Your Ego Is Bankrupting Your Business

I burned through $200K because I was too proud to admit I didn't know jack shit about user acquisition.

There, I said it. And honestly? It felt good.

While every other business guru is out here telling you to "fake it till you make it" and "never let them see you sweat," I'm gonna tell you the opposite. Your desperate need to look like you've got everything figured out is probably the biggest threat to your business right now.

The $200K Lesson

Back in 2019, I was running a B2B SaaS startup. We had a decent product, some early traction, and I was feeling pretty fucking smart about myself. When investors asked about our growth strategy, I'd rattle off buzzwords like "viral coefficients" and "product-led growth" like I was some kind of marketing savant.

Truth was, I had no clue how to actually acquire users at scale.

But did I hire someone who knew better? Did I admit to my co-founder that maybe we should bring in a real growth expert? Hell no. I doubled down, convinced I could figure it out myself. After all, I'd read all the right blog posts and listened to enough podcasts to sound smart in meetings.

Six months and $200K in failed ad spend later, we were hemorrhaging cash and our runway was looking more like a diving board.

The moment I finally swallowed my pride and said "I don't know what I'm doing" was the moment everything started to change.

The Cult of Always Being Right

Here's what nobody talks about in business school or startup accelerators: the most successful leaders I know are wrong approximately 60% of the time. The difference? They figure out they're wrong in week 2, not month 6.

But our entire business culture is built around this toxic idea that leaders should have all the answers. We worship at the altar of the "visionary CEO" who supposedly saw everything coming. We write case studies that make it seem like success was inevitable, not the result of a thousand course corrections and near-death experiences.

Bullshit. All of it.

I've been in enough boardrooms and strategy sessions to know that most of the time, we're all just really expensive guessers in nice suits. The companies that win aren't the ones with the best initial strategy – they're the ones that can admit when their strategy sucks and pivot fastest.

When "Best Practices" Become Worst Practices

Remember when "move fast and break things" was gospel in Silicon Valley? Or when everyone was convinced that open offices would revolutionize collaboration? How about the whole "growth at all costs" mentality that led to WeWork's spectacular face-plant?

Every single one of these ideas was once considered cutting-edge business wisdom.

I see this shit happening in real-time with my consulting clients. They cling to strategies that worked two years ago because "it's what we've always done" or because some business book from 2018 said it was the secret sauce.

One client was still organizing their entire sales process around trade shows because "that's how we built this business." Meanwhile, their target audience had completely shifted online during the pandemic. They were spending $150K annually on booth space to reach about 200 prospects, when a $15K digital campaign could reach 20,000.

But admitting that their tried-and-true method was now obsolete felt like admitting their entire foundation was wrong. So they kept bleeding money instead.

The ROI of "I Don't Know"

Here's a radical business concept: saying "I don't know" is a profit center, not a cost center.

When you admit ignorance, three things happen:

1. You stop throwing good money after bad – No more doubling down on strategies that aren't working just to avoid looking clueless.
2. You attract people who actually do know – Smart people want to work with leaders who are secure enough to acknowledge knowledge gaps.
3. You make decisions based on data, not ego – When you're not protecting your brilliant ideas, you can actually see what's working.

I learned this the hard way during my second startup. When our customer acquisition costs started climbing, instead of trying to optimize my way out of it, I literally said in our next team meeting: "I have no idea why our CAC is spiking, and I don't know how to fix it."

Within 48 hours, one of our engineers had dug into the data and found that a recent product update had broken part of our onboarding flow. A problem that could have cost us months and tens of thousands of dollars was solved in two days because I got my ego out of the way.

The Business Graveyard of Stubborn Leaders

Want to know what Blockbuster, BlackBerry, and Kodak all had in common? It wasn't lack of resources or bad technology. It was leaders who couldn't admit that their core assumptions about the market were wrong.

Reed Hastings from Netflix talks about this all the time. He says the key to Netflix's survival wasn't predicting the future perfectly – it was being wrong quickly and cheaply, then changing direction.

Meanwhile, I've watched countless promising businesses die slow deaths because the founder was too invested in being right about their original vision. They'd rather go down with the ship than admit they might need to rebuild the ship entirely.

Your Customers Don't Care About Your Ego

Here's something that took me way too long to figure out: your customers don't give a shit about whether you look smart. They care about whether you can solve their problems.

I used to spend hours crafting perfect email responses to client questions, making sure I sounded like an expert on everything. Now? If I don't know something, I respond with: "Great question – I don't have experience with that specific situation, but let me connect you with someone who does."

Guess what happened to my client satisfaction scores? They went up. Turns out, people respect honesty more than they respect fake expertise.

The Three Words That Will Save Your Business

"I was wrong."

Not "the market conditions changed" or "our assumptions proved incorrect" or any other corporate speak that deflects responsibility. Just own it.

When our SaaS startup finally pivoted away from our original product vision (the one I'd been defending for eight months), I sent an email to our entire customer base with the subject line: "I Was Wrong About What You Need."

I laid out everything – how my assumptions had been off, what we'd learned, and how we were going to do better. I expected cancellations. Instead, we got responses from customers thanking us for being honest and asking how they could help with the transition.

That email became our most shared piece of content and actually helped us acquire new customers who appreciated the transparency.

Stop Playing Business Theater

Most of what passes for leadership these days is just elaborate theater. We perform confidence in board meetings, we curate success stories for LinkedIn, we speak in certainties when we should be speaking in hypotheses.

But here's the thing – your team, your investors, your customers... they're all smarter than you think. They can smell the bullshit from a mile away.

The executives I respect most are the ones who say things like:

• "I'm not sure that's the right approach – what do you think?"
• "I was wrong about this assumption – here's what we learned."
• "I don't have enough context to make that decision – who should we ask?"

These aren't signs of weak leadership. They're signs of secure leadership.

Your Move

So here's my challenge: this week, find one thing in your business that you've been defending out of ego rather than evidence. Maybe it's a marketing strategy that's not delivering ROI. Maybe it's a product feature that customers don't actually want. Maybe it's a hiring approach that's not attracting the right talent.

Admit you were wrong about it. Out loud. To your team, your customers, whoever needs to hear it.

Then figure out what "right" looks like and go do that instead.

Your ego might take a hit, but your bank account will thank you.

And if you're sitting there thinking "this doesn't apply to me, I don't have an ego problem"... well, that's probably your ego talking.

What's one thing you've been too proud to admit you're wrong about? Drop it in the comments – let's normalize being fallible humans running businesses instead of pretending we're infallible business machines.

Trust me, the relief you'll feel is worth way more than whatever credibility you think you're protecting.