In this 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:

- 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

- What judgment skill separates founders who thrive from those who stay stuck

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stages 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Scott 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/

Mentioned in this episode:

Take the Founder's Evolution Quiz Today

If you’re a Founder, business owner, or CEO who feels overworked by the business you lead and underwhelmed by the results, you’re doing it wrong. Succeeding as a founder all comes down to doing the right one or two things right now. Take the quiz today at foundersquiz.com, and in just ten questions, you can figure out what stage you are in, so you can focus on what is going to work and say goodbye to everything else.

Founder's Quiz

Hello, hello and welcome.

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Welcome once again to the Start, Scale and Succeed podcast.

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The only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey as a

founder.

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I'm your host, Scott Ritzheimer and this is part two of our three part solo series.

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And last time, if you missed it, we talked about how your experience can and will actively

keep you stuck.

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If you missed that episode, you're gonna wanna check it out.

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It's gonna be helpful for understanding today to some extent, but it's gonna be really

helpful in understanding uh

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part three of this series here coming up.

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Now, 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.

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And that is the advice that you're getting from other people.

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Now, not talking about just flat out bad advice.

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I think we're relatively good at figuring out what to do with bad advice.

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It can trip us up every once in a while.

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But that's not really what this episode's about.

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Bad advice, you have to get rid of bad advice.

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What I'm talking about is good advice.

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Now, I'm also talking about good advice from people who should know what they're talking

about.

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These are the people who've actually done it, right?

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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

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with those founders or who have been founders ourselves.

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who record the podcast episodes or write the books or the articles that you're reading.

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You see, there's an immense amount of great advice out there.

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And the vast, vast, vast majority of it, hear me on this, is wrong for you.

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Not because they're lying, not even unfortunately because you're special, although you

are, don't worry, but because

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you're getting the right answers to the wrong questions.

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Or at least you're getting the right answers to the right questions at the wrong time.

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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

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will not drive the success you want.

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To the extent that you succeed following the wrong advice, you're doing it despite that

wrong advice, not because of it.

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And I wanna lay this out really clearly.

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This is the point of this entire episode and that is that the most dangerous advice is not

bad advice.

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The most dangerous advice is great advice given at the wrong time.

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And there are four primary sources of this problem.

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And we're gonna take a couple shots today, not because I'm mad at anybody, but because you

need to understand this.

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I'm gonna set a little context.

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uh I travel across the country, I teach CEOs how to scale their business with the business

world, nonprofit world.

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And a part of my story is I got really great advice from really uh great coaches and

consultants at really wrong times.

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I lost more money following the well-intentioned uh but wrong advice of uh advisors than I

did on any other decisions that I made on my own.

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That's not because I made great decisions, but because this is a really big

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problem.

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And for a while, I thought it was a me problem.

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And to be fair, it was.

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I picked the wrong people at the wrong time.

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We've got content on that if you need to know how to find the right people at the right

time.

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what I realized is I started traveling the country and started hearing from folks who

would come up to me after a keynote.

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They would share these problems that they had with coaches and how they had lost uh faith

in the profession.

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I mean, it broke my heart.

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So I started asking, hey, how many people

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uh have had a coach and in these circles, the vast majority have.

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A lot of founders have had coaches, which is great, it's wonderful.

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I think you can go way further, way faster with a coach, the right coach.

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But then I would also ask how many folks, uh how many of you who've had a coach have had a

bad experience with a coach?

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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.

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This is a really big problem.

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And again, it's not just coaches.

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uh

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It's a whole bunch of things.

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So we're gonna talk about what these four things are.

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But this is a problem that's affecting everyone almost all the time.

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All right, so what are the four sources in no particular order?

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What are the four sources of uh good advice at the wrong time or in the wrong way?

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uh And again, none of these people are trying to hurt anyone.

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uh Maybe some of them are, but that's not the point of this episode.

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The point of this episode is good people trying to help other people.

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and hurting them in the process.

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And the first category I'm gonna pick on here today is peers.

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And there's this idea, the definition of mastermind, which is relatively new phenomenon by

the way, is that uh the sum of us is smarter, all of us is smarter than the sum of us.

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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.

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That's a wonderful sentiment.

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It's true in some respect, but it also gives way to the blind leading the blind.

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And there's this poster, there's these demotivator posters, they're hilarious, uh but

basically they take little trite phrases from the business world and show them how silly

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they are, especially with a kind of bureaucratic, monolithic tone to them.

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And one of these motivator posters says this, um no one is as dumb as all of us.

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And I think it's got a hands in a, you know, everyone's hands in kind of thing.

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uh And that's true.

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I have been in many peer groups where I've heard folks em that have not figured out how to

succeed in the stage they're in, tell other people how to succeed in the stage that

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they're in.

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And because it's in this mastermind environment, you know, somehow it's more true than at

some other point in time, but...

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Peer groups are wonderful from camaraderie.

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They're wonderful for sharing the things that we've actually conquered.

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But if you're asking, like, let me give you a funny example.

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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

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manage your money.

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And in peer groups, we tend to run into that.

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You run into a founder who may have a successful business.

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uh

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but we don't know if that success was because of them or despite them.

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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.

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And we end up in this blind leading the blind uh phase, which is not helpful.

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The uh second group that I'm gonna pick on, I'm gonna turn the camera back on us and I'm

gonna talk about folks like me, coaches and consultants.

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And these are the ones that really frustrate me the most because honestly they should know

better.

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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

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you need to understand what stage they're in and what they need to know now, not just what

you know now.

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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.

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I know you're not trying to hurt them.

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know that you're trying to do what's best for them.

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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.

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And so if you're uh not a coach or consultant listening,

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Just because a coach or consultant said it doesn't mean that they're right.

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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

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mean that they're telling you the right thing.

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Doesn't mean that they're telling you the truth.

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They could be lying to you.

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That's very unlikely.

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There are very, very few coaches that do that.

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I've talked to thousands and thousands of coaches now, and that's not the issue that we

have to pay attention to.

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But I can tell you,

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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

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telling them only the things that they need to do in that stage.

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And so you will see folks who had similar situations to what I had where they get the

right answers to the wrong questions.

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And we're gonna talk about how that all these together are a huge, huge problem for

founders.

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But just suffice it to say that

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coaches and consultants need to pay attention to the stage that they're working in.

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um Whether it be the organizational stage, less Q and work for predictable success, or in

the founder stages, um where we talk about often here on the show, is really, really

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important that there, if you have someone helping you, that they are helping you succeed

in this stage.

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And that might mean that the coach who got you here isn't the coach who will get you

there.

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or the consultant who helped you in the past isn't the consultant who's going to move

forward.

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That's not a bad thing, it's not a problem.

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Coaches and consultants are very, very successful usually in one or two stages.

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There are very, very few uh who can really put on all these different stage hats and do it

in an effective way.

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In fact, for me, there are a uh bunch of stages that I don't work in.

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And I wrote the book on the stages.

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ah I know that I can specialize in a few areas and really do world-class work.

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No one can do world-class work in all seven stages.

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I just don't believe that's true.

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So we have coaches and consultants.

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Now here's another one and it's kind of related to uh this coaches and consultants thing,

but it's a little different.

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uh And the reason for that is uh the third group is authors or other thought leaders or

communicators.

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So.

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we'll pick on books, but know that this applies to articles, podcasts, videos, you name

it, seminars.

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And what happens when you're speaking to a mass audience, you have no real control over

what stage they're in.

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And so when you get something like Simon Sinek's, Start With Why, or you get something

like Built To Last, or you get something like Patrick Lincione's, uh Death By Meeting,

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or even Five Dysfunctions of a Team, these are wonderful books.

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All had a profound impact on me as a leader uh and me as a coach.

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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,

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it's not all businesses, because there are...

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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 uh

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stages.

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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.

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It's not just, they giving good advice or not?

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And it's not, do I agree with it or not?

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It's not even, did it work or not?

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The question really is what stage was this written to or what stage is this happening in?

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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.

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A good example of this, Simon Sinek spends a lot of time working with treadmill and big

rot organizations as uh predictable success stages.

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And...

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What happens is what he has learned is helpful to some of these bigger uh organizations is

then misapplied to smaller organizations as a universal truth, because in fairness, it's

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kind of represented as a universal truth.

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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.

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And when they're all woven together in one work, one book, you've got...

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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.

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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

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person writing to?

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And I could go on on that for a really long time.

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But 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.

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It's incumbent on us as readers to really recognize what's right for right now.

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All right, that's the third group.

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So we have peers, we have coaches and consultants, and we have authors.

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Now the fourth one I think is actually the trickiest.

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And that is successful founders who are telling their story.

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And they're telling, here's how I succeeded.

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Here's what I did to succeed.

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And either expressly or by implication, they're saying, and if you do this, you'll be

successful too.

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This is something called survivorship bias.

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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.

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And by implication, if you cold call your way, you just have to work harder.

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You have to cold call more and then you'll get to a million dollars.

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But we're looking at a sample size of one.

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And so,

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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

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time and put just enough energy behind it.

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And so what happened, you have to recognize this.

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Seth Godin wrote a book, All Marketers Are Storytellers and then storytellers is, uh or

all marketers are liars.

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One of them's crossed out.

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don't remember which one it is, but basically the premise of the book is that all stories

are lies.

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And it's not that uh they're intentional withholding of the truth, but no story is a

complete picture of what actually happened.

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No story shares the probability likelihoods that if we played everything out again, that

it would happen the exact same way.

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No stories intended to do that.

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Stories by definition are an incomplete version of the events that happened.

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Now, even more so,

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in this kind of success, bro culture thing that we do in the world of founders, we edit

our stories heavily.

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We edit them to highlight the heroics of some entrepreneur.

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And what we do is we inadvertently remove the dirty fingernails work that got them there,

the massive reliance they had on the team that got them there.

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And we look at these stories about why they succeeded

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but we can't actually tell if that's why they succeeded or if they succeeded despite those

things.

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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.

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That's just not true.

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They might be able to, right?

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There's a better chance than zero that they'll be able to.

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There's probably a better chance than the average Joe.

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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

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tell you to do things that aren't actually necessary for you or may just be wrong

altogether.

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Let me give an example of this.

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Most founders who get a platform where they're able to start sharing their story usually

do it somewhere in the organizational stage.

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uh of predictable success, oftentimes the leadership stage of the CEO uh stage or stages

five, six or seven.

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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.

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And so you'll see founders in stage five, six, seven talking about how to overcome stage

four issues

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But if you're not in stage four, that's not helpful.

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And they kind of tell it as if, 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

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beginning.

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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

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to solve stage four problems that they're not even experiencing or weren't experiencing

until they made themself experience it because of the advice.

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of a successful founder.

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Just because somebody has done what you want to do doesn't mean that they can reproduce

that in you.

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To drive this home, you have all heard this and it's the exact same phenomenon.

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And that is your best salesperson is not your best sales manager.

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We can interpret that same pattern out and say that the best

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person to make you the best entrepreneur is not the best entrepreneur you know.

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They are good at making themself an entrepreneur.

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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 themself or despite

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themself.

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That's all we know about it.

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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.

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They might be unbelievable because they're not really all that true or they're not true

for you right now.

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And so,

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I said this in the previous episode leading into this one that I actually think this is

the number one challenge that founders face.

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I really do.

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I think the biggest challenge that we face today is we have more access to advice.

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In fact, I'd even say we are bombarded by more advice than founders have at any other

point in human history.

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And quite frankly, it's only going to get worse.

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And so the thing that's going to separate successful founders from the rest is their

ability to filter out

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the noise.

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To put this in perspective, are seven different stages, right?

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So there's a couple of things that are universal to all seven stages, uh like knowing what

stage you're in, but most things aren't.

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So one in seven is something like, uh forgive the math on this, was something like 16%.

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And that means 16 % of all the noise out there is actually signal that you wanna be paying

attention to.

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Think about that.

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That means it's something like 84 % of what you have access to is not relevant or helpful

for you.

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That's profound.

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Now, within each stage, there are some things 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

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stage.

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And so that means that we actually can probably cut that 16 % in half all the way down to

something like 80%.

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of what you hear is relevant to you and 92 % isn't.

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Now, we can also add that some things are just wrong, right?

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A founder's story that they didn't fully understand, the advice of a peer that isn't

correct, uh the repeated advice from a book uh that's not relevant, all four of those

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categories can have stuff that's wrong in it.

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And so you could probably cut it down again

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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.

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And as a founder, you've got to keep the shiny object uh syndrome in check.

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You've got to keep um the kind of hero founder story, uh admiration thing in check.

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We can look at people who've done amazing things and say, hey, they did amazing things.

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And we can actually look at them and say, hey, what can we learn from it that is relevant

in our stage right now?

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Because the hardest thing in business, the hardest thing in growing a nonprofit, the

hardest thing in growing your church is finding good advice.

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And when we say good advice, we mean good advice for right now.

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And the best thing that you can do to...

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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

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you right now and which doesn't.

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And that leads us into what we're gonna talk about in episode three of this little

mini-series.

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We're gonna talk about if you can't rely on your past advice and you can't, I'm sorry, on

your past experience,

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and you can't rely on uh advice, uh even if it comes from a great source, what can you

rely on?

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And fortunately, the answer is not me.

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There's a better answer.

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I'm gonna tell you what it is.

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Something we take very seriously here at Scale Architects, but something that you can

apply yourself on a daily basis.

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I'll show you exactly what the answer is in our next episode.

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I'll see you there.