Bad advice is worse than none

Although businesses are toppling like dominos here, one intrepid friend of mine has been nurturing a little enterprise that just might make it. It’s strictly a mom-and-pop operation, but it has a very unique product and I think it’s extremely promising.

Once things started coming together, and it looked like the Big Plans for growth might actually see the light of day, this budding entrepreneur asked me if I could offer any business advice. And my advice was this: Don’t take ANYONE’s business advice. Sure, if you’ve got a large business, some professional expertise might be worth the investment, but that’s not the case here.

Furthermore, never, EVER, take freebie advice from anyone about business. Legitimate experts don’t give expertise away; they don’t have the time or the inclination. You wouldn’t take medical advice from a self-appointed doctor at a tavern, you wouldn’t take legal advice from a guy at the beach, and you shouldn’t take financial or management advice from just anybody who happens to have hyper-kinetic vocal cords. Bromides, buzz words, and cute sayings have nothing to do with the real world of having to calculate, project, analyze, and optimize the tangled streams of the business jungle’s financial factors.

I don’t know what it is about Saipan, maybe it’s something in the water, but so-called business advisors seem to grow like coconuts here. Most of these guys would get run out of American offices at knife point (and probably have been), but on the permissive shores of our fair tropical island, I guess the right line of B.S. and cheesy hustling jive-talk can fool some of the people some of the time.

A fair number of entrepreneurs visit my office and ask if I can help them out, and my rough cut- off for a client is an enterprise that has, or expects to have, about $400,000 a year in sales. From my experience, anything smaller than that is better run solely by the owner of the business. If you own a business, then you’ve got an instinctive process that you should trust. Spending much money to have a custom analysis performed probably isn’t appropriate. You’re better off poking your nose in a good book or two on the subject and hacking around with spreadsheets on your kitchen table. And I’m better off working on projects of an appropriate scope that I can invest sufficient time in.

Of course, the scope of keeping the books straight, the bills accounted for, and related things in order can’t be ignored, and we all have to find our way to a good accountant’s office. But the context for my comments here is the distinct realm of financial management.

I have a distinctly soft spot for entrepreneurs; they move the world forward, and their endeavors are noble. If you have a business idea, I say go with it. Don’t listen to anybody but yourself. If the business winds up big someday, then maybe you’ll need to poke around for some financial wizardry.
Until that point, though, follow your instincts and your passion. Let the human leeches find other prey, and don’t waste your precious time listening to jackasses bray.