Spend enough time around entrepreneurs and you’ll get no shortage of business advice.
One person will swear by billboards. Another will say social media is the future. A third will tell you that a pay-per-click rate is all that matters.
Before long, you’ll be drowning in opinions from people who seem confident they have all the answers.
But just because a strategy worked for someone else doesn’t mean it’ll work for you and your business.
At Crisp Coach Workshops, we like to make sure the law firm owners practice giving and getting feedback, because we believe there’s a right way to do both.
We emphasize a simple rule: Feedback should come from experience, not opinion.
For example, there’s a big difference between saying: “TikTok ads don’t work,” and, “We spent six months testing TikTok ads and they made little to no difference for our firm.”
The first statement is a subjective opinion, delivered like objective truth. The second one is a simple sharing of your experience.
Opinions are everywhere. Direct experience is what’s measurable and valuable.
When someone shares what they’ve personally done, they’re giving you data without telling you what to do. They’re simply sharing one real-world case study and letting you make your inferences from that.
But while you take it in, you can’t forget that even though it’s based on facts, it’s still one person’s or one firm’s experience.
After you filter opinions worth listening to from those you can disregard, you have to filter which valuable information would actually fit your firm and its particular circumstances.
A marketing strategy that generates incredible results for a personal injury firm may completely fail for an estate planning practice. A hiring process that works beautifully for a 100-person organization may be a disaster for a team of 10. A software platform that transformed one business may create headaches for another.
Context, goals, and vision are all crucial in deciding what’s ultimately right for your business. If you start traveling down someone else’s road to success without assessing whether it aligns with the firm you are trying to build, you’re no longer leading; you’re copying.
Leadership requires ownership. Good leaders gather information from people who have already solved the problems they’re currently facing, but after collecting all of the advice they ultimately make their own decisions.
You can’t go back to the person whose advice you blindly followed and blame them for a negative outcome. Regardless of who you followed, you’ll be the one left paying the price.
So remain curious and take in as much good perspective as possible, but never lose sight of your own personal roadmap. Learn from others’ journeys, but never forget that you need to stay committed to your own.
