On Guru Advice: How Founders Can Filter For Fit
"10X everything, because if you're not obsessed, you're average.
Eliminate, automate, delegate and buy back your time, and never say no to a client while you cut the bottom 10% every year.
A-players only, good vibes only, cut negative people out of your life, but stay edgy because haters mean it's working.
Niche down and become THE authority, bet it all on yourself.
Move fast and break things, ask forgiveness, not permission, sell the vision, fake it till you make it, because nobody is coming to save you."
Every line of advice above is pulled from the mouths of real, high-profile business gurus.
As entrepreneurship grows in popularity, advising founders has become an industry worth billions of dollars. Billions!
While most of these leaders genuinely believe in the power of their own playbooks, the advice that makes its way to your feed has often fallen far out of context, become diluted, maybe the wrong fit for your brand, and is certainly not optimized to protect and elevate your brand experience.
How could it be?
These distant gurus, these digital marketing channels, they don't know you. They don't know your brand.
And while I'm not suggesting your brand is so unique that the wheel needs reinventing at every decision point, if you believe, as I do, that brand experience is human experience, and you want to raise a brand that humanizes instead of dehumanizes, then your brand requires right-fit thinking.
So what's a human-centered founder to do?
Establish a Decision-Making System Grounded in Brand Identity
The answer to information overload and reactive decision making is developing a new habit: when advice arrives, ask the brand what it thinks.
Not what the feed thinks. Not what worked for the loudest voice at the conference. What does this brand, with its particular identity, make of this particular advice?
But here's the catch: that question only works if the brand's identity is explicit enough to answer.
Notice I did not say "that question only works if the founder has clarity/did a gut check/feels aligned." Because the founder is not the brand, and proximity is not articulation. Until the identity is seen as distinct from the founder and articulated as logic vs vibes, decisions made "in consideration of the brand" are subject to the whims, moods, and assumptions of whoever is deciding in that moment.
Know Thy Brand
There are different ways to know thy brand. At Humaniz, we use our Brand IdQ Identity Framework, which names a brand's Core Motive, its primary Emotive Style, and two or three supporting styles. Together, these become the lens every decision gets held up to, advice included.
A Sample Profile
Let's use the example of a brand with a Citizen, Creator, Jester profile.
Core Motive: Social
Your brand is driven by a need to cultivate meaningful social connection.
Recommendations: Make choices that foster a sense of belonging between people in the brand's orbit.
Be Mindful: Human impulses to form silos, in-crowds, echo chambers, and become exclusionary should be monitored.
Primary Emotive Style: Citizen
Need: Belonging
Belief: Safety in numbers.
Values: Humility, dependability
Habits: foster inclusivity and build community
Relational Strategies: Create approachable messaging, emphasize shared experiences, build trust through authenticity.
Supporting Emotive Style 1: Creator
Need: Expression
Belief: There are no bad ideas.
Values: originality, design
Habits: imagine and express
Relational Strategies: Inspire self-expression, imagination and innovation. Provide frameworks to support meaningful creation and collaboration.
Supporting Emotive Style 2: Jester
Need: Joy
Belief: Life is good.
Values: humor, spontaneity
Habits: playfulness and nonattachment
Relational Strategies: Use humor to disarm and connect, create lighthearted experiences that foster joy, and encourage others to embrace the fun side of life.
Now Ask the Brand
With the profile in hand, we can revisit some of the popular guru advice note earlier. Notice the answer is not always a flat no.
"10X everything, because if you're not obsessed you're average."
This advice belongs to a brand with a Core Motive of Ego Expression and a primary Emotive Style of Hero, with supporting Ruler styles underneath. For that brand, it's sound advice, and honest: it reinforces courage, determination, and the willingness to push past comfort for something hard-won.
Our sample profile on the other hand is predominately focused on being relatable. It measures success by its ability to bring people together. It would never dare imply that “average" is a bad word. Similarly, this brand never takes itself too seriously, which runs in direct conflict with obsession.
This advice is really about scale, momentum, and creating a movement. That's available to any brand. This one might say it more like: "Focus and think big if you want to inspire a movement."
"Move fast and break things, ask forgiveness not permission, sell the vision, fake it till you make it, because nobody is coming to save you."
This advice belongs to a brand with a Core Motive of Ego Expression and a primary Emotive Style of Rebel, with some Magician in the mix as well. For that brand, it's sound advice. OIt reinforces autonomy, conviction, and a real willingness to disrupt what deserves disrupting.
However, our sample profile builds trust through authenticity, so faking it and apologizing later undermine it’s core identity. This brand measures success by who shows up and stays. And its core belief is safety in numbers, which makes "nobody is coming to save you" less a rallying cry than a description of the problem.
This advice is really about starting before you're ready and bringing people along for the ride. And that is, regardless of brand identity, almost always a good idea. So the reframe would be: "Build in public. That's how you'll find the people who need what you bring."
"Niche down and become THE authority, bet it all on yourself."
This advice belongs to a brand with a Core Motive of Freedom and a primary Emotive Style of Sage. For that brand it's sound advice: it reinforces discernment and independence earned through genuine expertise, and the confidence to trust one's own judgment.
This actually has some staying power, but it needs some TLC to be a right fit. A our sample brand, being a Social brand with a primary Emotive Style of Citizen, does need to niche down. Finding your people requires knowing which people. But this brand is also interested in humility not praise. The goal here is to own the room full of like minded people who are all adding value vs standing in the spotlight with a captive audience.
This advice, at it’s core, is really about magnetism. A good reframe would sound more like: "Learn to speak their language and they will come running."
You're Getting It By Now
I think you're getting it by now. Every line of that advice carries two layers, style and value. Learning to see past style, down to the layer of value and then circling back to find your own expression is invalueable.
How advice is worded carries energy, and energy is what your team hears, repeats, and eventually becomes.
That's the difference between a brand with a decision-making system and a founder with a feed. The founder advice firehose isn't going to stop, but once the brand can speak for itself, you can hydrate instead of drown.
In closing, I'll point you to our Brand IdQ app to generate your own complimentary profile. Grounded in our Brand IdQ Identity Framework, this app is the foundation of all the work we do with our premium clients.
Who We Are
"We don’t create brands, because we truly believe that every business already has a brand. Rather, our role is to help founders and their teams embody the brand fully, express it with more clarity, and expand its influence and impact with more confidence."
~ Charlie Birch, Author of On Raising Brands + Founder and Creative Director @ Humaniz Collective
Bringing a brand to market is just the beginning of your brand’s development and life story.
And that’s where we come in!
We’re creative, marketing and operational experts working together to ensure brands come to life from the inside out.
We support brands throughout their lifecycle across three phases of service:
Brand Strategy
Brand Design
Brand Stewardship
If you’re looking for a brand partner to walk beside you, ensuring your brand grows up healthy and strong, makes good life choices, and attracts the right people into its orbit, Humaniz Collective is the obvious choice.
Engage with Brand IdQ - our complimentary brand strategy generator - and let us prove our worth.
