The Worst Business Advice Women Entrepreneurs Follow
I didn’t get bad advice from bad people.
I got advice from smart women, successful entrepreneurs, top earners. Women who had genuinely figured something out and were trying to share it.
The problem wasn’t that they were wrong.
The problem was that their advice was built for their life. Their energy. Their design. Their capacity. And when I tried to run it through mine, something always broke.
This is that list. The worst business advice I followed, what it actually cost me, and what I do instead.
Because here’s the real problem: most of us take business strategy at face value. Someone successful says it worked for them and we treat it as the only way. We don’t apply critical thinking to the source. We just try harder to make it fit. Then guilt ourselves because it failed. As one of my mentors would kindly say, “And how is that going for you?!”
The Success Story That Wasn’t Mine
I was a direct sales babe for 10 years. They showed you the thousand-person downline. The incentive trip. The top earner on stage. The business owner who went full time in eighteen months. Look at what she built. That’s what’s possible. You can do it!!
What they didn’t show you: the spouse’s income underneath it. The support system around it. The decade of relationship building before the breakthrough moment. The specific season of life that made it all possible.
I sat in those rooms single, with a demanding career, measuring myself against a finish line built for someone else’s race. When the metrics didn’t fit my own business I didn’t question the metrics. I questioned myself.
That’s the design of it. Not a conspiracy. Just a business model built for a specific person that got handed to everyone else as the standard. Successful entrepreneurs who share their frameworks rarely explain the conditions that made those frameworks work. They share the what without the context. (context is key!)
Success that doesn’t fit your life isn’t success. The metric was wrong. Not you.
Post Three Times a Day
Consistency is everything. Show up every day. Three posts minimum. This is what the algorithm rewards.
What this advice assumes: you have a marketing team. Or at minimum a few uninterrupted hours and a business strategy complex enough to generate that much content.
What it ignores: you are one person running your own business. Keeping yourself alive and a business running and possibly some chickens. Three posts a day from that place isn’t a content strategy. It’s a path to resenting the business you built.
And here’s the part nobody says out loud. The burnout makes the content worse. The worse content gets less traction. The less traction makes you feel more behind. So you post more. From a more depleted place. And the cycle continues.
The best way to build a sustainable social media presence is not volume. It’s consistency you can actually maintain without burning out. Your business will perform better when you aren’t running on fumes. That’s not a valuable lesson people share often enough. It’s just true.
You’re Stuck in Follower Jail
You need to get past 200 followers or the algorithm won’t show your content. Here’s the reel. Here’s the hook. Here’s how to break out.
What this is actually doing: making you feel behind so you’ll buy the course that fixes it.
200 engaged followers who trust you is a real business. One new client a week from 200 potential customers who actually want what you offer beats 10k followers who found you through a trending audio and have no idea what you do.
Viral is not a business model. It’s a moment. And moments don’t pay rent.
The goalposts moved every time you got close because they were designed to. You optimized for a number instead of a relationship. Reach instead of resonance. And the slow, steady, consistent presence you dismissed as not enough? That’s actually how most successful entrepreneurs built something durable. Different strategies exist for a reason. Volume is one. Depth is another. Depth wins long term.
Follow the Trend
This format is performing right now. Use this audio. Jump on this moment. The window is closing.
What this assumes: your business strategy is nimble enough to pivot on a Tuesday because something is trending. And your business can withstand you throwing a bucket of water of your head because it’s trendy.
What it ignores: trends require you to move from urgency, not alignment. And urgency is a stress response wearing a strategy hat. You are not making a creative decision. You are reacting. Your nervous system is in fight-or-flight and you are making content from that place and wondering why it doesn’t sound like you.
Marketing changes constantly. That’s real. But chasing every shift in the digital media world at the expense of your own voice is the exact opposite of building something recognizable. The content that doesn’t sound like you attracts an audience that doesn’t know you. And certainly doesn’t buy your good or service.
Borrowed timelines are not strategies. Someone else’s tipping point is not your benchmark. Your slow, consistent, genuinely-you presence compounds quietly and pays out in ways the trend-chasers never quite understand.
Only Three Spots Left
Create urgency. Scarcity closes. Two days left. Three spots. Don’t miss this.
This is probably the worst piece of advice in the industry because it works. Conversion data backs it up. Fear of missing out is a real psychological trigger and it moves people to action.
Here’s what it also does: it activates a stress response in your buyer. You are closing her from fear, not desire. And if you are already dysregulated, manufacturing urgency you don’t actually feel is expensive. Your body knows the difference between a real deadline and a performed one.
There’s a distinction worth naming here. Calling in your clients sounds like: here’s what I built, here’s who it’s for, the door is open. Calling out your clients sounds like: only three spots, closing in two days, don’t miss this. Neither is wrong. One just requires you to perform scarcity you don’t feel. And for creative entrepreneurs especially, performing anything from a depleted place costs more than it earns.
A genuine enrollment window with a real close date is enough. Trust that.
And if you actually only had 3 seats left, add more seats babes.
You Should Be Further Along By Now
At your stage you should have an email list of X. You should be making Y profit margins. You should have launched Z by now. You don’t have a _____, you have to have a _______ otherwise you’re not legitimate!
Where this comes from: someone else’s timeline, someone else’s starting point, someone else’s definition of what progress looks like.
What it costs: you measure a living, growing thing against a static benchmark and call the gap failure. You speed up when you should go deeper. You launch before you’re ready because the calendar said it was time. You skip the foundation because the should-be timeline had you past foundations already.
The hard way turns out to be the only way for a lot of business owners. Going back and building what you skipped. Slowing down to actually understand your business model instead of just executing tactics. There is no “by now” in building something real. The should-be timeline was always someone else’s and it was never a valuable lesson about your actual capacity.
What All of This Has in Common
The advice wasn’t bad. The people giving it weren’t wrong.
They were just built differently than you. Different energy. Different designs. Different seasons of life. What worked for them got packaged as what works, full stop. And the packaging was so confident, so backed by results, that applying critical thinking to it felt like making excuses.
It wasn’t making excuses. It was noticing a misfit.
The real problem was never your work ethic, your business strategy, or your work-life balance. It was that you were running someone else’s playbook in your own business and wondering why it kept breaking.
The framework I use instead, Human Design, cyclical living, nervous system regulation, building from your actual capacity rather than someone else’s ceiling, I give away for free. All of it. Because the methodology was never the product.
The product is having somewhere to practice it. Alongside other women who are done running someone else’s playbook and ready to build something that actually fits.
That’s what Soul & Strategy is.
The whole framework lives here in my writing on my socials for free. Read everything. Take what lands. Use it.
And if you want to build it alongside other women who are doing the same work, the door is open.
✦
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the worst business advice for women entrepreneurs? The worst piece of advice is that there’s only one way to build a successful business. Volume-based strategies, urgency marketing, and follower-count benchmarks were built for specific business models and specific people. When applied to a different design, capacity, or life situation, the same advice that built someone else’s business can quietly break yours.
Why doesn’t mainstream business advice work for every business owner? Most mainstream business advice comes from successful entrepreneurs who share what worked for them without the full context of why it worked. The underlying conditions, support systems, energy type, season of life, and business model don’t get included in the framework. So you get the tactic without the blueprint.
Is slow business growth actually a valid strategy? Yes. Most durable businesses were built slowly. The highlight reel of overnight success stories obscures the years of foundation underneath them. Slow, consistent, compounding growth is less exciting and significantly more sustainable. Different strategies work for different business models and timelines.
How do I know which business advice is right for my own business? Start by applying critical thinking to the source. Who built this strategy? What was their capacity, their support system, their energy type? Does this advice ask you to work against your natural rhythm or with it? If following the advice consistently leaves you more depleted than energized, that’s information. The best way to filter advice is to run it through your own design first.
What is the alternative to urgency-based marketing? Building genuine desire over time through consistent, valuable content and honest enrollment windows with real deadlines. It converts more slowly but attracts potential customers who are in alignment rather than fear. Those buyers stay longer, refer more, and are easier to serve.
Key Takeaways
The business advice that was making you worse probably came from smart, well-meaning people with genuinely successful businesses. The real problem was fit, not quality. Frameworks built for a specific business model, energy type, and life structure get handed to every business owner as universal truth. They are not. The alternative is building from your actual design, your real capacity, and a business strategy that belongs to you. The methodology is free here. The room to practice it alongside other women is Soul & Strategy.
About the Author
Laura Wendt is the founder of Soul & Strategy, a membership community for women entrepreneurs building businesses that fit how they’re actually designed. Her work sits at the intersection of Human Design, cyclical living, nervous system regulation, and AI. [Start the 7-day AI sprint →]
