Matt Haycox is going after a problem most founders do not price in, the hidden costs of bad advice. The entrepreneur and investor has released a new version of his No Bollocks Business HQ, framing it as a practical command centre for SMEs sick of paying for guidance that sounds clever and performs badly in the real world.
Haycox’s warning lands at a time when small businesses are under pressure to make faster decisions with thinner margins. Bad advice does not always show up as a clear invoice, it shows up later as discounting, overhiring, the wrong software stack, messy processes and cashflow stress that looks like “growth pains” until it is too late.
The unseen bill that follows “expert” help
Founders tend to measure advice by the fee, not the fallout. Haycox argues that is the wrong lens.
“Bad advice is rarely expensive on the day you buy it,” he says. “It’s expensive in the months after, when you realise the decision it pushed you into has locked you into costs you can’t unwind.”
That is the core of his message. A consultant tells you to hire, you hire before revenue is stable. A mentor tells you to scale ads, you scale spend before unit economics are proven. A course tells you to cut prices to win market share, you train customers to wait for discounts.
Each move can look rational in isolation. Together they build a cost base that quietly strangles the business.
SMEs are the backbone, and they do not get many retries
This matters because SMEs carry the bulk of the economy. The World Bank has described small and medium-sized enterprises as representing around 90 percent of businesses and more than half of employment worldwide. When bad decisions compound at that scale, it is not a niche founder problem, it is an economic one.
Haycox has built a reputation on blunt, practical frameworks rather than motivational noise. He does not pretend entrepreneurs can “manifest” their way through structural issues.
“Most owners don’t fail because they’re lazy,” he says. “They fail because they run the business on assumptions they never test, then pay for advice that confirms what they want to hear.”
Startup failure data keeps pointing back to basics
The uncomfortable part is that the causes are not mysterious. CB Insights’ well-known analyses of startup post-mortems have repeatedly highlighted familiar failure drivers, running out of cash, weak demand and pricing or cost problems that never get fixed early enough.
Haycox’s point is that bad advice often accelerates those exact failure patterns because it encourages founders to chase surface-level growth rather than tighten fundamentals.
“Advice that doesn’t touch cashflow is entertainment,” he says. “If it doesn’t change your numbers, it hasn’t changed your business.”
That view is less about cynicism and more about discipline. Advice should be measured by outcomes, not charisma.
What No Bollocks Business HQ is trying to be
The new release of Haycox’s No Bollocks Business HQ is positioned as a business system and support centre for operators, not a glossy content library. The emphasis is on decision-making cadence, numbers, process and execution.
Haycox describes it as a place founders can use to stop guessing and start running the company with structure. That includes how to think about pricing, how to manage overhead, how to build repeatable operations and how to avoid “strategies” that are really just expensive distractions.
He is careful not to sell miracles. The tone is grounded, more like a builder explaining why the foundations matter than a guru promising a shortcut.
“I’ve made the mistake of paying for advice because it sounded confident,” he says. “Confidence isn’t a KPI. I learned the hard way that systems beat opinions.”
The hidden costs founders keep missing
Haycox’s warning focuses on how bad advice hides costs across the business, not just in finance.
One of the biggest is pricing. Underpricing feels like a quick win, until it forces volume you cannot service or margins that cannot fund growth. Another is headcount. Hiring too early is rarely reversible without damage, and founder psychology makes it worse because layoffs feel like personal failure.
Then there is software and agencies. Many SMEs end up with a bloated tool stack, overlapping subscriptions and outsourced work that produces reports rather than results. The money leak is obvious, but the deeper cost is complexity, the business becomes harder to run, harder to forecast and harder to fix.
Finally, there is opportunity cost. Time spent rebuilding after bad advice is time not spent improving the product, selling, training staff or refining operations.
“Every wrong decision has a second price,” Haycox says. “You pay the invoice, then you pay the clean-up.”
A tougher market is exposing weak decision making
Haycox’s timing is not accidental. In tighter markets, weak unit economics and sloppy operations surface fast. Price pressure rises, customers negotiate harder and founders feel forced into reactive moves.
That is where bad advice thrives, because it sells certainty at the exact moment founders feel uncertainty. Haycox is positioning No Bollocks Business HQ as the opposite, a framework for making decisions when you do not get perfect information.
“Being a founder is learning to be calm with incomplete data,” he says. “You still have to choose. The system is what stops you choosing badly.”
Haycox’s forward-looking warning to SMEs
The new HQ release is being pitched as a reset for founders who want to run their business like an operator, not a hopeful gambler. Haycox’s message is direct: stop buying advice that flatters you, stop treating revenue like profit and stop assuming growth will fix structural problems.
“Bad advice loves chaos,” he says. “If you want to protect the business, get serious about cashflow, get serious about pricing and build a structure you can actually scale.”
