Quest Advising - Navigate Business with Confidence

Quest Advising - Navigate Business with Confidence ScalingUp, 3HAG, Quest Advising

09/20/2026

Owners either blame the team or blame themselves. Most pick the wrong one.

In The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, John Maxwell teaches that a business only gets as good as the person running it.

He also teaches that a leader's results depend on the few people closest to them. Both lessons are right.

If quotes sit until you approve them and nobody acts without asking, the issue is you.

If the work keeps moving after you step back but jobs are done wrong, the issue is the people doing it.

If it waits for you, it's you. If it runs without you and runs wrong, it's who you picked.

Owners either blame the team or blame themselves. Most pick the wrong one.In The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, John...
09/14/2026

Owners either blame the team or blame themselves. Most pick the wrong one.

In The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, John Maxwell says the person running a business affects how good it can be. He also says a leader's results depend on the people closest to them. Both lessons are right.

Quotes sit until you approve them, and nobody acts without asking. Or you step back, the work keeps moving, and jobs get done wrong. If it waits for you, it's you. If it runs without you and runs wrong, it's who you picked.

08/20/2026

You're not. You called the play. You brought the people together. You coached someone through their first big win. That's the contribution now.

I talk to owners every week who can't delegate because doing the work is the only way they feel valuable.

That identity crisis is the transition. And it's the only one that lets the company outgrow you.

Two books on your shelf are giving you opposite instructions about your own calendar.Paul Graham says founder mode. Stay...
08/19/2026

Two books on your shelf are giving you opposite instructions about your own calendar.

Paul Graham says founder mode. Stay in the details. Talk to the people doing the work, not just the ones who report to you.

Michael Ge**er's E-Myth says the opposite. Work on the business, not in it. Your job is building the system, not doing the work inside it.

Most owners read both and decide one of them has to be wrong.

Neither is. They are answering different questions.

The question was never whether you should be in the work. It is what happens to the work when you are in it.

Where your hands make the whole thing better, stay in. That is leverage.

Where the work only moves when you touch it, you are not the expert in the room. You are a bottleneck with your name on it.

Graham is right about the first. Ge**er is right about the second. Most owners hit both of those in the same week and treat them the same way.

Leverage or bottleneck. Stay in where you have leverage, work yourself out of the bottleneck.

08/18/2026

Most of you know I have spent the last 17 years helping small business owners grow.

In all that time the lesson never changed. It is the people. You can fix the marketing, fix the pricing, fix the process, and none of it holds if the wrong person is sitting in the job.

So that is what I have spent years building. A hiring system for small businesses.

I am not going to tell you I built something better than Topgrading. Those methods are good. They are also built for companies that already have an HR department. If you are hiring your first employee, or your fifth, they are too much. And what is left at the other end is too little. A template. A job description pulled off the internet. Whatever the AI or the job board hands you, which is just an average of everyone else's mistakes.

Mine sits in the middle. Works for the first hire, works for the fiftieth. It takes most of the guessing out, and it has helped us attract, select and start the right people over and over.

Today I am making it public.

You no longer have to hire me for this. If you have an opening you cannot wait on, or I am out of your budget, or you are outside the places I work, it is yours anyway.

And to make that easy, the first part of it is free. No card.

You spend about twenty minutes answering questions about the role, and you walk away with four finished documents: what the job is actually for, what the person has to produce, what they need in their head and their gut and their resume, and who exactly you are looking for. Yours to keep.

I think most people hiring right now would be better off with just the free part. That is the point.

So if you are hiring, or you know someone who is, send them this:

https://20minutehire.com/get-clear

08/17/2026

Fear works exactly once.

You push, the team performs, you think the pressure did it. Two months later your best person leaves and you're baffled.

Bret Piatt nailed it: "You may get elevated performance through fear, but you're going to figure out how to get the heck out."

Fear produces compliance. Compliance does exactly what it's told and nothing more.

Belief produces commitment. Commitment solves the problem you didn't know you had.

08/14/2026

Nobody teaches you this part. You build a team and suddenly your job is invisible.

You're not closing the deal anymore. You're not making the pitch. You're calling the play and watching someone else execute it.

Nick Monaghan put it plainly: "You become the least important factor."

That's the transition. And every owner fights it, because not doing the work feels like not contributing.

It's the opposite. It's the only contribution that scales.

"Culture fit" is the most expensive phrase in small business hiring.When an owner says someone was not a culture fit, it...
08/12/2026

"Culture fit" is the most expensive phrase in small business hiring.

When an owner says someone was not a culture fit, it usually means one of three things happened. The role was never clearly defined. The expectations were never communicated. Or the team never had shared standards to begin with.

"Culture fit" becomes the default answer when you do not have a better one. It sounds reasonable. It closes the conversation. And it guarantees you will make the exact same mistake next time, because you never named what actually went wrong.

A talented person who disrupts the team is not a culture problem. It is a screening problem. You hired for skill and hoped the rest would sort itself out. It did not sort itself out. It never does.

Culture is not a vibe check in the interview. It is a set of specific behaviors you can name, observe, and score. Can they handle direct feedback without shutting down? Do they follow through without being chased? Do they treat the junior person the same way they treat you?

If you cannot list your culture standards in under a minute, "culture fit" is doing the work your hiring process should be doing. And it is doing it badly, because a feeling is not a filter.

08/10/2026

Your team isn't slow. You're changing the target.

I talked to an agency founder who ran her company for 25 years. One of her longest employees used a single word to describe her leadership: whiplash.

She wasn't wrong for having ideas. She was wrong for dumping every one of them on the team with no filter.

She fixed it by hiring someone whose job was to absorb the change and translate it into steady work for the team.

Your ideas aren't the problem. Your delivery system is.

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