A survey came out this week asking people if they could handle a handful of situations almost none of them will ever face. Forty six percent of men said they could survive alone in the wilderness, compared to 21% of women. Forty one percent of men said they could escape a car sinking in a lake, compared to 19% of women. Twelve percent of men said they’d win a fight against an unarmed chimpanzee. Nobody polled has fought a chimpanzee. Nobody is going to.
That’s what makes the answers interesting. Nobody was rating actual experience. They were rating a gut feeling about something they’ve never been tested on, and for a lot of respondents, the gut feeling was generous.
Small business owners do this constantly. Not about chimpanzees. About their own companies.
The Business Owner Who Thinks He’s Also an Accountant
Walk into almost any business doing $1M to $3M and you’ll find the owner doing the books, writing the marketing, running payroll, and making the hiring calls. Not because they’re good at all four. Because nobody has ever told them they’re not.
That’s the real finding hiding in the survey. Confidence doesn’t come from being good at something. It comes from never having been tested and failed publicly. The guy who thinks he could survive in the wilderness has never actually tried. The owner who thinks he’s a solid marketer has never run his numbers against someone who actually does it for a living.
Nobody Grades You On This
A job interview gives you fast, blunt feedback. You get the offer or you don’t. Running a business doesn’t work that way. If your marketing is mediocre, you don’t get a rejection letter. You get slightly fewer leads than you should have, spread out over eighteen months, buried inside a dozen other numbers.
That’s the whole trick of the bias. There’s no scoreboard telling you your bookkeeping is bad. There’s just a margin that’s a little thinner than it should be, and a “the economy is tough right now” explanation that’s easier to believe.
Dunning and Kruger’s original research found that most people rate themselves as above average at things they’ve never been evaluated on. Eighty eight percent of U.S. drivers, in one widely cited version of the study, rated themselves better than the average driver. Math doesn’t work that way. Confidence doesn’t need math to work.
The Areas You’re Guessing, Not Working
Here’s my actual take: if you’ve never had an outside professional look at your books, your marketing, or your hiring process, you don’t know if you’re good at those things. You know you haven’t failed badly enough yet to notice.
I watch this pattern constantly. An owner who’s brilliant at the actual craft of the business, the thing the company was built around, insists on writing every social post himself because “nobody else gets our voice.” Meanwhile a full-time hire two rungs down could do it better in half the time, because writing marketing copy was never actually his skill. It was just the thing nobody challenged him on.
Spoiler: your gut has been wrong before. You just haven’t gotten the memo yet.
The Numbers Behind the Guessing
Cash flow problems, not lack of demand, are the number one reason small businesses fail. Roughly 82% of failed businesses point to cash flow as a core cause, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data compiled by Fortunly. That’s the accounting nobody wanted to hand off.
On the delegation side, 75% of entrepreneurs report struggling to hand work to someone else, according to Entrepreneur.com. The ones who do delegate see dramatically more growth than the ones who don’t. The gap isn’t talent. It’s who kept doing the job they were never actually qualified for.
The Fix Starts With One Honest Question
Pick the function in your business you’ve never let anyone touch. Bookkeeping. Marketing. Hiring. Ops. Ask yourself honestly: do I do this because I’m good at it, or because I’ve just never been shown I’m not?
Then test it. Get one outside opinion on that specific function this month. A bookkeeper reviewing your numbers. A marketer auditing your last three campaigns. Someone who does this for a living, looking at the thing you’ve been guessing at for years.
You’ll get one of two answers. Either you’re actually fine, and now you know it instead of assuming it. Or you’re not, and you just found the leak that’s been draining your margin for two years without a name.
The Cost of Never Getting Graded
The business owner who thinks he could survive the wilderness never has to find out he’s wrong. He’ll never be dropped in a forest. But you are running your business through actual conditions every single day, and the parts you’re guessing on are showing up in your margin whether you look at them or not.
Here is a link to the original survey.