inefficiency, it's going to make the inefficiencies even worse. There does come a point And it's usually around the $2 to $4 million in revenue mark when you actually need to pause growth just a little bit and you need to focus on systems. We're gonna shift the focus to efficiency. We're gonna shift the focus to profitability, to margins. We're gonna give ourself the space and the margins so that we have it to scale at the next level. If you do that, you're gonna have everything that you need to scale. Uh, if you don't, pretty good chance you're gonna rattle apart. Bad advice number 5, only hire A-players. This is one of those bits of advice. It's not wrong. It's just really unhelpful. How are you as a company only supposed to hire A players? I mean, yep. If everybody that you added to your team was just rockstar awesome, amazing, and just did, you know, everything they were supposed to do perfectly, that'd be great. But we act like that's a decision as business owners that we just get to make. In reality, true A players, they got options, which means more times than not, they don't want to go work for the messed up, you know, little startup business, which most of us are running, the goal should not be to only hire A players. It's not helpful. Instead, the goal should be to build a company that is so systemized that B and C players can succeed. And the reason we wanna do this is because there's gonna be times when that's all you can get because you're a B and C company. That's what you are. You're scaling, you're figuring this stuff out. Let's just be completely honest with ourselves. But here's the other phenomenal part of it. That is exactly the kind of company that A players wanna work for. Because A players have options, A players wanna work for companies where they know they're set up for success. So if you build a company that doesn't require A players, you're gonna wind up attracting A players. Bad advice number 6, hire fast, fire fast. Not only does this create a cutthroat meat grinder culture that I personally don't really wanna be associated with, the reality is this is also how you scale dysfunction. Instead of solving for systems issues, all you're doing is just brute forcing all of your inefficiencies. You're brute forcing the solution in the form of human beings. Let's like pick up these poor humans by the head and just toss 'em at our problems and hope that they fix it. And yes, this can work to a certain degree, but it will fail 100% of every single time at scale. Instead, what I want you to do is I want you to hire slow and fire fair. Now, incidentally, firing fair is gonna seem fast to some, and it's gonna seem slow to others. So let's get into what I mean by both. Now, most hiring failures, they're not actually like people problems. It's not the problem with the person that you hired. They're role clarity problems, they're system documentation problems, and they're training and onboarding problems. So more times than not, this whole fire fast concept just becomes a crutch for leaders who never really defined the role and they never really defined what success in that role looks like in the first place. To hire slowly, what I want you to do is not make a hire until you have number 1, clearly defined the role that you are hiring for. And crucially, what this means is that you need to know the name for the role that you're hiring. And crucially, the name for the role that you're hiring for shouldn't be something that you made up. Number 2, wanna make sure that we've visualized where this role fits into the broader value chain. So something that I'm big on, every single business is made up of different assembly lines. So you have an assembly line for how you get customers and clients. And then similarly, this is what we do when we get a customer or a client. These series of assembly lines are what are known as value chains or value engines. So what I would wanna do before we make any hire is to make sure that we've visualized and documented each and every one of these core critical value chains. And for most businesses, there's 3 or 4, there's not that many. And I would wanna make sure that I knew for the role that we're looking for, where do they fit within this value chain? And, and I, I don't just want this for me, I also want it for the person that I'm hiring because I wanna be able to show them when they show up like, hey, here's the role that you're gonna be doing. This is, this is where it fits in our broader value creation process. So here's all the things that happened before you that you're gonna need to know about. Here's everything that happens after you, and this is where you fit. Just that level of clarity is something that I wanna be able to give to any team member. And then number 3, documentation. Documentation on, on 2 things. Number 1, what success looks like, um, both in terms of the how and number 2, what success looks like in terms of the what. So when we think about the how, how do you do your job? So I, if somebody's gonna come into a role, I wanna be able to say, this is what the role is called, this is how you fit into the overall value chain, and this is specifically how you do your job. This is the checklist, the playbook, the SOP, the walkthrough of how you do it. And then number 2, the what. This is what success looks like in terms of the metrics that we're tracking, how we're defining success in your role. These are the metrics that we're tracking, and this is the target that, that we would look for you to achieve. If you don't know these things, then hire a contractor first, hire a freelancer, or hire a consultant to help you develop the role before making a full-time hire. It's just not fair to bring somebody in from the outside to give 'em a full-time job and then just set 'em up for failure. So finally, you need to fire fairly. You should have a written process in place for what happens when someone messes up. And it shouldn't be one of these things where it's like, oh, when you mess up once, then that's it. You know, you're gone. I know for us at the scalable company, if somebody messes up, we're going to go to them and we're going to assume that it was probably our fault. We're going to assume that, you know, we didn't give them the resources. We're going to assume that we weren't clear on the instructions. And so we're going to go to them and make sure that they understand that. And assuming that they do, fine. That, like, that's it. No harm, no foul. Now, if somebody in the team messes up and the expectations were clear and they did have all of the resources at they need, we're not necessarily going to fire them, you know, right then and there, but we are gonna have a conversation along the lines of, hey, mistakes happen, but can we agree that you do have the resources that you need? Can we agree that you are clear on what success looks like? Can we agree that you didn't meet the standard this time? And can we also agree that if you continue to not meet the standard, that then, then you can't stay in this role? That's being clear. Now, even in that case for us, If, if another mistake happens, that, that's when we're going to go to them and say, look, we've had this conversation once before. It's clear that it's not getting done. And so what we're going to do is we're going to put you on a performance improvement plan. For us, when somebody goes on a performance improvement plan, this is legitimately us wanting to pour into them, to give them some extra support, to try to get things back on track. So we're going to say, we're going to do this. We're going to work with you, you know, micromanage you for lack of a better thing for the next 30, 60, 90 days. We're going to meet weekly to ensure that you're up to the standard. But hey, if you're not up to the standard by the end of this period, I'm sorry, we're just gonna have to part ways. Now again, that's fair right then and there. If they, if they choose to opt out, we're gonna say, now look, if you decide at this point that you don't want to go through this, maybe we're gonna put 'em on a 60-day performance improvement plan. We'll say, if at any point in time you wanna opt out, you can opt out right now. You can resign and we will still pay you for the 60 days. That way everybody can kind of part as friends and it just gives team members the ability to, you know, if, if they know that things aren't working out, it gives them clarity on exit. It gives them time to leave. And I've just found that that's the, the best way, uh, to do things. And, and it's the reason that we fire very, very few people at our companies. More times than not, we're either able to invest in 'em and get things back on track and they succeed, or they choose to leave on their own. I should probably say, my attorney made me say this, employment law varies from state to state, country to country. Consult with an HR and/or HR professional before implementing any termination policy. I'm not an attorney. This is not This is for entertainment purposes only. Bad advice number 7: culture trumps everything. Oh my gosh, I hear this all the time. Culture eats strategy for breakfast, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And again, it's one of those things. It's, it's true-ish, but a great culture is not the goal. The great culture is the outcome. It's what happens when you combine a shared purpose with shared values and critically shared victories. And that last one is the biggie. Don't focus on culture. Building culture, at least not when you're at 7 figures in revenue trying to scale. At 8, when you're getting into hundreds of millions of dollars and you're gonna have like a chief culture officer, like go nuts. But for right now, don't focus on that. Instead, focus on winning and specifically winning for your customers. If you will do that, culture will follow. So if you want to build a company that can stand the test of time, then offer a product or service that delivers surplus value to the customer. In other words, deliver more value to the customer than you for in return and run your business at a profit. That's what's going to give you the margin that you need to build an environment where your people are well compensated for doing meaningful work, work where they can leverage their skills and their abilities in a way that creates real tangible value and where they're compensated in the form of personal growth, where they get a little better every day, where they get to see their skills improve, but also achievement, you know, where they get to see themselves and their team members win. If you can check all those boxes, then your customers will win. And if your customers win, your company will win. And if your company wins, then you should be able to provide a fun, valuable, self-sustaining culture. You don't need your people to care as much as you do. They never will, and that's not the point. What you need to do is you need to create alignment where your team wins when your customers win. All things that sound true in theory, but they just fail in practice. So before you blindly follow that YouTuber or TikToker, including me, ask the question, have they actually done what I'm trying to do? Or have they only ever made money just talking about this stuff? I mean, one of the things that I'm so proud of at the Scalable Company is that my partners and I spend way more time doing this stuff than we do talking about it. So if you want more practical advice based on real in-the-trenches experience, actually running and scaling businesses, be to subscribe. The, the stuff that's true doesn't always fit on a bumper sticker, but if you're okay hearing it like it is, warts and all, then you're definitely in the right place. So stay tuned, and I'll see you in the next one.
