The Business Advice I Ignore (And Why)

If you've been in business for more than five minutes, you've probably heard advice like: 

"Done is better than perfect." 

"You need to be everywhere on social media." 

"Hustle harder."

"Automate everything." 

While each of those ideas has a little truth to it, I've learned over the last 24 years of running a business that the best advice isn't always one-size-fits-all. 

Success comes from knowing when to follow conventional wisdom—and when to do things differently.

In this episode, I'm sharing five popular pieces of business advice I mostly ignore and, more importantly, what I believe actually leads to sustainable business growth. 

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Transcript

Why Common Advice Needs Nuance

Carrie Saunders 0:00

If you've been in business for more than five minutes, you've probably heard advice like, done is better than perfect. You need to be everywhere on social media. Hustle harder. Automate everything. And while some of these ideas have a grain of truth to them, I've learned over the last 24 years of running a business that some of the most common business advice out there needs a lot more nuance. So today I'm sharing five pieces of business advice that I mostly ignore, and more importantly, what I believe instead. Let's dive in. Struggling to turn website traffic into real sales, you're not alone and you don't have to figure it out all yourself. Welcome to Smarter Online Business, the podcast for course creators, coaches, and e-commerce entrepreneurs who want their websites to convert visitors into buyers without the tech overwhelm. I'm your host, Carrie Saunders, a website strategist and conversion expert with over 20 years of experience. Each episode delivers simple, proven strategies to help you generate more revenue and make your website your smartest sales tool. Welcome back to the show. Today I'm talking about the, you know, typical business advice that's out there. And which one of those do I ignore and what do I do instead?

Stop Trying To Be Everywhere

Carrie Saunders 1:11

So, first off, the one that drives me crazy is you need to be everywhere on social media. I built this business without any social media and with referrals and word of mouth. You simply don't have to be everywhere. There are so many people in this world you need to focus on what works for you. You can't be fully present everywhere, you can't create quality content everywhere, and you can't maintain your sanity everywhere. We don't want to be on 10 different social platforms. So what I do is I like to choose the platforms that I use and enjoy first. And then if you need to add another platform in where you know your audience is, if they don't actually resonate on those platforms. So I want you to choose one or two, maybe at most three social platforms, depending on how long you've been in business to concentrate on, to focus on. I don't personally focus on Twitter slash X. I just don't really enjoy it. I also don't focus much on Instagram. It's just another platform I don't really enjoy. I don't like using it. So I focus on the ones that I do enjoy. I enjoy Facebook, I enjoy LinkedIn, I'm enjoying Substack as of recently. Um, I also do this podcast. You know, I love reaching you guys via a podcast. So even though that's not social media, it's another way to reach outreach. So think outside the box. You don't have to be on all the socials at all the time. Just be consistent where you enjoy and where your audience is too. It's so much better to show up in a few places really well than poorly in all of them. And then

When Quality Beats Speed

Carrie Saunders 2:53

advice number two, done is better than perfect. Okay, so this is true in some cases, but in some cases it is not. So this one's partially true. Perfectionism delays launches, creates procrastination, and causes overthinking. So we need to balance this piece of advice. There are some examples where you know, done is better than perfect does not work at all. E-commerce launches. That has to be pretty much close to perfect before you can launch payment processing. That needs to be working. Um, engineering projects, yeah, I have two degrees in engineering. Those have to be, you know, done right. Maybe not necessarily 100% perfect. We there's never any 100% perfect, but they need to be done right into our best ability. Security is another one of those where we have to be as perfect as possible there. So when we talk about done versus perfect and done is better than perfect, we want to make sure that we are doing proper things to make sure we're have that right balance. Whenever we are launching a new website or a new e-commerce store, we need to have both us as a, you know, if we're working on a site and the client do thorough testing. We're gonna find certain types of things, they're gonna find certain types of things. We have different brains, different perspectives on the business and on the website. So making sure that there's lots of testing is very important. We need to have that shared responsibility. Progress beats perfection, but quality still does matter. So, in some situations, done is better than perfect, but we there are some situations where we need to be a little bit closer to that perfectionism because we don't want to have failed credit cards whenever somebody's checking out for your product or your services, and we don't want to have bad customer experiences for our customers. The

Hustle Seasons Versus Burnout

Carrie Saunders 4:46

third piece of advice, you have to hustle to succeed. This one kind of drives me a little bit crazy because hustle seasons can happen. That is okay. Sometimes we are in a hustle season, but we can't believe that we have to hustle all the time. We need to be working on building our businesses to fit our lives and to fit what we enjoy. You know, when we're starting a business, when we're doing big launches, when there's emergencies, yes, yes, hustle, hustle happens. We just hustled so hard the other week for one of our e-commerce clients when some things went wrong. Hustle is definitely there. But we want to also have that balance. We can't have that constant hustle. It leads to burnout, it can hurt families, it can hurt relationships, it can hurt your health, it can hurt your decision making. You can become so decision-fatigued you don't make good decisions anymore. It's something that I've run into it before as well. You know, I started this business with a nine-month-old. My oldest was nine months old, and I accidentally started the business helping a an old uh high school, you know, friend's mom with her store and getting it online. I raised three kids in the beginning of this business. We quickly had a few more kids. I had to learn boundaries for myself, for my kids, for our employees, for our clients. You have to learn those boundaries so you don't feel like you're hustling all the time. There was a point in time where I would work from about nine to five, then it would be kid and family time, and then from about nine p.m. to midnight. I was working a lot, you know, pretty much 12 hours a day. I enjoyed what I was doing, but it was a bit much. It took a lot for me to get out of that, it became a habit, like so to get out of that habit. Now I have the boundary. I do not work on weekends or after hours, after business hours, unless there's actually a client emergency. I do not mind at all helping a client when there's a true emergency after hours. But I had to, you know, create that boundary. I'm not checking email, business email after hours. I'm not checking business email on the weekends unless I know I need to be looking out for some, you know, a potential issue. Maybe we've launched a client. I want to just double check everything's going well. So I don't generally even sit at a computer. Is if you can believe that, you know, I'm on a computer all day. I love computers. You know, I'm my degree is basically computer engineering. It's electrical engineering with a computer engineering specialty. And I love computers. I love technology, I love all the things. But I've gotten to a point I cannot sit at a laptop or a computer in the evenings or on the weekends unless I'm gaming with my kids. Um, occasionally, if I'm building up something new for our business, I'll be excited about sure I'll wanna work on it some on the weekend. And if we don't have any family things going on, sure I'll do that. But it's not my norm. That's my exception now. So we want to make sure we have that balance there because business should support your life, not consume your life.

Cheap Choices That Cost More

Carrie Saunders 7:52

Piece of advice number four, the cheapest option saves money. This is a big gotcha. For example, you might get the wrong developer by going with a cheaper option. You might get the wrong website platform, whether it's for e-commerce or course creator or coach platform. You might get the wrong platform because you went with the cheapest one. You might get a whole bunch of technical debt. You get the cheapest one here and the cheapest one there. And next thing you know, you have like 10 different platforms. You have to work together and make them all operate together. You might have to redo projects. We've had clients come to us where they went and got the cheapest developers. Everything didn't, most of the things didn't work, lots of things were broken, and we had to fix it. So we had to redo their project. It cost them way more money than if they had come to a reputable developer to begin with. So sometimes the cheapest option isn't the best option. Think about it when you go buy products in the store. You know, I tend to buy not necessarily the cheapest option, not always the most expensive. I don't think the most expensive is always the best either, but I try to find the right price point, the right balance for fit. Whenever you pay a little bit more money for something, generally it does last longer. It may even last years longer. It's similar when we're working with our business and with our websites. We don't want to necessarily always go with the cheapest option. Sometimes it is a good option, but sometimes it's really not the best fit. It's going to cost us more money in the long run. And so I'm always looking at value over price to make sure it is the best fit for us or for our clients. If we're helping our clients make decisions, we just want to make sure we're evaluating all aspects of something, not just the price.

Automate Processes Not Relationships

Carrie Saunders 9:34

And then the last piece of advice is automate everything, especially in the, you know, nowadays with all the AI that's coming out at the, you know, why is of this recording, automation can be very, very amazing. But if you go too far, you're going to lose personal connection, you're going to lose intentionality, you're going to lose relationship building. Relationship building is key with businesses. So some examples of some good automation are like reminders, onboarding of clients, repetitive tasks. Um, when you're using e-commerce, you know, doing like the checkout emails and everything that automates that comes out of that. But bad automation can include everything customer facing beyond that. For example, you know, there are quite a few different automations for sending direct messages in Facebook or Instagram or things like that. Sometimes those are good, but when you overuse them, that can then really degrade your customer relationship. It does a few things. One, the end customer feels like they're just kind of talking to a robot and nobody's really over there and they they it kind of feels like the cold short shoulder. But two, you also lose that human connection of understanding what their pain points and their needs are. So when we don't humanly interact with our clients or with the people who are buying our products or services on our website, we lose what is going through their mind, what they need. We lose touch with them. So it's really hard to serve them if you don't know what's going on with them. So, for example, we have our course creator suite, which is our white label version of Go High Level. We have some wonderful people in there. And it has some automations to it, but it also has human connection. I get on phone calls several times a month with the community to make sure their questions are answered. I also jump in the community and the team jumps in the community to answer their questions in there as well. Now, sure, we could have some of those questions automated. We could create some sort of chat GPT bot that would answer their questions, or I could even use a Go High Level itself and train it to answer their questions. But we all know that whenever we start using a chat bot and it's AI, we can get so frustrated, especially if it's not done right and doesn't escalate to a human quick enough. So I want you to, you know, think about not how can I get things done fast, but you we have to balance that human connection. How do we get things done well and correctly as well? So automating everything doesn't necessarily be the best piece of advice. We want to leave that human connection in there when it's necessary, when it makes sense, and when we would lose something if we didn't. So my general rule of thumb is that we need to automate processes, things that we're going to repeat often. But human relationships, we don't want to automate those. So just remember, just because something can be automated doesn't necessarily mean it should be. So

Gut Check Questions And Next Steps

Carrie Saunders 12:31

these are just some of the top five that come come to my mind when writing this podcast episode. And I just want to reiterate that the one thing I've learned in the past 24 plus years in business is that most advice isn't completely wrong. Like we've talked about in detail with each one of these. It just needs context, it needs some more information behind it because businesses are built by real people with real goals, real families, personalities, and priorities. And what works for one person may not work for another. And if you've enjoyed this episode, I'd love to hear from you. What's one piece of business advice you decided to ignore? You can send me a message right in your podcast app. There should be a text carry link when you're looking at the description of this episode. You can also connect with me on social media too and let me know. Send me a message. I'd love to hear. I'm most frequently on Facebook, followed by LinkedIn. So I want to give you a few action items, a few gut check items. I want you to ask yourself, what business advice am I following simply because everyone else says I should? Does it actually align with my goals? Does it support the business and life I want to build? Because sometimes the smartest thing you can do is question conventional wisdom. This is something I've done most of my life. I'm an only child. It's kind of in my nature, but I do tend to question conventional wisdom and make sure it fits me and fits my life and fits our environment and our family and our employees. Business advice can be incredibly helpful, but remember you don't have to follow every trend. You don't have to build your business exactly like someone else does. And you absolutely have permission to create a version of success that works for you.

Share Feedback Rate And Review

Carrie Saunders 14:11

That's all we have for this week's episode of the Smarter Online Business Podcast. I hope you thoroughly enjoyed it. And we would love it if you rated and reviewed us on your favorite podcast app that helps spread the word to other entrepreneurs just like you. And we will see you next week.