Where Are You Getting Advice?
I love starting my day with a little time in the Word, and recently I was listening to a sermon that hit me right between the eyes. The pastor asked a simple but powerful question: Where are you getting your advice?
It made me pause. Every day, we let different voices shape our thoughts and decisions—sometimes without even realizing it. And the truth is, the voices we choose matter. A lot.
This applies to every part of life:
Our walk with the Lord
Our marriages and family relationships
How we raise our kids
The way we run our businesses
And yes… even our financial decisions.
The world is overflowing with advice. Friends, family, the internet—there’s no shortage of people ready to tell you what to do. In fact, I’m willing to bet your friends could give Google a run for its money when it comes to unsolicited opinions. But here’s the million-dollar question:
How do you know if the advice you’re getting is actually good?
Maybe you have a trusted banker or accountant you’ve known for years. Surely, they’d never steer you wrong… right? Probably not intentionally. But here’s the catch—they may not know what they don’t know. And when that’s the case, their “best advice” might be setting you up for trouble.
We saw this recently with a family’s attorney. He was well-meaning and competent in certain areas of law—but not in the area they needed most. He was helping set up a plan to pass on the family business, but his plan would have created a tangle of tax issues, liability problems, and even unexpected shareholders. The intentions were good. The results would have been disastrous.
Bad advice doesn’t always come from bad people—it often comes from good people operating outside their expertise. Usually, it boils down to two main reasons:
As in the previous story, they don’t know what they don’t know and think they know enough.
The right question never gets asked.
That second one is big. Sometimes it’s not about the answer you get—it’s about the question you ask.
For example, if you ask a banker, “How can we pay for this?” they’ll likely offer solutions from the tools they have—like a loan. But what if the better question was, “How can this be paid for?” Maybe a loan is one way, but what if Uncle Sam could pay for it? What if insurance could pay for it? What if you didn’t have to pay for it at all?
The key is knowing which professional to ask—and which questions to ask them.
That’s where we come in. Think of your team of professionals as the players, and us as the quarterback. We may not have lived your exact life, but we’ve spent 36 years walking alongside clients through all kinds of situations.
Your job isn’t to be the expert in every area or to figure out which advisor is the “right” one. Your job is to make sure we understand your vision—your goals, your family dynamics, your dreams, your comfort level with risk.
Our job? Helping you ask the right questions and finding the right people to answer them.
Because getting advice is easy. Getting the right advice—that’s where the real work (and the real reward) is.