The most useful thing an advisor ever tells a founder is no.
It is also the thing nobody wants to pay for.
A month of posts on survival rates, validation and budgets, so here is the fair version of the sales pitch, including the argument against it.
The case for.
UK research covering 2015 to 2021 found that firms taking external business advice were around 10% more productive than comparable firms that did not. The researchers matched firms to deal with the obvious objection, that the sort of business which goes looking for advice was probably better run already. The effect held up. What worked best was specific, practical knowledge from people who do the work for a living, rather than general encouragement.
The case against.
If you already have a validated offer, customers paying real prices, and a budget you genuinely run the business from, you may not need us. Plenty of founders do this well on their own.
Advice is not insurance. Better odds is not the same thing as a good outcome, and anyone selling you the second one is selling something.
That research is UK data. It points in a direction for New Zealand. It does not prove a number here.
And planning has a limit. The same researchers who found that writing a formal plan improves the odds also found that spending too long on it does not help. At some point the honest advice is to stop planning and go and sell something.
What we actually do.
We test the idea against demand, competition, feasibility and the numbers. We build the plan and the budget as one working document, with the figures worked through rather than guessed. Then you get a written view of where the idea landed and a recommendation either way.
Sometimes that recommendation is do not do it. We have no stake in your optimism, which is the entire reason to pay someone outside it.
If you are about to put real money into an idea, an honest answer is the cheapest part of the whole exercise.
Sources and notes
Sources:
Business advice and productivity: Enterprise Research Centre, "What Kind of Business Advice Improves Small Business Productivity?", Andrew Henley, March 2024. UK longitudinal data from 2015 to 2021, using statistical matching to account for firms selecting themselves into seeking advice. Headline finding: business advice across all forms raises productivity by around 10%, with the strongest results from codified knowledge delivered by trusted professional practitioners.
On the limits of planning: Greene and Hopp, Harvard Business Review, "When Should Entrepreneurs Write Their Business Plans?" (May 2018), the follow-up to their 2017 finding that formal planners were 16% more likely to reach viability.
Matching reduces selection bias. It does not remove it. And UK evidence is directional for New Zealand rather than conclusive.
If you want a straight read on whether your idea stacks up, the discovery call is the place to start: futureshiftadvisory.nz/contact?interest=entrepreneur_module