Black Entrepreneur Blueprint 645 - Jay Jones - The Danger of Free Advice - Why Cheap Feedback Kills Great Ideas

[00:00:12] Welcome to Black Entrepreneur Blueprint, the number one podcast and resource for Black entrepreneurs. I'm your host Jay Jones and Black Entrepreneur Blueprint was created specifically to educate and inspire Black entrepreneurs to launch, build and grow successful, sustainable businesses. Join us as we help build an economic power base in the worldwide Black community by building and supporting Black owned businesses.

[00:00:41] If you're currently an entrepreneur or want to be an entrepreneur, you're invited to join us each and every week here at Black Entrepreneur Blueprint. Welcome to the BEB family and get ready to elevate your entrepreneur IQ. Welcome to the Black Entrepreneur Blueprint episode number 645.

[00:01:07] I'm your host Jay Jones and today we have another outstanding and informative show in store for you. Today's show topic is the danger of free advice, why cheap feedback kills great ideas. The danger of free advice, why cheap feedback kills great ideas. Now most entrepreneurs guys don't fail because of lack of ideas, they fail from listening to the wrong people.

[00:01:33] Today we're going to talk about the silent killer guys of great businesses and that is free advice. Now you can get free advice from well-meaning people, but you have to understand the source. Where is it coming from? Now before we get to today's show content, let me just share a few things with the Black Entrepreneur Blueprint family. First and foremost, I want to welcome all first-time listeners to Black Entrepreneur Blueprint. Welcome to the BEB family.

[00:02:00] Please stick around until the end of today's broadcast and I'm going to share all my social media contact information and resource links such as the link to the new revised website, which should be out by the time you listen to this. Go to blackentrepreneurblueprint.com. We have all types of free resources to help you elevate your entrepreneur IQ.

[00:02:22] If you want to learn about marketing, mindset, strategy, e-commerce, everything is there for you to take advantage of. Go to blackentrepreneurblueprint.com. Now let's get ready for today's show content. So today guys, we're going to talk about the dangers of free advice, why cheap feedback kills great ideas. You know, my mom always said something to me ever since I was little and I shared this with my kids, my wife.

[00:02:51] Remember the source and she always used to say remember the source of the information because people have different agendas. People are coming from different viewpoints and people aren't necessarily on the same wavelength as you. So remember the source of where you get information. And today we're going to break down the dangers of free advice and why cheap feedback kills great ideas.

[00:03:20] So stop taking business advice guys from people who haven't built a life or the company that you actually want. So you're taking advice from somebody that hasn't done what you want to do or built the life that they want. Now, I'm not saying that you can't take advice from somebody that's not an entrepreneur. The Bible speaks of you can learn things from a child. So I'm not saying poo poo everything that comes across your plate. But what I am saying is remember the source.

[00:03:50] OK, so when you start a business or pivot, everyone's got an opinion and you get that unsolicited feedback. And it usually comes from well-meaning people, family, friends, whatever, who have zero skin in the game, meaning that it doesn't matter to them if you succeed or fail. So the danger is the cheap advice can actually cause you from taking risk or being risk averse and not following what you're truly designed to do.

[00:04:18] So we're going to talk about that today. So we're going to talk about the three types of dangerous advice that you might get and also the three filter advice test. I'm going to give you a test that you guys can learn to filter out advice. But first, let me just talk about listening to people, right? Or not listening to people. So I'm pretty pigheaded.

[00:04:40] And because of my experience, I feel that I know a lot more than a lot of people when it comes to entrepreneurship. Number one, I understand what entrepreneurship looks like. It doesn't look like going to a nine to five and a straight trajectory. It looks like ups and downs, bumps and bruises. And you have to understand that's part of the process to become a successful entrepreneur.

[00:05:05] So one of my ventures that and I've talked about this on many, many occasions that my wife and my daughters laughed at is when I started my own brand of flat irons hair flat iron brand. And so once again, if you heard the story, bear with me. If not, I'm going to make it super succinct. So back in 2014 or 15 or whatever, my wife was doing a hair in the morning and with the flat iron and her flat iron broke.

[00:05:34] And she was like distraught and she was like, oh, my God, what am I going to do? I need to go get a new flat iron after work. I'm going to go to the mall. And I said, OK. And out of curiosity, I said, well, how much does a flat iron cost? And back at that time, she was saying, well, a good flat iron costs anywhere between one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars. And I looked at that that piece of, you know, plastic with that mechanism sitting on the sink in the bathroom. And I'm like, what?

[00:06:03] And so I started thinking, I'm like, if people are paying that much money for that, I said, I know that thing can't cost but so much. So I said, well, what do you look for in a good flat iron? She said it has to have high heat. It has to have ceramic plates. It has to have this, that and the other thing. So she broke it down. So me, because I'm a thinker like that. And every time I see an opportunity, I try to figure out how can I make money?

[00:06:29] And I knew that there was a large gap in the perceived value of a flat iron and also the actual cost of the flat iron. So what I did was and didn't really know what I was doing. I went on Alibaba, which was new at the time. I contacted three flat iron manufacturers and I found manufacturers that produce flat irons that look similar to the one my wife had. I got some samples and I trademarked the name. This is before I even knew it was sell. So I'm doing things backwards.

[00:06:59] Right. But it just so happened to work out. And so I trademarked the name. I created a high end product or perceived product. I had a nice magnetic closure box, beautiful graphics. The website I had was was immaculate. It looked like a high end product. So if you want to sell a high end product, everything has to be aligned. The packaging and perception is going to allow you to create or sell for the price that you want.

[00:07:28] Now, my wife and my daughters were like, oh, my God, what are you doing now? You know, my girls were like, Dad, come on now. You don't know nothing about this. And my wife was like, here you go. Wasting money again. But what did I do? I didn't listen to that advice because I remembered the source. And once again, my wife and my kids love me, but they don't understand that this is not something that they're they're versed in. I do this every day.

[00:07:58] Been a serial entrepreneur for 25 years. Almost lost it all twice. Been able to come bounce back and build two million dollar businesses, separate million dollar businesses. So I've been in the trenches. I've seen the highs and the lows and I know what to look for. And I've had experience of being successful by not listening to people. OK, because if you listen to everybody that tells you something, you're never going to get anywhere.

[00:08:23] Long story short, I started selling on Amazon and from July, actually June of that year to December of that year, I grossed over two hundred and seventy two thousand dollars right now. Now, out of that, my profit margin was close to about seventy eight, seventy nine percent.

[00:08:46] So you figure I put about a what close to one hundred and sixty hundred seventy thousand dollars in my pocket for a six month run. That was just the first six months. And it was so funny because when the money started rolling in, my wife and kids were like, oh, my goodness, I can't believe this. And I'm like, yeah, because I didn't listen to you, not that you meant wrong or you meant bad for me, but you didn't understand what I was trying to do.

[00:09:15] Now, do all stories end like that? No. Sometimes people that don't have any idea about what you're doing, give you great advice and that's fine and dandy. But you as the entrepreneur who live this, who breathe this, who study this, who understands this, you have to understand where the source of the information or the feedback or the advice is coming from.

[00:09:39] And if it's not somebody that is in your lane and I'm not saying you can't learn from everything, then guess what? You need to use your own your own senses and see, hey, I think there's an opportunity here. And I always tell people you want to test, test, test your mad scientist before you go all in like I did by purchasing a whole bunch of flat eyes.

[00:10:04] I actually started out with an order of 100 units and those babies were gone within the first two weeks based on my marketing, my advertising and people giving me five star reviews. And all I started doing was keep repeating it. So I would I would spend up to during the holidays. I was spending fifteen hundred dollars a day on Amazon pay per click advertising and people like, oh, my God, why would you do that? Because I'm making five six thousand dollars a day.

[00:10:33] That's why. OK, so you never start out that way in terms. I never started out fifteen hundred a day. I started out with like fifty dollars a day advertising a hundred. And as everything started growing, I scaled that up. All right. So what we're talking about today is the danger of free advice. Why cheap feedback kills great ideas. So once again, I wanted to share that personal story and you have to understand where the source of the information is coming from.

[00:11:03] Now, let's talk about the three types of dangerous advice that you can get. There's actually more than this, but the top three are the protect you advice. And that's usually from friends or family. So they love you. So what they want to do is they want you to take the safest, lowest risk path. And their goal is comfort, not growth. So the protect you advice. People want you to be risk averse. So they're thinking about more of your comfort and not growth.

[00:11:33] The only way you're going to grow, guys, is if you go out of your box. Right. If you take risks, if you don't take risk, you're going to stay the same. So these people mean you well. But once again, they're not on the same wavelength as you. And they weren't given the same assignment as you or the same dreams that you have. So remember the source. All right. Then you have another type of dangerous advice to spectator advice, social media and critics.

[00:12:01] So people who watch from the sidelines would have never built anything themselves. And these are probably some of the worst people out there. They're telling you what to do and they haven't done a damn thing themselves. And that's a real problem because they have no idea of what it takes to be successful. So they judge the results without understanding the trade off what it takes to get there. And I explain this to new entrepreneurs all the time. You are going to have failures. You're going to have setbacks.

[00:12:30] This is a natural part of the process of becoming a successful entrepreneur. The key is you don't want to make the same mistakes twice. OK, you if you do that, then you're not learning. Sometimes it happens even though you're trying the best you can. But you don't want to make the same mistake twice. It's part of the maturation and growth of an entrepreneur. Number three, the outdated success advice, the outdated success advice.

[00:13:00] So if you get advice from veterans or people that built businesses 15, 20 years ago, it was a different market. It was a different era. And the playbook that they're using, guys, is all is done. It's just like in football, right? Football is cyclical now and most things are. So in football back in the day, Buddy Ryan had the 46 defense, which one with the Chicago Bears and with the Eagles, one of the best and greatest defensive teams out there.

[00:13:30] Now people learned how to beat the 46 defense over time. So that success, if Buddy Ryan was still alive and told you to run the 46 defense today, guess what? You wouldn't be successful. One of the biggest things that I used to look at. This is dating myself, but back in the day, there used to be an infomercial for real estate and investing. It was a guy named Carlton Sheets and Carlton Sheets had this program that he would sell you.

[00:14:00] Yes, I did buy it back in the day and some of it was useful, but most of it was useless because some of the tactics and strategies that he used back in the day weren't even applicable. When he was selling it and he probably sold that program for 10, 15 years and never changed anything. So if you're dealing with outdated success advice, that's something that you need to leave alone.

[00:14:25] And so these are the three types of dangerous advice to protect you advice, the spectator advice and the outdated success advice. Now let's talk about the three filter advice test. This is how you can filter out advice to determine if you need to listen to this or not. Right. And most of the time you're going to know right off the bat if you should listen to this. But here's what we're talking about.

[00:14:50] Here's some actionable framework guys that you can evaluate any piece of feedback before you act on it. And we always talking about talk about actionable steps or actionable things that we can do for our business. So this is the three filter advice test filter. Number one, the results check. Has this person built what you're trying to build or achieve what you're trying to achieve now results?

[00:15:17] Has that person done what you want to do or built what you want to build? And this is why mentorship is so important, because I tell new entrepreneurs if they can find a mentor, somebody that's done what they're looking to do and somebody that's been through the trenches. They can help you from a perspective that somebody that has never done this can. So filter number one, the results check has the person or people you're listening to.

[00:15:45] Have they ever built what you're trying to build or achieve what you're trying to achieve? And if the answer is no, that doesn't mean that you poo poo their advice. It just means that you recognize and understand where that advice is coming from. It's not coming from the place of know how. OK, it's just advice. Filter number two, skin in the game. Does the person bear any financial or personal risk if their advice fails?

[00:16:13] Now, people are quick to give you advice when it won't cost them nothing. Yeah, man, you should do this, this, this and this. If I were you, I would do this. Come on, man. Come on. Does that person bear any financial or personal risk if their advice fails? Now, here's a quick story. And it doesn't have to do with financial risk, but it has to do with risk in general. And people actually that didn't have skin in the game long time ago.

[00:16:41] And this is a little little off on a tangent, but it's going to give you to bring you back to the same thing. Long time ago, I got 18 first cousins on my mother's side. My mother was one of six kids. So I have 18 first cousins. And in the summer times at my grandma's house down south, we used to play football because out of the 18, it was like 12 of us were boys and we were all kind of in the same age range. So one day I had this massive headache. I probably was about 10 to 11 years old.

[00:17:10] And I was like, man, every time I took a step, my head was ringing. It was I don't know what was going on. But because the fellas started playing football, they were like, come on, man, you all right. You could do it, right? You can play, man. You be all right. Don't even worry about it. So I'm like, all right, man. So I go and literally on probably the first play that I was on offense, I went to jump and catch a pass.

[00:17:36] And my cousin cut my legs out from under me and I fell on my back in my head and I was done for the day. I probably had a concussion. Right. But back in those days, you just walk that thing off, bro. Shake it off, you know. And that taught me something, even though I knew better. But what it taught me was when somebody else isn't going to suffer for what you do, you don't necessarily listen to them. So I know my cousins didn't mean any harm.

[00:18:05] But why am I listening to these nuts when my head is already killing me? I go out there, listen to this advice. Then I get jacked up even worse. So filter number two skin in the game. Does the person bear any financial or personal risk if their advice fails? So if they don't have anything to lose, guess what? If it doesn't affect them, they don't care. They may be giving you advice, but you really have to take that under consideration. All right.

[00:18:33] Filter number three market validation is the opinion back by paying customers or just personal preference. And this is big market validation is the opinion back by paying customers or just personal preferences. So when you go and you ask your friends or family or your network, hey, man, I got this business idea. Do you think it's going to work? Oh, yeah, man, that sounds good. Yeah, yeah, that'll definitely work.

[00:19:02] And they're saying that because it's you. But there's been no proof of concept, no validation. The true proof of concept, guys, is when people go into hip pocket national, which is their pockets and they buy your product or service. That's true market validation.

[00:19:20] Even groups, you know, that you go beta groups or whatever, unless they're paying for something, you know, it doesn't mean anything unless somebody is ready and willing and able to go in their pocket and pay for your product or service. OK, so filter number three market validation. And like I said, you can get survey groups and all that good stuff. But the true test is when people go in their pocket.

[00:19:48] So once again, this is a test that I've done on numerous occasions. And here's another story. Years ago, I created a supplement and I'm going to give you the truncated version, a supplement product. I went to a manufacturer, found out the price. And before I even bought the initial order, I bought a couple of samples so I could test it out and some other people could test it out. We thought it was a good supplement and I started selling.

[00:20:14] But the way I started selling was not because people said, oh, yeah, I'm gonna buy this. I had to see if people were actually going to spend money for this. So what I did was I created a landing page, a sales page, and I had a mock up of the product. Right. I haven't even purchased a product and put my label on it yet. And I started selling the product and I said to myself, once I get to a certain number, I think it was 25 bottles. Then I'll call the manufacturer.

[00:20:42] I have a place my label on the product and then I'll fulfill the product. Because even though people said, oh, yeah, I'm going to buy it. You know, it's never a proof of concept until people go into their wide wallet and spend money. So market validation. So, you know, is this opinion backed by paying customers or personal preferences?

[00:21:07] And these are the things, guys, when you start a business or are thinking about creating a new product or service to add to your business. The danger of free advice, guys, is serious. All right. You know why cheap feedback kills great ideas. So you as the entrepreneur have to take the lead. Matter of fact, even when it comes down to this AI technology.

[00:21:29] Right. So you'll go and ask what's a good product I can create in this market space for these type of to solve this type of problem. So, I might come back with all types of stuff that sounds good. But is there validation? You as the entrepreneur have to take the lead. You have to take the lead on a I don't just follow it. I'm doing some vibe coding right now.

[00:21:53] And a I is telling me to do this when in all actuality, I said, no, we don't need to do that. This is how we solve that problem. So, remember the source. That's the key and the biggest takeaway of today's show. Remember the source of information. Now, before we get to the last segment today, let me share all my social media contact information and resource links. I mentioned at the top of the show, guys, make sure you go to the website black entrepreneur blueprint dot com.

[00:22:23] We have all types of free resources to help you level up your business, provide you with actionable steps to take you from point A to point B. All right. Also, in terms of connecting with me, anything long family hit me on my email. Jay Jones at black entrepreneur blueprint dot com. Jay Y. J O N E S at black entrepreneur blueprint dot com. Facebook black entrepreneur blueprint Instagram. I have two IG accounts. The first one is Jay Jones for real.

[00:22:53] Jay Y. J O N E S the number four. R E A L. Second one is black entrepreneur blueprint. LinkedIn. Just type in Jay Jones SaaS entrepreneur or black entrepreneur blueprint. I'll come right up. Also for X formally Twitter. Jay Jones zero zero one. Jay Y. J O N E S zero zero one. YouTube. Make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel, guys. Just go to YouTube. Type in black entrepreneur blueprint.

[00:23:23] Now for all you first time listeners, please make sure wherever you're listening to this or watching this, you hit that subscribe button. So you'll be alerted for all of our new episodes. We drop a new show every Monday morning, 5 a.m. Eastern standard time on all your major podcast platforms and YouTube. So make sure you connect.

[00:23:45] Also, make sure you share the links and share the podcast with all of the people in your network as we continue to try to grow over these 12 plus years. We've been rocking. All right. Let's get ready for the last segment of the show. Now in this last segment, guys, I just want to tie a couple of things up real quick. So we talked about the danger of free advice. Why cheap feedback kills great ideas.

[00:24:09] And we talked about the three types of dangerous advice to protect you advice, the spectator advice, and also the outdated success advice. And we also I gave you the filter advice test this way you can filter the information, right? So the results check has this person built what you're trying to build or achieve what you're trying to achieve the skin in the game. Check. Does this person bear any financial or personal risk if their advice fails?

[00:24:37] And last but not least number three, the market validation is this opinion backed by paying customers or personal preferences. And once again, after this episode, when you leave here, as my mom always said, always remember the source. Remember the source of information. Everybody that gives you advice doesn't mean for you to do well. There's always an angle to it.

[00:25:06] Not well, most times there's an angle to it. It could be an angle of love, could be an angle of support. It could be an anger angle of jealousy. You never know. So my mom said, always remember the source of your information. What does that person have to gain if you're successful or if you fail? Think about it is deeper than that. Remember the source. And I will always remember that because a long time ago I was listening to certain people.

[00:25:35] And my mom was like, why are you listening to them? Because what they're telling you is absolutely incorrect and it's going to lead you down a wrong path. Remember the source of information. Now, I say this each and every week, family, because it is true. We get more and more downloads because of you, the BEB family. I appreciate you guys so much.

[00:25:58] Please continue to spread the word about the podcast, the ecosystem, the online courses, the books, everything designed to elevate your entrepreneur IQ. Remember, it's not about me. It's not about you. It's about us. It's about building an economic power base in the worldwide black community by building and supporting black owned businesses. Love you guys. See you same time next week. Peace.