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Greetings, business innovators! Gone are the days of being elbow-deep in tools and tangled wires; you’re making strategic decisions, and directing your business towards opportunities and growth.

But as the owner of a booming business, there’s a new kind of pest you need to watch out for: Bots!

WHAT ON EARTH ARE BOTS?

Short for “robots,” bots aren’t the sci-fi, humanoid machines that might first spring to mind. Instead, think of them as special-purpose computer programs designed to perform specific tasks on the internet.

While some serve a useful purpose, like helping to index the web or respond to simple questions, others have less honorable intentions. Either way, bots are probably impacting your ad spend in ways you aren’t aware of.

These invisible critters, seemingly benign, can be as detrimental as a small leak that slowly but steadily drains your ad reservoir. Dive in with me and let’s explore why Bot Blocking should be your new best friend.

1. YOUR CASH IS PRECIOUS. DON’T FEED THE BOTS!

Nearly 40% of all internet traffic is some kind of bot, making them one of the costliest critters at this digital banquet. Every time one clicks your ad, intentionally or not, they take a bite out of your budget. Your campaigns become less effective for humans, because they’re keeping bots well-fed.

2. THE MULTIPLIER EFFECT: BLOCK ONE, GAIN A BUNCH

Every bot you block has a domino effect. Let’s say your campaign generates 100 clicks, but 20 of them were bots. With bot blocking in place, those 20 clicks can instead be living, breathing, humans clicking on your ad. Every dollar you spend goes 25% further.

In addition to getting more bang for your buck, your campaign has 25% more legitimate clicks to learn from. Services like Google Ads use machine-learning to figure out who is likely to purchase your product, and show those shoppers your ad. When droids no longer click on your ads, Google stops thinking you’re trying to sell to them.

With bot-blocking, your campaigns become leaner and smarter, targeting genuine souls and turning their clicks into gold.

3. NOT ALL BOTS WEAR BLACK HATS (BUT THEY’RE STILL A NUISANCE)

Think of bots as ants at a picnic. They might be on a benign quest, but you wouldn’t want them munching on your sandwiches.

Some of the bots that are generally useful include search engine spiders that index your site and images so that they can show up in search, and site analysis tools like SEM Rush, Ahrefs, and MOZ Open Site Explorer.

Like the picnic ants, “useful” bots can unintentionally snack on your ads. Seemingly innocent, but still costly.

4. BEWARE OF AUDIENCE EXPANSION AND DISPLAY AUDIENCES!

Advertising platforms lure you into expanding your audience and putting ads onto other “ad networks.” These networks are often made of low-quality blog websites that only exist to host ads.

Beware! Expanding your audience is like venturing into a dodgy neighborhood. Bots especially love these “expanded” territories. Be cautious where you tread.

5. BIG TECH’S HALF-HEARTED EFFORT

Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and LinkedIn benefit from bots clicking on your ads. To a tech giant, a click is a click, and you get billed regardless!

While they make some effort to block bots, let’s be candid—when there’s money involved, motivations can be murky.

6. LET’S PLAY SPOT THE BOT

Are you experiencing a surge in web traffic without a corresponding boost in sales? There might be a bot party on your site! While it may look like you’ve got thousands of people flocking to your website, these visitors contribute no actual value.

You are looking for real humans to buy your products and services. Inflated vanity metrics like website visits don’t tell the entire tale.

7. BUT HOW DO I BLOCK THE BOTS?

Ah, the billion dollar question! The simple trick is to employ specialized bot-blocking software. There are a number of options in this arena. While the technicalities are daunting, any of the top options are going to do a pretty good job of keeping the bots off your ads.

Bot-protection software use myriad techniques, such as IP address blocklists, or excluding specific audiences, ensuring that any bot that clicks your ad once can’t click again.

8. DECREASE BOT DAMAGE

If you want to minimize the impact of the bots that do make it onto your site, there are couple of measures that you can take that will keep those bots from making a mess of your life.

1. Use Google reCAPTCHA on your forms. There are a number of techniques that help keep bots from filling out the forms on your website. To block bots that make it past your firewall, we have found reCAPTCHA to be the most effective tactic.
2. Make sure you don’t count clicks as conversions. The main types of clicks that people often count as conversions are clicks on email addresses, clicks on phone numbers, and clicks on submit buttons of forms. These actions are worth tracking, because there’s a good chance that they indicate a real attempt to contact you. BUT, it’s always better to track the successful completion of a form submission or phone calls that last a minute or more when you are measuring valid conversions.

9. WHAT ABOUT THE HUMAN PESTS?

Beyond bots, there are humans with mischief afoot—like competitors clicking on your ads just for kicks – also known as click fraud.

Fear not! Bot-blocking software often doubles as a sentinel against malicious human activity, adding such tricksters to blocklists based on their frequent clicking or other shady maneuvers.

WE BELIEVE IN EFFICIENT ADVERTISING

Wizard of Ads Online uses advanced bot-blocking defenses for our client ad accounts, ensuring every penny you spend targets genuine, interested humans.

So, titans of industry, let’s arm those ads. They deserve genuine engagement, not bot interference.

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To learn more about how we can help you, book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads™ today.

Oh PPS, how most people hate you for no good reason! Processes, Procedures, and Standards.

These are the money-makers of the big 6, er big 4, er, big 2 Business Consulting Firms. The Showtime show House of Lies takes the idea that business consultants are just snake oil salesmen full of hot air to the next level. I love that show because they do manage to use some of the right buzzwords I’ve heard (and used) in the last 25 years. But like any other show, it’s more “dramedy” than reality when it comes to fixing companies.

In my experience, most senior executives in large companies ($100+ million) think their departments use PPS. When interviewing department heads in the same companies, that percentage drops significantly to about 25%. When interviewing staff in the same departments, virtually no one would call whatever written documentation they had as being usable processes, procedures, or standards! Everyone explained that these documents were old, obsolete, or otherwise not applicable and that the company had changed enough things to make them useless.

Naturally, there are exceptions. Companies that have become certified in standards, such as ISO 9001 or even ISO 27001 must have PPS to become certified, and so they absolutely have PPS – for the areas covered by requirements. For that matter, they have PPS on how to keep their PPS up to date. Of course, companies that practice Kaizen, have Six Sigma programs or have contracts that require PPS, try to have it to whatever degree they need to.

But let’s look at the typical small to mid-sized business. Selling $25 million top line and maybe getting $2 million in bottom line profit. How many of them have up-to-date, meaning actually usable, PPS? Not many at all and if you’re like the average company in the US, you probably don’t either.

So what’s so great about Standards or Processes anyway? Well, to put it into money terms, they allow you to have a more standardized product or service delivery for a lower cost. So you can do stuff cheaper and of consistent quality. With business, unlike art, variety is the enemy of success. No matter how much people like your product, if you can’t repeat what you did, you will never taste the reward of that success.

Repeatability allows you to make and test incremental changes. Quantifying the results of those incremental improvements is impossible without consistency.

Standards define what things are, what they need to be produced, and what to measure the final product against. Procedures describe how things are made or assembled, or designed in a repeatable way. These are step-by-step guides like Ikea furniture might include. Processes are the big-picture view of the business operations. They discuss standards and procedures and show processes necessary to drive the business.

If so many businesses operate without them, then why would small businesses need them? Well, competition favors those who can offer the best thing at the most reasonable price. Notice I didn’t say cheapest since you have to compare apples to apples, not oranges!

There are many advantages to standardization and continual improvement. I had the pleasure of having the W. Edwards Deming Institute as a client many years ago. Deming is the American responsible for most of the Japanese auto industry overtaking US automakers in such a short time. Today Toyota is the world’s largest automobile company. I happily defer to the Institute for training on the benefits of the Deming method or to a plethora of Six Sigma training programs for quality and process improvement.

Most of the Fortune 500 companies utilize some form of PPS, and for one I am happy to name a company where I consulted. P&G – Procter, and Gamble – is leaps and bounds ahead of any other company I have worked with in their adherence to PPS and continuous improvement.

While I came into P&G with multiple certifications in various technology and business practices, I was very happily surprised at the level of process control and improvement at every level of the company with which I interacted. As you can imagine it is much harder to ensure processes are followed and monitored in a large company than a small one – there are just so many more moving pieces – but P&G managed to lead the way for other large businesses. It is interesting to note that in 2017 P&G cut $140 million in advertising online. There may be many factors that played into that decision, but a significant factor was the lack of tangible return on investment.

Unlike companies that act like lemmings, following one another blindly, P&G evaluates all their contracts and expenses to be sure they are performing at the level of expectations. This process is very uncommon in small businesses and almost unheard of in large corporate America. P&G determined that traditional media like television, print, and radio had a better quantifiable return on their branding spend. After all, it’s impossible to have an ad-blocker block out commercials from the radio station you are listening to in the car – and that includes SiriusXM!

To learn more about how we can help you, book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads™ today.

The big brother lived with his little brother, his mom, and his grandma.

They lived in an apartment, with an entrance that looked like the one on Sesame Street. Today I understand that meant this fractured family lived in an inner city, somewhere. When I first fell in love with this book, I just thought it was cool.

I have no idea what that children’s book was called, or who the author was, but I will gladly pay a bunch of money to the used bookstore I find one day that has a dusty copy sitting on a shelf. I always imagine it will be low down, forgotten, near the back.

There are a lot of booksellers out there I still have to visit. It was a brilliant story. If I remember it, so do other people who were once upon a time in grade 2.

Connecting people who have with people who want.

People who need help with those that know how. This is the dance of every single small business.

Service or product, any small business exists to serve. If they do it right, they thrive. Their business thrives, their community grows, people have jobs and little Johnny gets a new pair of shoes.

Some don’t thrive, they survive. Squeaking by year after year. The owner owns a job, and not much more.

I believe the tragedy is when it’s a great idea of a business, the owner is beyond passionate… But Not enough people know. Even worse, they know but can’t imagine themselves needing it and walking in that door to Get It. So even, one day, when they finally actually need that perfect local business holding on by fingernails of faith, they don’t think of it. It doesn’t pop into their heads. They ask their friends, coworkers, and spouses, “Who should I call for…..Where should I go to buy….” And no one knows about the shop around the corner.

All of us are potential customers, looking for something.

When we wander into a shop, call a company for help, or scroll past cat videos that make us laugh out loud, there is something we are looking for. A need or a want…. there is always something.

“Can I help you?” asks the shopkeep.

“No thank you, just looking.”

That happens every time someone drives by your location, even if that location is on their screen and not on the road in front of them. We drive by in a lot of different ways.

The pictures in that book were beautiful, glossy prints of canvas paintings with bold colorful strokes – there was a texture to the faces and the furniture – the granma’s smile – that carried the simple plot beyond the words. I could feel that big brother’s heart all the way through the story, completely connected to mine.

The pictures told me he was black and that made no difference – he was completely my twin brother.

This little guy (my age, but still, I thought of him as little) had realized he did not have his own room. Granma explained that he and his little brother shared the couch and the one bedroom belonged to her and mom. But – all was not lost, he could have his own corner.

Well, that was grand. He picked a corner and fixed it up beautifully with Granma’s help. A little plant, a crate, some drawings, and even a small turtle. His little brother kept annoyingly invading his sacred space… even though the wise Granma had bestowed corners on both boys.

The Grand Corner of the older brother simply could not be made perfect and wasn’t fun… And it should have been! Finally, the big brother realized – with Granma’s wisdom of course – that there could be no joy without the satisfaction of helping little brother create his own perfect corner.

I just loved that big brother. And the little brother. And that sage Granma. It was the building and the sharing and the creating that was the ultimate joy of having.

That is why I love advertising so much.

By connecting what your business is to a message and a campaign that people remember, you take a project and a job and turn it into something beautiful. Something brilliant. Something bigger than just a corner in your side of the room.

Because somewhere out there, someone has this… something, they keep looking for. Or a needed service that would make their life better.

They have money to buy it. But they don’t know who to call so it’s going to be a lot tougher to connect and do the dance.

Advertising is the invitation. There is no Best Before date and no expiry on the invite.

Let’s tell them to come when they are ready and need what you have for sale. We start by telling them the story of what you have, and why.

And it might not be what you think you are selling. The brothers got their very own corners, but Granma gave them much more than that.

I promise the process will make your corner feel exactly right and help you create the perfect corner for your customers. You will be just what they were looking for.

I know people who know how to help you do that.

The picture above, “Jonathon and His Mommy”, isn’t the book, but it’s the closest I’ve found… so far.

If you're struggling to craft killer direct response ads for your business, Ryan Chute from Wizard of Ads® can help. Book a call.

Have you ever come across one of those doors that people perpetually get wrong?

Where people push when they should pull and vice versa?

Doors that resort to signage to help clue people in? Like this:

Those are called Norman Doors, after the industrial design legend Donald Norman.

His contention is that people intuitively and subconsciously respond to the design language of the doors themselves.

So when the design language mismatches the function, people automatically attempt the wrong action.

In the header image, the broad, flat black platforms look like affordances for pushing.

So that’s what people do — only to get jammed up against the non-moving door.

Similarly, the doors in the side image have pulling handles attached, when the function requires users to push.

In both cases, the building managers band-aided the problem with signage.

But I’ll guarantee you people continue to routinely screw it up. Even people who pass through the doors on a daily basis.

A far better fix would be to install proper pull handles on the doors in the header image and to install those black pushing pads from the header image on the doors in the side image.

Got it? Great.

So…. what’s this gotta do with high-performing lead generation?

Everything.

What Is Your Branding Intuitively and Subconsciously Communicating to Prospects?

Your brand voice and attitude as well as your brand codes all communicate on an intuitive and subconscious level to prospective customers.

Let’s call this your “brand design language.”

So when that brand design language mismatches your business model, you run into trouble.

When you get leads through discount offers, but your business is set-up to provide a premium product or service, you’ve got a mismatch.

And that mismatch, wherein you attract transactional customers to a relational business, inevitably drives low conversions, bad reviews, and low margin.

If your business was set up as a low-priced provider, there’d be no problem. Your brand design language would match the customer experience, your operations, and your business model / economic engine.

If you attract bargain-seekers and price shoppers, but you’re set-up to profitably do business with that type of customer, you’re all set.

Walmart does a roaring trade doing exactly that.

Conversely, if your ads used a brand design language that attracted relational customers who place a premium on convenience, quality, expert help, and professionalism — and if your business was set-up to provide that level of customer experience, then you’d be all set.

Apple became one of the most profitable and valuable companies in the world doing that.

Either way works, so long as you are matched up on brand design language, customer experience, and business model.

It’s exactly like push doors work and pull doors work whenever the design language of the door matches the function.

For lead generation, the key is to craft ads with the right brand design language to attract the right kind of prospects into your business.

This will skyrocket your conversion rate and help you to make the most of your lead-gen efforts.

If you're struggling to craft killer direct response ads for your business, Ryan Chute from Wizard of Ads® can help. Book a call.

“Don’t forget about me.”

I haven’t. But enough people did. John was friendly, and passionate, and had a great location for his service-based business which filled a need.

And John invited people. In a bunch of ways. There is, you might have heard, only so much money for advertising. But John didn’t want to miss anyone. At least, not all of the time. And so he jumped from a bit of this to a bit of that. Some signage, some flyers, the occasional radio spot. Community sponsorship too, of course. He understood that he could not talk to everyone all the time. But he was convinced he could bounce around enough to remind all people everywhere about his business.

He loved the excitement of something bright, shiny, and new that just might work better than the last shiny new possibility.

Change and movement feel like we are going forward. It is the wind in our hair.

The daydreams of the ultimate “moving” sale or better yet “grand opening” event are endless! But a business owner ready to sink their teeth into success does not keep moving locations, even for that rush of change and “what if….” Not even successful food trucks move all the time. They fight over and guard a stable location.

Business owners looking for a crowbar lever to the next floor know changing an address does not serve sustainable growth. You sign the lease – or the mortgage papers, set up shop, and flip that sign on the door to Open. And you stay.

I left home at 18 to get a job and figure it out. University was not an option but I had a cheque for $500, $140 bucks, and change and it was a Saturday in late August. A perfect day to pack everything I owned into my Red Chevy Nova 3 on the tree 4 door and head to the not really big but kinda big city 2 hours away. My sister rode shotgun.

We found my first apartment, a one-bedroom basement suite, and the caretaker let me move in that day even though I wouldn’t have the damage deposit until the banks opened on Monday. I paid him cash for the last week and a half of the month and only just realized that he no doubt pocketed the cash and let me move in, telling the apartment owner that he had a renter for the beginning of September.

Hmmmmm.

Of course, on Monday, no bank would cash my cheque until I called the small town bank where it was drawn from. First, I had gone with the very hyper-friendly caretaker who offered to vouch for me at his bank, but it turns out he was really overdrawn on his account.

I did have a full tank of gas because I had taken the last bit of cash I had and filled up – I explained to my sister that we needed to make sure not to run out of gas and we didn’t. But we were a bit hungry until the cheque cleared on Monday. Rent was $217 a month so I was job hunting right away and put my writing career in neutral.

I lived in a bunch of places over a few short years, moving for a bunch of reasons, buying a lot of beer and pizza for friends with trucks, and patching a lot of nail holes with bits of toothpaste (always use white- not peppermint).

I loved the basement suite I rented from an old woman with a hump on her back which I heated by keeping the oven door open and sitting on a chair close by with a book in my lap reading and imagining that one day I would have a fireplace. And a pool. And a puppy. And be a writer.

I didn’t write or read or study or live nearly as much as I could have. I was moving around too much.

Marketing decisions are the same.

Stop moving around, here, there, everywhere. There is only so much money, remember? And even if you can keep cutting checks for every earnest marketing guru with an idea for you, just stop.

As I told John, pick someone to work with. Even if it isn’t me. Roy Williams is right – trying to talk to everyone, everywhere means you will be forgotten by almost everyone when they finally need who you and your business are.

Work on your business. Make a decision to handle your marketing in a specific way, and move on. Trust someone to do your marketing. Trust yourself to grow your business. Pick someone who has a vested interest in your success. Believe in someone who believes enough in your business to be paid according to how you grow. Who? If you are on this site, reading this blog, you already know.

Don’t jump all over. A Wizard of Ads partner will create a plan and a team based on what you have created and what you envision.

A business that no one will forget.

Don’t keep losing your damage deposit.

If you’re interested in learning more about the best means for marketing your specific business, you can book a discovery call here.

In my last book, I talked about differences in both the types of employees and even executives that a company needs throughout its growth and maturation. So here is a summary of that chapter from my previous book. For many entrepreneurs, the traditional wisdom is that if you do a good job hiring at the early stages of business, you only have to hire someone for a position once and they will grow with the company. I will get into why people think there is never a need to replace anyone, and why that is wrong in a later chapter, but let me focus on the hiring process itself in this chapter. Hiring the right people means you need to avoid hiring the wrong people, and there are many ways to hire the wrong people.

For instance, during those early employee hires, you need to be sure you hire for flexibility and trainability. Everyone, you included, has to wear a lot of different hats. The company can’t afford to hire experts to fill each need yet. Even the owners are probably not experts; rather, they are simply willing to pick up whatever needs to get done to make the next sale and do it.

If successful through the initial startup, what you want to end up with several years later is:

• Written procedures and processes in place.
• A management team that plans and knows how to minimize unplanned events.
• Expertise in their departments who work with other experts in other departments.
• No one is a jack of all trades anymore.

The personal challenge you face as the CEO – and that the rest of the CxO management team faces – is being OK with not knowing the up-to-the-minute operational details of the company the way you used to. Your focus is on guiding an ever-growing organization, which means, much like a conductor of an orchestra, you focus on what will be happening next, rather than what is happening now. You trust your management staff to execute on the future plans and keep you informed enough to be able to make the right strategic decisions. They, in turn, trust their department heads to know enough about day-to-day, but not necessarily minute-by-minute operations.

The most important reason to hire someone is that they have skills that a company needs, are willing to utilize those skills when the company needs them, and are eager to do this at a rate the company can afford. Secondary qualities, like people skills, will help determine how well this person fits into the company culture and how effectively they will interact with employees already at the company are also important. However, you as a founder or a senior manager liking someone as a person, while it is obviously a plus, should be much lower on the list.

I have been able to find very good people to hire for my clients, but that is not an easy process. Finding a great employee means the company has to do as much work as the person applying for a job. What I mean by that is great hires do not stay available for long. You may receive 25 resumes and see five great potential hires, but those five may have sent out resumes to 25 companies, and the first company to interview them and give them an offer is likely to get them. So do not waste time with filtering tactics that make the candidates jump through hoops. Instead set up an interview immediately with anyone whose resume looks impressive. The first interview may be only 15 minutes and cover just a few questions, but at that point, they are not likely to take another offer without talking to you first. If you simply email your candidates a list of questions, and other companies are already setting up interviews, guess what your odds are of getting a reply to your email?

If you take too long from initial contact to an interview, you will simply end up with the candidates who are most desperate, not the ones who may be the best fit. Finding the perfect employee is easy – it just takes the same amount of effort as making the perfect product or delivering the perfect service!

For many CEOs I’ve worked with, hiring people is second only to firing people as the least enjoyable part of the job in the company. Even ‘people’ people from sales and marketing departments dislike spending time to find the best candidates. Unfortunately, very often that means the solution is just to hire the first person who comes along, replies to filter questions, and doesn’t blow the interview just so they can end the hiring process. This leads to a company full of mediocre people doing an OK job. No one is terrible, but it also means it doesn’t take much to stand out in this crowd. The TV show The Office was based on following the fictional lives of mediocre people selling a boring product. In that show, no one is motivated to do more than the bare minimum. While the head of the office constantly comes up with ideas to motivate people but accomplishes nothing but distracting them from their work. The show was funny precisely because it showed an office full of people doing mediocre work and a boss who thought that his staff was great. It was a TV show written by utterly NOT mediocre comedy writers!

Another common occurrence is to see a company full of twenty-somethings. Yes, there certainly are examples of companies started by teens and others staffed by people just starting their professional careers, like Facebook in its early days, but let’s face it, a successful company like that is a unicorn – it just doesn’t happen very often. For most businesses that have an age bias in either direction, this is a detriment to the success of the company as it starts growing past a half dozen employees. Youth can have skill and energy, but if not balanced with wisdom, which only comes from making mistakes – maybe lots of mistakes – it does not provide the best workforce long term. Likewise, a company full of very experienced people will be missing the energy and creativity of inexperience which often leads to completely out-of-the-box solutions to problems.

I’m a fan of using interns precisely because they bring something unique to the workforce that cannot be taught – namely, an unbiased view of existing processes. But unless you are in college, and you don’t know anyone over 25, you really should be hiring some of your people based on experience and the wisdom it brings to balance out the exuberant enthusiasm of youth. Certainly, by the time you hire your 5th or 10th employee, you should be recruiting for skill and experience.

Mistakes can be made by everyone. Your goal in hiring more seasoned and specialized staff is to pay for what they learned from past mistakes through a higher salary or hourly rate. You pay for more inexperienced staff mistakes through unexpected business losses that come at the most inopportune times when a business follows through on a bad decision.

How do I find the best people if I don’t like wasting time on the hiring process? Well if you can afford to use recruiters (15-25% of annual salary) then do so, but only after doing due diligence on the recruiter. Don’t just trust someone who paid $9.99 for a business card with the word “Recruiter” to help you find a person who will be responsible for potentially millions of dollars in profits or losses for your company. Have the recruiter audition for you. Have them explain their process for finding the best employee for you. Have them tell you about their successes as well as failures of the past. Tell them you want to use one recruiter for the next five years, so they are potentially going to make hundreds of thousands off your company, and that you want to be sure that is the kind of relationship they bring to the table. If you can find a good recruiter, you can avoid having to find new employees on your own. If you can’t find a good recruiter, then don’t use a recruiter as they will merely cost you money and solve none of the problems that you would have if you just hired poorly yourself.

After the initial startup period of hiring generalists, one of the skills of a successful CEO is being able to surround himself with people who are more qualified than he is in their particular specialization. Look around your company and think about the people who you see as being better than you. For each one, you can honestly say that about – congratulations, you made a good hire. For everyone else in roles that are specialized, you probably need to start looking for their replacement sooner rather than later. For menial or entry-level roles you should not expect that people know more than you about doing that job, but they should at least be faster, more efficient, or more regimented in doing their jobs than you would be if you had to do it yourself. Any fault with the staff within a company always rolls up through management and executives to the CEO. Find good specialists, and set high expectations for their hires, and you will have a company of the top producers in your industry. Shrug off the responsibility to take the time to hire the best of the best, and your bottom line will suffer.

I had one client that had shown an ability to grow sales very quickly. They were riding the wind as it were. Then it turned out that the ride was unsustainable. When I came in, I was surprised to find a company full of people in their 20s. I wondered if it was all the innovative ideas of younger employees that helped them grow so fast. It may have been, but it was also the cause of their downfall. As I mentioned, everyone makes mistakes, as much as we try to be perfect. We can make fewer mistakes by remembering our own past errors and the mistakes of others. Nothing will prevent someone from making an error in judgment nearly as much as a bitter memory of the price they paid the last time they made the same mistake.

Learning from others’ mistakes is a half-step in the right direction, and it contains wisdom, but not the instruments of enforcing adherence to that wisdom. So when you have a company staffed by people who have made very few business mistakes in their lives, they will not help you as the CEO in avoiding mistakes. They have nothing to fall back on personally, and they will respect and admire you as a successful CEO even if you make bad decisions, further hurting your decision-making abilities by creating a false sense of always being right. We see this type of thing happen with politicians all the time. They surround themselves with sycophants and then end up falling from grace, but never understanding why they fall so far.

Making mistakes is human, learning from your own mistakes and the mistakes of others makes you superhuman. Unfortunately, most people need to make the same mistake multiple times before they actually learn from it. For companies that is often even worse because mistakes get institutionalized and become part of the normal process. It’s not wisdom unless you avoid the same mistake in the future.

If you have no other reason than this to surround yourself with people who are more experienced and better qualified than you, it is that their internal criticism and disagreements with you will give you the opportunity to prevent making extremely costly mistakes with the entire company. But that will only happen if you take their advice! If you surround yourself with only enthusiastic but inexperienced youngsters, they will have little criticism to offer you and you will keep making costly mistakes.

Unless you work with seasoned marketers with rich experience writing irresistible advertising, like Ryan Chute’s teams at Wizard of Ads®. Book a call.