Deaf Ears: Business Advice You Should Never Listen To

When you’re running a business, there’s no shortage of people who want to come out of the woodwork in order to give you advice on exactly how you should go about doing it. Whether it’s other business owners, investors, or even blog posts and websites. Everyone has an opinion of the right and wrong ways to go about running a business, and the big issue is that these opinions often end up conflicting with one another. Of course, that’s not always a bad thing. There are plenty of occasions where the best possible thing is to hear as many sides of the story as possible in order to create a more nuanced and deep understanding of how to deal with something. However, there is a significant amount of advice that get’s given out to new business owners a lot of the time that is not only wrong but can sometimes actually be dangerous to your business as a whole! With that in mind, here is are some pieces of business advice that you should never take.

Bigger is always better

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Of course, this is not to say that growth it not important to a business, of course, it is. Not business could possibly expect to compete without being able to grow over time. But far too often business owners assume that growth is the only thing that’s truly important. This often ends up with them doing so in a way that is almost entirely unsustainable. The bigger a business becomes, the more responsibility you have to deal with. Not to mention the increased pressure from both customers and investors. If you haven’t grown your business in a sustainable way, then there’s simply no chance that you’re going to be able to support that kind of pressure. The key is to only every grow your business at a rate that still allows you to support it properly, even if that means doing so more slowly than you might have expected.

Don’t bother with physical marketing

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You can almost never get through a conversation about the modern business world without someone claiming that the internet has “killed” traditional marketing techniques. Anyone with any sense can see that this is utter nonsense, but it’s something that far too many impressionable new business owners tend to take to heart. If you ignore physical marketing, then you’re shutting yourself off from entire demographics who might be incredibly interested in your product. Not only that but there are plenty of different types of traditional marketing that you can use. Whether it’s custom signs and banners from www.selbys.net, direct mail, or even simply networking with people in person, there are always ways in which traditional marketing can help your business. You’ve just got to be willing to put in the time and effort.

More employees make things easier

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The issue here is that it assumes that many hands always make light work, which is simply not true. In fact, if each employee doesn’t have enough work to keep them busy, they’re going to get bored. This means that you end up with a large staff who you are paying to do virtually nothing. It’s far better to streamline your staff and provide them with enough work to keep them engaged and motivated throughout the day.