I hear it in every kickoff call. I see it in every Slack channel. I read it in the desperate DMs of founders who are bleeding cash.
“What are the best practices?” “Can you show us a benchmark?” “What is the industry standard?”
It sounds like a smart question. It sounds like due diligence. It sounds like you are being a responsible operator trying to de-risk your investment.
It is actually the sound of you settling for mediocrity.
Here is the uncomfortable truth about “Industry Standards”: The standard performance in almost every industry is failure.
Most businesses fail. Most campaigns lose money. Most startups die within 36 months.
So when you ask me to apply the “Industry Standard” to your business, you are asking me to engineer a slow, predictable death.
The Bell Curve is a Prison
In statistics, “Regression to the Mean” describes how variables tend to move toward the average over time.
In business, “Best Practices” are the mechanism that forces this regression.
Think about it. A “Best Practice” is, by definition, a tactic that has been used enough times, by enough people, to be codified into a template.
It is common knowledge. It is the path of least resistance.
And because everyone has access to it, it offers zero leverage.
If you use the same landing page template as your competitor. And bid on the same keywords. And use the same ad creatives generated by the same “Winning Hooks” PDF you bought for $49.
You have removed every variable that could possibly make you win.
You have entered a race to the middle. And the middle is crowded.
The Safety Illusion
We crave best practices because they feel safe. They feel like insurance.
If you follow the playbook and fail, you can tell your board: “We did everything right. We followed the data. It just didn’t work.”
It absolves you of blame.
But if you deviate? If you ignore the template? If you do something weird, or quiet, or ugly?
Then you own the risk. The air gets thin. The hum gets louder.
Differentiation Requires Deviation
You cannot outperform the market by doing exactly what the market does. That is a mathematical impossibility.
To get an outlier result, you must exhibit outlier behavior.
That doesn’t mean being “creative” for the sake of it. It means looking at the “Best Practice” and asking: Is this actually optimal? Or is it just what everyone else is doing because they are too scared to do the math?
The Cost of Deviation
Deviation is expensive. It requires you to be wrong before you are right. It requires you to ignore the industry echo chamber telling you that “nobody does it that way.”
But look at the P&Ls of the companies that follow the rules. Look at the margins of the businesses that look exactly like everyone else.
They are grinding. They are fighting for scraps. They are dying a quiet, standardized death.
The Choice
You can have the template. You can have the safety. You can have the “Best Practice.”
Or you can have the result.
But you rarely get to keep both.