I’ve been writing lately about what I’ve learned from blogging. Last week, I singled out a comment that I found extremely helpful. This week, I want to talk about the opposite.

Since this is a moderated forum, spam and insane nonsense rarely make it to the page (except for this guy.) Thank you, editors! That still leaves room for people who disagree with my opinions — which make perfect sense to me — or who think they somehow indicate that I’m an inhuman monster (see some of the comments on this post about hiring.)

I’m going to disqualify ad hominem attacks from my list of unhelpful comments. I want to highlight, instead, a couple of ways that I have found advice to be less than useful. Doing this, I hope, will be helpful for small-business owners who must constantly decide whose advice to take. Here are four types of advice to watch out for:

The Complicated and Expensive Solution

Some commenters seem to believe that there are more resources available to a struggling business than my experience would suggest. The following is a comment from my post on soliciting employee ideas:

At first glance this seems to be good advice. But if you don’t have a fairly sophisticated information infrastructure in place, with consistently good inputs being maintained regularly by people who care about what they are doing, it can be impossible to implement ideas like this.

Think of the amount of record-keeping this scheme would require. Who sets it up? Will you be collecting data on paper or electronically? Who trains your workers to do the proper inputs? Who makes sure the data is collected every day? Who tabulates it into useful form? Who figures out whether it makes sense and how to interpret it in a way that helps?

My experience with data is that, in real life, it’s so noisy that it’s almost impossible to draw conclusions. There’s a ready solution for these problems: plenty of money and management time. How many small, struggling businesses have both?

On the other hand, a business that doesn’t work toward understanding itself is at a serious disadvantage. It’s easy to get caught in a death spiral where ignorance leads to bad decisions, which eat up the money required to change course, which can only be generated by good decisions, which only come from good information. I’ve struggled with this and am still struggling with it. And apparently I’m not alone. Here’s a comment from my post about my goals for this year:

A few years ago, when I was exactly where Roger seems to be, I had a simple rule: when prioritizing, start with the thing that will bring the biggest check the fastest. In retrospect, that was kind of dumb.I should have been starting with the thing that would make me cash-flow positive.

What’s the difference? A big check is useful for immediate needs, but figuring out how to arrange things so that revenue consistently outpaces spending is more important. When management bandwidth is limited, you may have to turn your back on a revenue opportunity in order to set up a better system for tracking cash, or to analyze the electric bill, or to spend time checking local wage rates to make sure you aren’t paying too much for labor. I ignored every one of those issues for years while I scrambled for more sales, and it cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars. When I fixed those leaks, as explained here, I suddenly had cash. But I don’t want to give the impression that hard work is always rewarded — I was lucky, too, in that demand for my products has increased in the last year. If it hadn’t, all my tinkering would have been in vain, and the company would have failed.

Conventional Wisdom

I’ve been assured many, many times that I should be looking for repeat customers. For instance, from My Week in Cash Flow:

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