Ignore the Experts (Including This One)

“We need your business to be less punk,” the industry veteran told James Watt after reviewing BrewDog’s branding and business model. “Your beers are too high in alcohol, your messaging is too confrontational, and your direct sales approach won’t scale. This isn’t how the beer industry works.”

The experts were unanimous. Multiple consultants and beer industry veterans assured Watt that BrewDog’s approach would never succeed. They needed to tone down their attitude, reduce their alcohol content, and pursue traditional distribution channels.

Watt’s response? He doubled down on everything the experts told him to avoid. He made their beers more distinctive, their messaging more confrontational, and their approach more direct. In his book “Business for Punks,” he even advises entrepreneurs to “be a selfish bastard and ignore advice.”

The result? A £2 billion business that completely disrupted the UK beer market.

The Most Dangerous Person in Your Business

The most dangerous person in your business journey isn’t your fiercest competitor or your most demanding customer. It’s the well-credentialed expert who convincingly tells you why your distinctive approach won’t work in “the real world.”

Let’s be clear: experts aren’t inherently wrong or malicious. They’re often brilliant people with valuable knowledge. But they share a fundamental limitation that makes them dangerous to your essence-driven business: experts study what worked before, not what might work next.

When you’re building something truly distinctive, looking backward is precisely the wrong direction.

The Expert Industrial Complex

We live in the golden age of business expertise. Consultants, coaches, advisors, and mentors stand ready to guide your every decision. Entire industries exist to tell you exactly how your type of business “should” operate.

Their insights aren’t worthless—but they come with hidden dangers:

The Pattern Recognition Trap: Experts naturally view your business through patterns they’ve seen before. But true innovation happens when you break patterns, not follow them.

The Risk Mitigation Bias: Most expert advice optimises for avoiding failure rather than maximising distinctiveness. Safer? Perhaps. More likely to make you the obvious choice? Almost never.

The Homogenisation Effect: When every business in your industry follows the same expert advice, they inevitably become more similar—precisely when you need to become more distinct.

Consider Monzo’s bright coral payment cards. Banking consultants insisted customers wouldn’t trust a mobile-only bank with such a distinctive, non-traditional card design. Traditional banking wisdom demanded muted colours and conservative branding to signal stability and trustworthiness.

Yet Monzo’s coral cards became a powerful conversation starter and recognition symbol that helped drive their rapid growth. The experts weren’t wrong about banking history—they were simply unable to imagine a future where banking could look different.

Three Types of Dangerous Experts

Not all experts pose the same threats to your business essence. Here are the three most dangerous varieties:

1. The Generic Expert

This expert offers one-size-fits-all advice divorced from your specific context. They’ve developed a system or framework that supposedly works for everyone—which means it actually works perfectly for no one.

Hubspot faced this when launching their inbound marketing approach. Every SaaS expert insisted outbound sales was essential—cold calls, aggressive follow-ups, and traditional sales tactics were the only way to grow. Hubspot ignored them, focused entirely on inbound marketing, and built a multi-billion dollar business by practicing what they preached.

2. The Industry Veteran

Perhaps the most dangerous expert of all, the industry veteran knows exactly “how things are done around here.” They’ve spent decades absorbing industry orthodoxy and can’t imagine any other approach working.

ARM Holdings encountered this when developing their semiconductor business model. Industry experts insisted they needed to manufacture chips rather than license designs—after all, that’s how Intel and other giants succeeded. ARM ignored this advice, focused purely on designing and licensing their technology, and built a business that now powers billions of devices worldwide.

3. The Successful Pattern-Matcher

This expert has succeeded with a particular approach and now sees every business through that lens. They’re not selling snake oil—their advice worked brilliantly for them. But their success may have come from a completely different context than yours.

When Ben Francis was building Gymshark, fashion industry experts insisted he needed retail distribution. Their pattern recognition told them direct-to-consumer wouldn’t work for apparel, especially fitness wear. Francis ignored them, built a model powered by fitness influencers, and created a billion-pound business by going direct to his ideal customers.

When Experts Are Actually Right

Before you dismiss all expert input, let’s acknowledge when expert advice actually deserves your full attention:

When dealing with established facts rather than predictions: If a legal expert tells you your contract won’t stand up in court, listen carefully. If a marketing expert predicts your distinctive approach “won’t resonate,” be more sceptical.

When addressing technical domains requiring specialised knowledge: Stripe’s founders sought deep technical expertise on payment infrastructure while ignoring market sizing experts who said the developer market was too small. They needed technical facts, not market predictions.

When they’re asking better questions rather than providing answers: The best experts help you think more clearly rather than think for you. They probe your assumptions rather than replace them with their own.

When they’ve worked with businesses like yours but don’t insist you become like their other clients: Context matters. Great experts adapt their expertise to your essence, not the other way around.

The Expert Filter: A Decision Tool

How do you separate valuable insight from essence-destroying advice? Try this simple framework:

1. Essence Check: Does the advice align with or contradict your fundamental purpose? Advice that requires abandoning your essence is almost always wrong for you, no matter how right it might be in general.

2. Evidence Weight: Is the advice based on patterns or personal opinion? Patterns can be valuable context, but remember they tell you about the past, not your future.

3. Context Relevance: Does the expert truly understand your specific situation? Generic advice based on different contexts is the most dangerous kind.

4. Prediction Track Record: Has this expert been right about similar situations before? Past success predicting innovation is rare but valuable when found.

5. Skin in the Game: Does the expert bear any consequences if their advice fails? Those who share your risk tend to give more nuanced, contextual advice.

Oatly faced this challenge when experts advised against their conversational packaging copy. Marketing consultants insisted food products needed professional, concise messaging—not paragraphs of quirky, conversational text. Oatly ignored them, filled their cartons with distinctive copy, and created one of their most powerful differentiation points. The experts weren’t wrong about most products—they just couldn’t see how Oatly’s specific audience would respond to something different.

The Courage to Be Wrong

Ignoring experts requires genuine courage. Here’s why:

Experts provide safety: Following established wisdom gives you someone to blame if things go wrong. “We followed best practices” is the corporate equivalent of “I was just following orders.”

Experts provide credibility: Telling stakeholders you’re following expert guidance feels safer than admitting you’re charting your own course.

Experts provide certainty: Their conviction can be comforting in the face of your natural doubts about a distinctive approach.

Building the muscle to trust your instincts means accepting that you might be wrong—but it’s far better to be wrong in your own distinctive way than to be mediocre following someone else’s formula.

Figma faced this when building a browser-based design tool. Every expert insisted professional design tools couldn’t perform adequately in a browser—desktop applications were the only viable approach for serious designers. Figma’s own blog acknowledges this: “Most people don’t believe a web-based application can be as fast as a desktop one and it’s our job to prove them wrong.”

They did exactly that, creating a tool that not only matched desktop performance but added collaborative capabilities that transformed the design industry.

Trust Your Essence, Not Their Expertise

“Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.”

Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, understood this principle deeply. When everyone told him small towns couldn’t support discount retail, he built one of the world’s largest companies by ignoring that conventional wisdom. As he explained: “If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you’re headed the wrong way.”

The most valuable expert advice I can give you is this: develop the discernment to know when to ignore experts—including everything you’ve just read in this chapter.

Your business, at its best, will never be a perfect implementation of someone else’s formula. It will be the unique expression of your essence, your positioning, and your distinctive way of serving your market. The moment you surrender that to external expertise, you begin the slow drift from the obvious choice to just another option.

Experts are brilliant at explaining why something worked yesterday. They’re terrible at imagining what might work tomorrow. And tomorrow is where you need to live.

When an expert tells you something “won’t work,” what they’re often really saying is “I’ve never seen it work before.” That’s not a prediction—it’s merely an observation about the past.

The difference between a good consultant and a great one? The good one gives you answers. The great one helps you ask better questions.

Your unique essence is the one thing no expert, regardless of their credentials, can understand better than you do.

So by all means, listen to experts—including me. Absorb their knowledge, consider their perspectives, weigh their evidence. Then trust your essence to tell you when to follow their guidance and when to forge your own path.

Because the most dangerous thing about experts isn’t that they’re wrong.

It’s that they’re usually right—about the past.

But your business needs to be right about the future.

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The Expert Filter

When receiving expert advice, run it through these five questions:

1. Essence Check: Does this advice require me to compromise my fundamental purpose or values?
2. Evidence Weight: Is this based on repeated patterns or just personal opinion?
3. Context Relevance: Does this expert truly understand my specific situation?
4. Prediction Track Record: Has this person successfully predicted innovation before?
5. Skin in the Game: Will this expert bear any consequences if their advice fails?

The more concerning your answers, the more permission you have to politely ignore the advice—no matter how confidently it’s delivered.