Bad Advice Is Free and You Keep Paying For It

We duplicated a booking template once to save ten minutes. Same title, same layout, same button. It looked identical to the one that was working.

It didn't work. The copy carried everything you could see and dropped the settings underneath it, and we found out the way everybody finds out… in front of the customer.

Most borrowed advice works exactly like that copy. You get the part you can see. The settings underneath (the location, the people, the timing, the person who built it) stay behind, and you do not see the gap until something breaks.

Once is a story

In my experience, roughly 96 out of every 100 martial arts school owners never get past a net income of three or four thousand dollars a month, and a lot of them work another job to pay for the school. They work hard and love what they do. A lot of the time what keeps them stuck is whose advice they trusted, more than talent or the market.

I thought of this because I get told all the time (in fact, yesterday at the time I wrote this) "I am talking to a bunch of successful people and then I will figure out how to run my school". This is a flawed strategy. Before you take one more person's counsel on how to run your school, ask a single question: have they produced this result more than once in many locations at the same time?

That question works in any business. Here's the line I use with school owners. One school can be luck, timing, or a great corner with a big market with lots of prospects walking past the window. Two schools is often a husband/wife team or really 2 schools that are similar but run by individuals. Three schools or more, in different towns with different teams, is a system.

Swap "school" for office, store, practice, sales team or client account and the line still holds. A result that happened once is a story. A result that repeated somewhere else, with different people, is a system – and only one of those is safe to copy.

Our brains don't sort them that way on their own. Tversky and Kahneman asked research psychologists (people trained in statistics) how they'd handle small samples, and found that people treat a small sample as highly representative of the whole population, similar to it in all essential characteristics (Tversky & Kahneman, 1971). They called it the belief in the law of small numbers. If people trained in statistics do it (often), what chance does a first-time founder have listening to one success story?

A team of researchers (the Open Science Collaboration) re-ran 100 published psychology studies to see what happens when you try to repeat a single result. 97% of the originals had statistically significant results. 36% of the replications did, and the replicated effects were about HALF the size of the originals (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). That's trained researchers following a written method under controlled conditions. The successful peer telling you how they did it has none of those!

The founder with one successful friend

A first-time founder gets an hour with somebody who built one great company in the same industry. The advice is sincere and the result is real, so the founder goes home and starts copying it. Why wouldn't they?

Respect the success. I do. A person who builds one strong business has done something real, and there's plenty they are doing right. What worked for them was tied to conditions you probably can't reproduce: their location, their customers, their staff, their history, and the plain fact that they're a different person than you.

That's the booking template. Their business looks like the thing you want, and the settings that made it work aren't on the screen.

The manager with the imported playbook

A manager arrives from a company where a playbook worked beautifully. Sales process, meeting cadence, the way reviews get done. They install it in the new place and it stalls. The team gets blamed for not buying in.

Szulanski studied something close to this, moving a best practice from one unit to another inside the same company. Across 271 observations of 122 transfers of 38 best practices in 8 companies, the biggest barriers to moving a practice from one unit to another weren't motivation. They were knowledge problems: the receiving team's lack of absorptive capacity (they didn't have the background to use it), causal ambiguity (nobody could say precisely WHY the practice worked where it came from), and a difficult relationship between the source and the receiver (Szulanski, 1996).

The study says outright that this runs contrary to the conventional wisdom that blames motivation.

That's inside one firm, same logo on the door, same parent company… and it was still hard to move. Causal ambiguity is what bit us with the booking template (we copied what we could see and not the settings underneath). The playbook came over. Whatever made it work at the old company, maybe a culture, a customer base, a leader who enforced it, stayed behind.

Before you import it, ask the same question. Has this playbook worked more than once, in more than one company, with different people running it? If the only evidence is your old job, you have a story.

The second error: five mentors and no author

It seems like a good idea, if you're starting a business, to go to a bunch of different people doing the same thing and "pick their brains" until you get all the info you need and assemble it together into a business. Another flawed strategy…

Picture it this way… Imagine you wanted to learn martial arts for the first time. Would you walk into a dozen different schools, watch each one for a while, take a class here and there, put the fragments together, and call yourself a Black Belt? Of course not. You'd need a cohesive system, one where each piece sets up the next. And the key is: early on, no matter how smart you are, you won't fully understand every piece or how it interconnects. You find a mentor and do it, and do it, and do it (remember Bruce Lee's quote, "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times" (Lee, n.d.)) until it's muscle memory. It's just like becoming a Black Belt.

A marketing idea from one person, pricing from a second, hiring from a third. Each part may be fine on its own, but nobody built them to work together. What you end up with is a system with no author, and when it breaks there's nobody who knows why, because nobody ever ran that combination.

The manager does this too. One habit from each of the last four jobs, stacked into a department nobody has ever seen before.

Running a school (or any business) works the same way. A system isn't something you shop for in fragments off other people's shelves. It's something you do and do and do, and one day (I estimate 10 years minimum) you'll start to understand the way it works together.

Don't make the mistake of trying to cobble together a business.

Keep them close, and keep them out of your plan

This isn't "don't listen to anyone." The owner of one excellent business has data and inspiration you want around, and it helps to know what they're doing. Use it as healthy competition. Beat them, and have fun doing it!

For the commitment, find somebody whose result repeated: built it, rebuilt it, and built it again somewhere new, with different people. Take one complete system from that one person, and run it whole before you start improving it. When you clone something that matters, test the part you didn't look at.

Your move

Make a list of the parts of your operation. Marketing. Pricing. Sales. Hiring. Training. Scheduling. Billing. Customer follow-up. Whatever yours are.

Next to each one, write the name of the person it came from. Your old boss, a friend who runs a similar business, a podcast, a conference speaker, you.

Count the DIFFERENT names. Not the total, the different ones. That's your number.

If it's one or two, and those people have produced the result more than once in more than one place, you're probably running a system. If it's five or six, you're likely running a collection, and the day it breaks you won't know which piece did it.

Reply and tell me what number you got. I'm curious whether it comes out the same outside a school.

If you want to work through which parts to keep and which to replace, come talk to me. The version of this I wrote for school owners is here. The third error, the one smart people make, is here.

References

Lee, B. (n.d.). "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." Bruce Lee Family Archive (authenticity confirmed by Snopes, 2022). https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/02/19/bruce-lee-value-of-practice/

Open Science Collaboration. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251), aac4716. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac4716

Szulanski, G. (1996). Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm. Strategic Management Journal, 17(S2), 27–43. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250171105

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1971). Belief in the law of small numbers. Psychological Bulletin, 76(2), 105–110. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0031322