In this eye-opening episode, Scott Ritzheimer, Founder of Scale Architects, shares why even great advice can actively hold you back if it’s not stage-specific. If you struggle with applying well-meaning guidance that doesn’t fit your current reality, you won’t want to miss it
You will discover:
– What judgment skill separates founders who thrive from those who stay stuck
– Why advice from peers, coaches, authors, and successful founders is often wrong for your stage
– How to filter all advice through the lens of your current Founder’s Evolution stage
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the Start scale and succeed podcast, the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey. As a founder, I’m your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and this is part two of our three part solo series. And last time, if you missed it, we talked about how your experience can and will actively keep you stuck. If you missed that episode, you’re going to want to check it out. It’s going to be helpful for understanding today, to some extent, but it’s going to be really helpful in understanding part three of the series here coming up. Now the there’s something today that we need to talk about that’s even harder to see than the challenge of over relying on your past experience, and that is the advice that you’re getting from other people now, not talking about just flat out bad advice. You know, I think we’re relatively good at figuring out what to do with bad advice.
It can triples up every once in a while, but that’s not really what this episode is about. Bad advice. You have to get rid of bad advice. What I’m talking about is good advice. Now I’m also talking about good advice from people who should know what they’re talking about. These are the people who’ve actually done it right, other founders who’ve built what you’re trying to build, other leaders who’ve done what you’re trying to do, or even folks like me, coaches, consultants, advisors, who’ve worked with those founders, or who have been founders ourselves, who record the podcast episodes or write the books or the articles that you’re reading. You see, there’s an immense amount of great advice out there, and the vast, vast, vast majority of it. Hear me on this is wrong for you, not because they’re lying, not even unfortunately, because you’re special, although you are, don’t worry, but because you’re getting the right answers to the wrong questions.
Or at least you’re getting the right answers to the right questions at the wrong time and right now, you are likely building on a foundation, both consciously and subconsciously, of advice that was never meant for the stage that you’re actually in and will not drive the success you want to the extent that you succeed following the wrong advice. You’re doing it despite that wrong advice, not because of it. And I want to lay this out really clearly. This is the point of this entire episode, and that is that the most dangerous advice is not bad advice. The most dangerous advice is great advice given at the wrong time. And there are four primary sources of this problem. And we’re going to take a couple shots today, not because I’m mad at anybody, but because you need to understand this. I want to say a little context.
I travel across the country. I teach CEOs how to scale their business with the business world, nonprofit world, and a part of my story is I got really great advice from really great coaches and consultants at really wrong times. I lost more money following the well intentioned but wrong advice of advisors than I did on any other decisions that I made on my own. That’s not because I made great decisions, but because this is a really big problem, and for a while I thought it was a me problem. And to be fair, it was. I picked the wrong people at the wrong time. We’ve got content on that if you need to know how to find the right people at the right time. But, but what I realized is I started traveling the country and started hearing from folks who would come up to me after a keynote. They would share these problems that they had with coaches and how they had lost faith in the profession. And, I mean, it broke my heart.
So I started asking, Hey, how many people have have had a coach? And in these circles, the vast majority have a lot of founders have had coaches, which is great. It’s wonderful. I think you can go way further, way faster, with a coach, the right coach. But then I would also ask, how many folks, how many of you who have had a coach have had a bad experience with a coach? And I’m embarrassed to say that something like nine out of 10 who have had a coach have had a bad experience with a coach. This is a really big problem, and it’s, again, it’s not just coaches, it’s it’s a whole bunch of things. So we’re going to talk about what these four things are. We’re these four things are. But this is a problem that’s affecting everyone almost all the time. All right, so what are the four sources in no particular order? What are the four sources of of of good advice at the wrong time or in the wrong way? And again, none of these people are trying to hurt anyone. Maybe some of them are, but that’s not the point of this episode. The point of this episode is good people trying to help other people and hurting them in the process. And the first category I’m going to pick on here today is peers. And you know, there’s this idea the definition of mastermind. Which is relatively new phenomenon, by the way, is that the sum of us is smarter. All of us is smarter than the sum of us. That if we get people in the room together, even if none of us knows all the answers, all of us have a better shot at knowing the answers. That’s a wonderful sentiment. It’s true in some respect. But it also gives way to the blind leading the blind. And there’s this post, there’s these demotivator posters. They’re hilarious, but basically they take little trite phrases from the business world and show them how silly they are, especially with a kind of bureaucratic, you know, monolithic tone to them. And one of these motivator posters says this, no one is as dumb as the as all of us. And I think it’s got a hands and, you know, everyone’s hands in kind of thing.
And, and that’s, that’s true. I have been in many peer groups where I’ve heard folks that have not figured out how to succeed in the stage they’re in tell other people how to succeed in the stage that they’re in, and because it’s in this mastermind environment. You know, somehow it’s more true than than at some other point in time. But peer groups are wonderful from camaraderie. They’re wonderful for sharing the things that we’ve actually conquered. But if you’re asking, like, let me give you a funny example. If you have a financial planner who’s broke and doesn’t have any money in retirement, you probably shouldn’t be paying a ton of attention to them on their advice for how you can manage your money and in peer groups, we tend to run into that. You run into a founder who may have a successful business, but we don’t know if that success was because of them or despite them. More likely, you’ll have a founder who’s struggling with the same things you are and hasn’t figured it out any more than you have, and we end up in this blind leading the blind phase, which is not helpful. The second group that I’m going to pick on, I’m going to turn the camera back on us, and I’m going to talk about folks like me, coaches and consultants, and these are the ones that really frustrate me the most, because honestly, they should know better.
And just as a quick aside for those of you coaches and consultants who are listening, I genuinely believe you have a moral authority, not just to tell people what you know, but you need to understand what stage they’re in and what they need to know now, not just what you know now, and if you are working with folks who are in the wrong stage, or if you’re sharing information with folks that’s in the wrong stage, you need to stop now. I know you’re not trying to hurt them. I know that you know you’re trying to do it best for them. You probably fully believe in what you’re doing, but you have a moral authority, in my opinion, to understand what your clients need right now, not just what your program says.
And so if you’re not a coach or consultant listening, just because a coach or consultant said it doesn’t mean that they’re right. And just because they have all kinds of past success with a bunch of people, maybe a bunch of people, who are even trying to do what, who have done what you’re trying to do, doesn’t mean that they’re telling you the right thing. Doesn’t mean that they’re telling you the truth. They could be lying to you. That’s very unlikely. There are very, very few coaches that do that. I’ve talked to 1000s and 1000s of coaches now, and that’s not the issue that we have to pay attention to, but I can tell you, it is a real struggle for coaches if they don’t understand this stage concept, to make sure that one, they’re only working with people in the right stage, and two, that they’re telling them only the things that they need to do in that stage. And so you will see folks who had similar situations to what I had, where they get the right answers to the wrong questions.
And we’re going to talk about how that that all these together are a huge, problem for founders, but just suffice it to say that coaches and consultants need to pay attention to the stage that they’re working in, whether it be the organizational stage like less McEwan’s work for predictable success, or in the founder stages, where we talk about often here on the show, is really, really important that there, if you have someone helping you, that they are helping you succeed in this stage. And that might mean that the coach who got you here isn’t the coach who will get you there, or the consultant who helped you in the past isn’t the consultant who’s going to move forward. That’s not a bad thing. It’s not a problem. There’s just coaches and consultants are very, very successful, usually in one or two stages. There are very, very few who can really put on all these different stage hats and do it in an effective way. In fact, for me, there are a bunch of stages that I don’t work in, and I wrote the book on the stages so I know that I can specialize in a few areas and really do world class work. No one can do world class work in all seven stages. I just don’t believe that’s true.
Scott Ritzheimer
So we have coaches and consultants. Now here’s another one, and it’s kind of related to to this Coaches and Consultants thing, but it’s a little different, and the reason for that is my. So the third group is authors or other thought leaders or communicators. So we’ll pick on books, but know that this applies to articles, podcasts, videos, you name it, seminars and what happens when you’re speaking to a mass audience, you have no real control over what stage they’re in. And so when you get something like Simon Sinek, start with why, or you get something like built to last, or you get something like Patrick Lencioni, death by meeting, or even five dysfunctions of a team, these are wonderful books all had a profound impact on me as a leader and me as a coach. However, what none of those authors really explain, and I don’t know if they’re aware of it or not, is who that is written to, because it’s not all founders, it’s not all leaders, it’s not all businesses, because, like, there are very, very few resources that are actually universally applicable to all resources, just like there’s very few coaches and consultants who are universally helpful to all stages.
And so when you’re reading a book, when you’re listening to a podcast, you have to change the way that you’re thinking about what they’re saying. It’s not just, are they giving good advice or not, and it’s not, do I agree with it or not? It’s not even, did it work or not? The question really is, what stage was this written to? Or what stage is this happening in because each of these authors you’ll see are writing from a context of the stage in which they do most of their work, or they spend most of their time. A good example of this Simon Sinek spends a lot of time working with treadmill and big rot organizations as predictable success stages. And what happens is, what he has learned is helpful to some of these bigger organizations is then misapplied to smaller organizations as a universal truth, because, in fairness, it’s kind of represented as a universal truth. And some of the things that Simon Sinek says are universal, they’re not stage specific, but many of the things that he says are stage specific, and when they’re all woven together in one work, one book, you’ve got to up your game on being able to siphon out and filter out what are appropriate for the stage you’re in right now and what isn’t. So the very first thing you can do is just pay attention when you’re listening to an audio book when you’re reading a book, when you’re watching some video, what stage is this person writing to?
And I could go on on that for a really long time, but if you if you just filter through that, it’s not actually the author’s fault, because they’re writing to everyone, and they don’t control who picks up the book. It’s incumbent on us as readers to really recognize what’s right for right now. All right, that’s the third group. So we have peers, we have coaches and consultants, and we have authors. Now, the fourth one, I think, is actually the trickiest, and that is successful founders who are telling their story, and they’re telling, here’s how I succeeded, here’s what I did to succeed. And either expressly or by implication, they’re saying, and if you do this, you’ll be successful too. This is something called survivorship bias, and it’s actually the most dangerous issue in entrepreneurship, because you’ll get a founder who said, Oh, I cold called my way to my first million and that’s how I succeeded. And by implication, if you cold call your way, you just have to work harder. You have to cold call more, and then you’ll get to a million dollars. But we’re looking at a sample size of one.
And so you can’t actually definitively say if it was the cold calling that was what drove the success, or just because they had product market fit and had the right product at the right time and put just enough energy behind it. And so what happened? You have to recognize this. Seth Godin wrote a book, all marketers are storytellers, and then storytellers is or all marketers are liars. One of them’s crossed out. I don’t remember which one it is, but basically, the premise of the book is that all stories are lies, and it’s not that they’re intentional withholding of the truth, but no story is a complete picture of what actually happened. No story shares the probability likelihoods that if we played everything out again, that it would happen the exact same way. No stories intended to do that. Stories, by definition, are an incomplete version of the events that happened. Now even more. More so in this kind of, you know, success row culture, thing that we do in in the world of founders, we edit our stories heavily.
We edit them to highlight the heroics of some entrepreneur and and what we do is we inadvertently remove the the dirty fingernails work that got them there, the massive Reliance they had on the team that got them there. And we look at these stories about why they succeeded, but we can’t actually tell if that’s why they succeeded, or if they succeeded despite those things. And so just because someone has done what you want to do doesn’t mean they can help you do what you want to do. That’s just not true. They might be able to, right? There’s a better chance than zero that they’ll be able to there’s probably a better chance than the average Joe. But I can tell you this, if they aren’t stage specific in the way that they understand their own story and especially in the way that they communicate it, then they’re going to tell you to do things that aren’t actually necessary for you or may just be wrong altogether. Let me give an example of this.
Most founders who get a platform where they’re able to start sharing their story, usually do it somewhere in the organizational stage of predictable success, oftentimes the leadership stage of the CEO, stage or so, stages five, six or seven. And when you’re in stage five and you look in the rear view mirror, the big, ugly monster that you slayed most recently is all the crap you had to deal with in stage four. And so you’ll see founders in stage 567, talking about how to overcome stage four issues. But if you’re not in stage four, that’s not helpful. And they kind of tell it as if, oh, I wish I had done that all the way at the beginning, or they might even rewrite the story and say that they did do it all the way at the beginning. And so what this ends up being? And forgive me if this sounds a little technical, but it ends up being stage one, two and three founders stuck in stage one, two or three trying to solve stage four problems that they’re not even experiencing or weren’t experiencing until they made themselves experience it because of the advice of a successful founder. Just because somebody has done what you want to do doesn’t mean that they can reproduce that in you. To drive this home. You have all heard this, and it’s the exact same phenomenon, and that is your best salesperson is not your best sales manager.
We can interpret that same pattern out and say that the best person to make you the best entrepreneur is not the best entrepreneur. You know they are good at making themself an entrepreneur. That’s not a selfish thing. It’s just the skill set that they have proven that they have is they can do enough things right to succeed, either because of themselves or despite themselves. That’s all we know about it. And so when you’re looking at these unbelievable stories of what folks have done and how they do it and how they think about it, they might be unbelievable because they’re not really all that true, or they’re not true for you right now. And so I said this in the previous episode leading into this one, that I actually think this is the number one challenge that founders face. I really do. I think the biggest challenge that we face today is we have more access to advice. In fact, I’d even say we are bombarded by more advice than founders have at any other point in human history. And quite frankly, it’s only going to get worse. And so the thing that’s going to separate successful founders from the rest is their ability to filter out the noise.
To put this in perspective, there are, there are seven different stages, right? So there’s a couple of things that are universal to all seven stages, like knowing what stage you’re in, but most things aren’t. So one in seven is something like, forgive the math on this, but something like 16% and that means 16% of of all the noise out there is actually signal that you want to be paying attention to. Think about that. That means it’s something like 84% of what you have access to is not relevant or helpful for you. That’s profound. Now, within each stage, there are somethings you need to do to thrive in this stage, and there are some things that you only need to do if you’re trying to evolve to the next stage. And so that means that we actually can probably cut that 16% in half, all the way down to something like 8% of what you hear is relevant to you, and 92% isn’t. Now we can also add that some things are just wrong, right a founder’s story that they didn’t fully understand the advice of a peer that isn’t. Correct the repeated advice from a book that’s not that’s just, that’s not relevant.
All four of those categories can have stuff that’s wrong in it, and so you could probably cut it down again, maybe not in half, but you’re in the like six to 7% of all advice out there is actually relevant for you right now. And as a founder, you’ve got to keep the shiny object syndrome in check. You’ve got to keep the the the kind of hero, founder story, admiration thing in check. We can look at people who’ve done amazing things and say, hey, they did amazing things, and we can actually look at them and say, hey, what can we learn from it that is relevant in our stage right now? Because the hardest thing in business, the hardest thing in growing a nonprofit, the hardest thing in growing your church, is finding good advice.
And when we say good advice, we mean good advice for right now, and the best thing that you can do to to really focus your energy right now and dramatically improve your long term chances of success are to get really good at developing the judgment to Know which advice applies to you right now and which doesn’t, and that leads us into what we’re going to talk about in episode three of this little mini series. We’re going to talk about if you can’t rely on your past advice, and you can’t, or, I’m sorry, on your past experience, and you can’t rely on advice, even if it comes from a great source, what can you rely on? And fortunately, the answer is not me. There’s a better answer. I’m going to tell you what it is, something we take very seriously here at scale architects, but something that you can apply yourself on a daily basis. I’ll show you exactly what the answer is in our next episode. I’ll see you there.
Contact Scott Ritzheimer
Scott Ritzheimer helped start nearly 20,000 new businesses and nonprofits and with his business partner started led their multimillion-dollar business through an exceptional and extended growth phase (over 10 years of double-digit growth) all before he turned 35.He founded Scale Architects to help founders and CEOs identify and implement the one essential strategy they need right now to get them on the fast track to Predictable Success.
Want to learn more about Scott Ritzheimer’s work at Scale Architects? Check out his website at https://www.scalearchitects.com?