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Entrepreneurial Ideas That Move You Forward

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 18:32:31 GMT

One Size Does Not Fit All: Why You Need to Think Critically (and Experiment Relentlessly)

We live in a world overflowing with advice. Books, podcasts, YouTube videos, courses — all filled with people telling you what worked for them. And it’s tempting to copy and paste their blueprint into your business or life. But here’s the thing: that’s a shortcut to mediocrity if you don’t filter it through critical thinking.

What Keith Cunningham is saying here is powerful. Business — like life — is not a bathrobe. One size does not fit all.

Great Coaches Teach from Experience

The best coaches and mentors don't just parrot generic advice. They preach what they've done. What they've lived. And because they’ve walked the path, they can speak with clarity about what worked for them — not necessarily what will work for you.

Take Tim Ferriss, for example. He once suggested that volunteering for organizations you admire is a great way to get a foot in the door. And he's right — for him. That insight came from his own trial and error. He tested dozens of ideas before finding what clicked.

A Million Ways to Win

There isn’t just one path to success. There are a million. A million ways to a million dollars. A million ways to build a business. The trick is figuring out which way works for you, right now, in your unique environment.

That’s the part most people skip. They hear someone say “This is the way,” and assume it's the only way. But what if that advice is right for someone with a totally different set of skills, goals, or context than yours?

The Beauty of the Online World

The online world gives you an incredible advantage: you can test ideas quickly and cheaply. You can try something today, measure the result tomorrow, and adjust by the weekend. That’s a gift previous generations of entrepreneurs never had.

But the key is to try . Try often. Experiment. Watch what works — not just for others, but for you. Then when you find something that resonates, double down . Own it. Teach it. That becomes your story, your angle, your value.

Final Thought

Just remember: every expert was once a beginner sifting through bad ideas. Most of those ideas weren’t wrong — they just weren’t the best fit for them at the time.

So stop chasing “the right way.” Instead, chase your way — with curiosity, courage, and the willingness to learn through action.

Because business isn’t a bathrobe.

Dead Bears and Sad Park Rangers

lewis@bluecrocus.ca (Lewis Vandervalk) — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 01:54:47 GMT

What do Dead Bears have to do with Marketing?

“Doing Business without Advertising is like Winking at a Girl in the Dark. You Know What You are Doing, but Nobody Else Does.”

Steuart Henderson Britt

What do park rangers, bears, and business owners have in common?

I'll get to that in a second, but do you know what a park ranger's least favorite part of their job is?

Not the bugs, the heat, the long hours, or the loneliness..

It's all the dead bears.

Here's why. Campers and hikers feed the bears yummy snack bars as they pass through.

Bears eat the food.
They develop a liking for the snack bars. A craving. A NEED.

They then forget how to hunt.

Now, they get way more nutrition and dopamine from a snack bar than fish.

When the campers leave for the season, they die.

Park rangers have to clean up the bear bodies.

No park ranger likes to do that.

Bears -> Business owners who have bought into the idea that marketing companies can bring in ALL their leads.

Campers -> Marketing agencies who sell the bears on this idea.

Bears are hunters by nature.

Business owners should be, too.

Marketing agencies want you to sit back and get rich on the dreams of leads pouring in every month from SEO, Google ads, SMS Campaigns, etc.

That's not how it works.
Those are just tools.

YOU NEED TO BE A HUNTER. ALWAYS.

Use the tools, but for the love of all things good in this world, stop debating which tool is better.

They all have a purpose.

But you are so fixated on the flavor of snack bar (leads) from marketing agencies (campers) that most of you have forgotten how to hunt.

Many of you never learned how to hunt because you just dove right into the stache of snack bars..

Get out there and hunt.

Deploy your tools (marketing techniques) as it makes sense.

But for goodness sake, stop arguing about which snack bar is better.

Or, like a naive park-fed bear, you will die when things get tough...

Giving Or Taking?

lewis@bluecrocus.ca (Lewis Vandervalk) — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 14:08:44 GMT

“You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”

Zig Ziglar

In March of 2020 the world was coming crashing down around us, and my new marketing agency was struggling to grow. Not for lack of opportunity, but due to my desperation mindset that was driving every conversation.

Every prospect who reached out to me was steered quickly into the I-Want-To-Make-Money-Off-You conversation. And they ran away as quickly as they came. Seriously, it was like I was fishing for eels with butter on my hands. Not a lot of results to show for my calls.

I was stuck in the rut of immediate gratification, bringing this flick-a-switch mentality to life and business. I bet you can relate. If we need something nowadays, we just pull out our phone and order it. Pizza in less than 30 minutes. Next day Amazon delivery. Dopamine shots on social media.

But what happened to planting before we harvest? Farmers have been following this principle and reaping the benefit of it for thousands of years. Work the ground. Plant the seeds. Water. Weed. Prune. Fertilize. When the time is right, the harvest is ready to be brought in.

How does this apply to business or to everyday life, far removed from the dirt and crud of a farmer’s fields?

It's simple. We gotta plant before we can harvest.

Back to frustrated Lewis.

Right around this time, I was recommended to read a book called “The Go-Giver”. In it, Bob Burg and his co-author John D. Mann talk about the “5 Laws of Stratospheric success”.

The first and second laws crashed into my paradigm, causing a major shift for me. The law of value says that “your worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment.” or put another way, “money is an echo of value. Value comes first. Money is the natural and direct result of the value provided.”

The second law, the law of Compensation, says that “your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them.”

The book made a compelling argument, so I thought I would give it a try. I started giving away audits, value, and time to help people, with no immediate call to a sale.

Incredible stuff started to happen. When I started to give away value, hopping on calls with people, and planting value, THEN I finally started to see results. It came in unexpected forms. Unsolicited reviews from people who would never be a client, but found what I told them very useful for their business. Referrals started coming in from those people as well. The snowball started to build.

I came into every interaction truly wanting to help. And the harvest came, little by little. Some of the people who weren’t in a position to take advantage of our services right away reached out over a year later to ask for our help. They knew, liked, and trusted me, because I wasn’t just pushing for the sale. I genuinely wanted to help them.

Are you always on the hunt for the next sale, screaming into your pillow at night because NO ONE WANTS TO BUY from you? Try giving away some of the value and knowledge you have. It’s going to blow your mind what can happen.

Caveat: You must truly want to help people and to truly want to add value. I’ve had moments of slipping back into desperation mode. I resort back to SALES, and miss helping people, and then the harvest dries up. But every time I come back to adding value FIRST, this crazy force of the universe rises up to help me reach my goals.

Get out there. Add value to the world. Massive value, in massive quantities. You won’t regret it.

Learn. Implement. Grow.

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Lewis Vandervalk is a husband, dad, and business owner who is working to live each day as a vote towards the man he was born to be. He owns Blue Crocus Solutions ( www.bluecrocus.ca ) a marketing company focused on helping contractors with getting a return from their digital presence. If you need to chat with someone about the power of clarity, email him at Lewis@BlueCrocus.ca .