The advice column

The Jan. 11 issue of Home Channel News—our first-ever Pro Dealer Extra—is locked and loaded with business advice for readers.

This issue includes advice from executives at companies ranging from a 150-year-old family business (Requarth Lumber) to a startup division of a national powerhouse (ProBuild Holdings).

We even dedicate a page to the topic of advice, and how to get the best kind (see Tony DeCarlo’s “The case for advisory councils”).

Good advice is the most valuable and plentiful of business tools. Valuable because it can make or break a business; plentiful because everybody has an opinion.

The thing about advice is it almost never comes with a guarantee, and almost always depends on the timing. Good advice for one person could be bad advice for another. And a piece of advice can be good in small quantities, but not large quantities. “Don’t drink the whole bottle,” is a piece of advice I once received from a golf pro.

Home Channel News gathers a lot of advice when we’re out in the field. Looking back at our reporter notebooks, some of the advice stands out in a crowded field.

Emery-Waterhouse’s CEO Steve Frawley speaking at the National Hardware Show in 2009: “Don’t spread yourself all over the place. Run a few initiatives, and run them well.”

Back in March we heard Warren Buffett weigh in on the housing crisis with the following advice to regulators and fellow citizens: “Home purchases should involve an honest-to-God down payment of at least 10%, and monthly payments that can be comfortably handled by the borrower’s income. That income should be carefully verified.” We received a lot of mail in support of this advice.

There have been a number of books about Sam Walton’s business acumen, but here’s a nugget of advice from an independent retailer and hardware store owner: “Try to do what Wal-Mart won’t do.” That was from Jim Zyrowski, owner of single-store Ben’s Supercenter in Brown City, Mich., a Do it Best hardware dealer.

Businessmen aren’t the only kinds of people who give valuable advice that can be applied on the job. Here are a couple of examples:

Success in the Big Ten advice from Bobby Knight (an editor heard this one from the source at Indiana University): “You have to do the things that other people are either unwilling or unable to do.”

Political advice from Abraham Lincoln: “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.”

And how about this advice from Orville Wright, who, with his brother Wilbur, invented the airplane: “If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.”

It’s worth noting that Requarth Lumber supplied lumber to the Wright Brothers.

Here’s another fact worth noting. Requarth Lumber is still in business. The Wright Co. is not—despite having the two biggest names in aviation history.

There’s a lesson there somewhere.

Do you have any good advice? Let us hear it.