As humans, especially humans in business, we must be wary of where we take our advice from. It’s easy to listen to all the loud voices out there who are ready to offer business tips, but should we really listen to them? Business skills come from experience as well as from lessons taught by teachers, but in my experience growth comes must faster if we first grasp the lessons that business experts have to offer.

Here I will be explaining why it’s important to get your business advice from experienced professionals rather than friends, family or elsewhere. Your brother might be wont to tell you why you should make changes to your business, but should you listen to him if he has no real business credentials to back his words up?

Students go to business school because they know their teacher is a credible source for information, and at school you have access to business textbooks and other materials that are hard to find elsewhere. But this is all beside the point. Perhaps the best reason why you should never take business advice from rookies is because it might lead to further failure for your business, whereas taking tips from experienced experts has a way higher chance of improving your success. And learning from professionals is most important in the realm of business compared to other fields, because we’re talking about more than just success here. We’re talking about the fulfilment of dreams, the real-world usefulness of products, and services rendered to others for the good of all humanity. If you take the wrong advice, you run the risk of reducing the quality of your services and products which spoils the whole point of starting a business in the first place.

There’s a lesson to illustrate the importance of choosing who you listen to carefully that I’ll share now to drill this final point in deeper. In competitive industries like appliance repair, businesses are prone to imitate each other in ways which lead to more success. For example, one Victoria appliance repair business, when it began to offer warranties on their services, increasing their success and customer return rate, other companies in the area began to do the same thing because it was proven to work. This means that learning business skills from professionals doesn’t always come in the form of listening to a teacher but observing your competition. By observing the competition in your field that has had the most success, you can learn what they’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong.

A major part of being observational is paying attention to your competition and logically comparing your business to theirs. Keep rapport with your competition, befriend them, ask them questions and maybe they’ll be willing to share what worked for them.

At the end of the day, not every business deserves to succeed. It’s the ones that learn and adapt that continue to grow, while others who fail to adapt are left behind. Us here TLI Colombia hope this information helps, and we wish you the best.