Entrepreneurs are often encouraged to create a self-fulfilling prophecy by ignoring those with something bad to say. Dozens of articles implore business owners to stop listening to criticism or give naysayers a wide berth. Optimism has been called the single most important factor to an entrepreneur’s success.
While it’s true that nothing’s achieved with a doom-and-gloom mindset, ignoring all criticism is a recipe for disaster. Entrepreneurs often harbor big dreams and big ideas, sometimes carrying big flaws they’re too eager to notice. Simply hearing out a person with legitimate concerns can save a business owner money, time, and heartache.
Surrounding yourself with 24-hour negativity is like poisoning the well — it will drain your ideas and your efforts of all their spark. But that doesn’t mean you should ditch every critic.
Why You Need to Listen (Even When You Don’t Want To)
Jim Rohn famously said that we’re the average of the five people we spend the most time with. That also means that our brains are filled with the ideas these people approve, share, or discuss — and the people we spend an inordinate amount of time with are likely to be in our corner. That means they can sometimes tell us what we want to hear or what will encourage us to keep going, even if the kinder thing to do is to tell us about real problems they see.
This happened to a friend of mine who started a marketing business. His business, aimed at helping other small business owners manage their social media and email marketing efforts so they could focus on their areas of expertise, was doing well. By the end of his first year in business, he’d received enough referrals and retained enough customers to be turning a decent profit, something even he hadn’t anticipated.
He decided to expand his efforts, offering services to help with webinars, paid ads, and affiliate marketing. He knew a little bit about each and expected he could scale the services with a little outsourcing and some demand. He mentioned his company’s expansion to a fellow business owner at a local networking meeting. “How are you going to have time for that?” the other man asked. “Are you hiring?”
My friend said he wasn’t. In the back of his head, he pondered the other man’s words but eventually disregarded them, reminding himself that the other guy ran a construction business that required more hands-on work. The other friends he’d talked to had been encouraging, agreeing he could make a lot of money, and that sealed the deal.
What he got, instead, was a lot of demand and no outsourcing. So many clients requested the new services after they debuted that he couldn’t manage all the deliverables. By the time he realized what he was in for, he felt it was too late to bring in an external assistant or company to help. He ended up losing half his clients during his second year in business, simply because he couldn’t deliver on what he’d promised — and he ended up feeling like his friends had broken his trust.
What You Need to Hear vs. What You Want to Hear
But had they? Not business owners themselves, they likely a) didn’t grasp the realities of service line expansion and b) had understood that their interactions with him were meant to be more encouraging than questioning.
My friend needed to be more open to critiques — as well as more open to exploring them. The initial suggestion that he wouldn’t have time for everything he’d planned may have caught him off guard (and even stung a little), but that reaction should have triggered follow-up questions: Why do you say that? Have you tried something similar? Would you limit the rollout to specific customers? Would you just launch one new service at a time?
Poking holes in his plan would have been painful at the beginning, but it would have felt a lot better than ignoring the holes did later. Other entrepreneurs would be smart to also welcome those who tell them what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.
Here’s how I recommend doing that.
- Develop a cunning BS detector (aka determine which critics deserve your attention). Not all feedback is created equal. Before you listen to any critics, first determine whether they have given you any reason to think they are not reliable narrators or are in a position to want to sabotage you. There are two types of people, however, that you should immediately put on your “listen” list: those who support you and those who have been where you are. The former are invested in your success and will stick with your questions, concerns, and interests; the latter can help you sidestep landmines or ask tough questions that make you think.
- Ask questions. And those questions shouldn’t be one-sided: Ask questions of your critics, too. If your friend says she thinks your new product idea is great, ask her why she thinks people would buy it. Who’s the audience? How much does she think they would — or could — pay? What would they want that you can’t supply currently? Even if your friend isn’t an expert in your industry, she’s a consumer who can give you honest answers. If you ask questions of your entrepreneurial friends, they’ll give you sharp insights you may normally overlook when you’re excited about your ideas — or help you refine your ideas so they’ll work.
- Bring up contradictions. One critic may suggest that your new pay structure makes sense, while another balks at it because so few of your current clients could afford it with their other distribution costs. Ask the first critic whether she agrees. She may tell you she hadn’t even considered their other distribution fees, or she may say she’d assumed you were rolling those other distribution methods into your new fee. It pays to bring up the awkward.
Your critics may intimidate you, but they can also be some of the strongest assets you’ll ever have. Without their feedback, you may walk right into problems you could have prepared for and prevented — and you may give up profits and success along with them. While you shouldn’t listen to everyone, you do need to have a stable of critics you trust. Without them, you may be running on optimism alone.
