Business.com aims to help business owners make informed decisions to support and grow their companies. We research and recommend products and services suitable for various business types, investing thousands of hours each year in this process.
As a business, we need to generate revenue to sustain our content. We have financial relationships with some companies we cover, earning commissions when readers purchase from our partners or share information about their needs. These relationships do not dictate our advice and recommendations. Our editorial team independently evaluates and recommends products and services based on their research and expertise. Learn more about our process and partners here.
The Best Business Advice of 2025
We spent the year talking to executives and leaders from Whole Foods, Google and more to get the best business advice, strategies and insights.
Table of Contents
The b. Newsletter team spent the last 12 months interviewing the best and brightest in the business world to find out the top strategies for growing your business and making it the kind of place people actually want to work at.
Whole Foods co-founder John Mackey shared how he spends his time and energy and taught us the art of negotiation. Google’s Laura Mae Martin explained what counts as productivity and what doesn’t. And Robert Irvine of the Food Network stressed the importance of finding unique business opportunities. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
As you reflect on the year that was and plan for 2025, take a look back at some of the nuggets of wisdom we collected. The game-changing advice and unexpected insights compiled below are worth bringing into the new year.
On the Keys to Success
“I chose to focus most of my time and energy on growth and empowering more operationally skilled executives to focus more on current operations. It is impossible to do everything well yourself. Ultimately, you need to create an empowered team that works together to get all the necessary and important work done, both for today and in the future.”
–John Mackey, Whole Foods co-founder and author of The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism
“The way that business and culture work now — compared to 10 or 20 years ago — there is always a shiny object. There’s always the new thing you have to be doing, all these different tentacles your business feels like it needs to have, like a gravitational pull.
You don’t need to necessarily say ‘no’ to all of those things, but you need a framework of thinking that keeps you on track [without] losing sight of who you are and what your vision is.”
–Brandon Wenerd, publisher of BroBible
“Embrace imposter syndrome as a positive because [it] means you are very self-aware. You are analyzing what your strengths and weaknesses are, and trying to address them. The best thing you can say is, ‘I don’t know. I need help.’ That empowers your team and that empowers you. It opens you up to learning more. You just have to be real and you’ll make it. If you’re faking it, you’re never going to make it.”
–Stephanie Stuckey, chair of Stuckey’s Corporation and author of UnStuck: Rebirth of an American Icon
“You’ve got to talk like a human. … Many business leaders fall victim to corporate buzzwords and jargon, thinking it makes them sound smart — but it actually confuses the audience. If your audience is confused, they won’t buy your product or sign up for your service. I call it the ‘barbecue rule — think about how you would talk at a barbecue with your family. You wouldn’t use all that jargon, but we do it when we come to work.
You’ve got to turn your words into deeds. … If you’re asking employees to work extra hours, you should be doing the same. If you’re asking for donations or commitments, you should be doing that, too. This is the true measure of an effective leader and presentation.”
–Terry Szuplat, former speechwriter for President Barack Obama and author of Say It Well: Find Your Voice, Speak Your Mind, Inspire Any Audience
On Entrepreneurship
“If you’re an entrepreneur, you need to expect it to be hard. If you go into it thinking it’s 100,000 Twitter followers and a private jet and a unicorn company, you’re just going to be perpetually miserable. You’ve got to expect that it’s going to be a grind. It’s going to be chaotic. There’s going to be change all the time. And if that’s your expectation, then you have a chance of meeting the moment.”
–Brad Stulberg, author of Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing — Including You
“One of the things we always said at Barstool Sports is that nobody is coming to help us. … Entrepreneurs should think the same way. The more you can take on — and the more you can make happen of your own propulsion — the better off you will be. The more you will know, the more you will control, and the more adept and efficient at steering the company you will be.”
–Erika Ayres Badan, former Barstool Sports CEO and author of Nobody Cares About Your Career: Why Failure Is Good, the Great Ones Play Hurt, and Other Hard Truths
“The biggest fault of every businessperson is you’re so in the weeds, worried about today and tomorrow. What will take your company to the next point is thinking years down the line, because you’re giving yourself something to work towards.”
–Gregg Majewski, founder of Craveworthy Brands and former CEO of Jimmy John’s
On Starting a Business
“Operate conservatively. People often underestimate the time it takes for sales and product development. Be conservative in your estimates and layer in contingencies — essentially, plan for the worst and hope for the best.”
–Carolyn Rodz, CEO of Hello Alice
On Business Opportunities
“If we go with the premise that there are truly no more ideas that could be considered completely original — and I think there’s a sound argument to be made in favor of that notion — then the mandate for any of us is to not just do a thing well, but to do it in a way that is unique to us, in the way that only we can do it … I think you need to look for opportunities in every corner of your business to imbue the customer experience with things that personally excite you. If you feel strongly about it, then there are probably a lot of other people out there who will also love it, even if they don’t know it yet.”
–Robert Irvine, Food Network host and author of Overcoming Impossible: Learn to Lead, Build a Team, and Catapult Your Business to Success
On People Management
“Smart companies demand that all employees are treated with respect and that employee well-being is a top priority. They have read the research and understand that productivity and profitability go hand in hand with organizational cultures where trust is high and respect is a given. In those types of positive climates, toxic leaders simply cannot thrive.”
–Teresa A. Daniel, dean of human resource leadership programs at Sullivan University and author of Toxic Leaders and Tough Bosses: Organizational Guardrails to Keep High Performers on Track
“You need to invest in your people. Not just in terms of compensation and benefits, but in terms of providing them with an environment where they’re comfortable bringing their full creative force to bear upon their work.
Invest in them personally. Spend a little time getting to know their families and their passions outside of work. This goes beyond the desire for a happy workplace, though of course, that’s exactly what I’ve tried to cultivate. It’s also a good business practice. It’s a fact of life in business that we often wind up spending more time with our co-workers than we do with our real families.
You can debate whether that’s right or not all day, but I think as long as it’s true, then workplaces ought to function as supportive families — and not just have mission statements that pay lip service to the idea.”
-Irvine
On Productivity
“‘Busy’ is not important! Churning out work, if it’s not the right work, is not productive. Attending tons of meetings, if they’re the wrong use of your time, is not productive. An inbox full of emails is not a badge of honor; it’s a drain on your energy …
You want to keep a trade-off mindset at all times: Where am I spending energy? Where am I getting the best ROI for how I’m spending my time? … Is it the right time to do that task? Are you handling distractions ahead of time to make sure you can make the most of it?
Those are more important than the time itself. Time will come with good energy and attention practices. … Constantly play with Future You in mind, and you’ll find yourself happier and more aligned.”
–Laura Mae Martin, executive productivity advisor at Google and author of Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing
On Marketing
“I see so many companies that make emotionless, vague ads. When you look at successful brands, their ads remind you of their key value — clean design from Apple, reliability from Amazon — but there are a lot of brands that just mimic each other’s content, from the graphics to photography to the copy. I think it’s all about finding a way to keep your … unique brand footprint.”
–Fiona Frills, CEO of Frilliance
On AI
“Bring AI to everything you do — ethically, legally — and see what works or what doesn’t work. That’s the only way to [learn] what it’s good or bad at. … You need to get a sense of, where is it useful and where is it not for your products or services? And then you want to think about what use case it has. And then that lets you think about, OK, what happens if AI continues to get better quickly? Or slowly …? … There’s no instruction manual, right? It’s not like somebody knows how to be the world expert in your field by using AI. … You have to explore this for yourself to figure out how it’s best used.”
–Ethan Mollick, associate professor at the Wharton School and author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
On Negotiation
“Negotiating is a type of game, and it can and should be fun most of the time. I always seek the win-win when negotiating with anyone. I never try to take advantage of the other person when negotiating. I want the other person to experience that they are winning instead of losing in the deal. If the other person feels like they are being taken advantage of in some way, then they will often seek some type of payback in the future. … Integrity and trust are the foundations of any good relationship and if I decide the person I’m negotiating with is not trustworthy, then I walk away from the deal.”
-Mackey
On Failure
“If you aren’t failing, you’re either not trying or you don’t have a pulse. Failure is an incredible way to learn [and] feel your way through things so that you understand them in a way that’s emotional and lasting.”
-Badan
“The more we sit with failure, the more we actually learn from it and the faster we’ll get to success the next time. Teams that struggle with failure are the ones that sweep it under the rug and don’t address how and why they failed.
A lot of people don’t move forward because they don’t want to talk about failure. You cannot move forward unless you address failure. You’re going to be stuck in fear forever because failure is the step out. It’s really funny, nobody’s like, ‘Oh, gee, I want to move forward. I can’t wait to fail. Gee, that sounds like fun.’ No, but that’s the only way we get to success, the only way we get to authenticity, the only way we get to grow — when we go, ‘OK, that was a problem. Where do we go from here?'”
–Valerie Garcia, leadership coach and author of We’re Gonna Need Cake: Celebrating Authentic Leadership in a Messy World