Business owners don’t have an advice shortage. Ask a question in any online group and you’ll get forty answers in an hour. Search any topic and you’ll find a thousand articles, most of them confidently contradicting each other.
What’s actually scarce is insight. And it’s worth knowing the difference, because one fills your head and the other changes what you do.
Advice tells you what to do
Advice is a recommendation, usually general: “Post every day.” “Raise your prices.” “Niche down.” “Hire a VA.” It might be right. It might be right for someone else’s business. It usually comes without context about yours.
That’s why advice so often feels useful in the moment and then doesn’t change much. It’s an answer to a question that’s slightly different from yours.
Insight helps you see your situation differently
Insight is understanding why something is happening, specific to your situation. It sounds more like:
- “You’re not short on leads. You’re losing them between the call and the proposal.”
- “Your busiest clients are your least profitable. That’s why you’re exhausted and not growing.”
- “You’ve described three different businesses in the last ten minutes. Which one are you actually building?”
Insight doesn’t always tell you what to do. It shows you what’s going on, so you can make a better decision yourself.
Where insight comes from
Insight tends to come from three things together:
- Context: someone who understands your actual situation, not a generic version of it.
- Experience: someone who has seen the pattern before, in their own business or others’.
- Good questions: the kind that make you look at something from a new angle.
That’s why a short conversation with the right peer can be worth more than hours of content. They ask about your business, not business in general.
How to get more insight and less noise
- Give context when you ask. “Should I raise my prices?” gets advice. “I charge $X, I’m booked solid, two clients take half my time, and I’m not hitting my income goal” gets insight.
- Ask fewer, better people. Three experienced peers who know your business beat a hundred strangers.
- Listen for questions, not just answers. The most useful thing someone says might be a question.
- Be wary of certainty. People who know exactly what you should do, without asking anything about your business, are usually giving advice, not insight.
Find people who’ll ask good questions
WEN is built for this kind of conversation. At WEN Round Tables, a small group of women running real businesses hears what’s actually going on with yours and asks the questions that help you see it clearly. Related reading: What Good Business Conversations Actually Look Like.
