How do you know if business advice applies to your business?

You know whether business advice applies to your business by weighing it against your own architecture: your position, your strategy, and your core values. Without those in place there's no metric, so every confident idea looks equally plausible and you end up adopting whatever was argued best. The advice isn't the problem. Having nothing to measure it against is.

Is watching what everyone else does actually a waste of time?

No, and I want to say that plainly before I say anything else, because the cynical version of this argument is everywhere and it's wrong.

Watching people build their businesses is useful. Looking at what others in your industry are doing for marketing is useful. When things are slow, going and looking at what the experts in your field are trying and saying works is not a dumb idea at all. I do it constantly. I read constantly. I quote other people's work in nearly everything I write.

Let me tell you how much I owe to this.

I learned what a lead generator was about two weeks before I launched my business, and then I was supposed to go sell one. I really did not know where to start. I love learning and I learn fast, so I took off anyway. But that was the starting line.

About ten months in, a large commercial construction company called me. Brand-new project, and they had never needed marketing before. They started describing the scope of what they wanted and I had this thought: that sounds like what people call a fractional chief marketing officer engagement. I had no idea what that actually looked like. None. I didn't know what the contract should say or how to scope it.

So I went to the StoryBrand community on Circle and posted, more or less: I think I'm being asked to do fractional work, I don't know what it entails or what the contract looks like, can anyone give me some advice?

Within 45 minutes four people had responded, offering time that day. I met a husband-and-wife team who ran a fractional CMO agency, for thirty minutes, and they just poured ideas into me and handed me templates. That generosity is why I could take that engagement.

So when someone sneers at founders for learning from other people, I don't join in. If you don't know what you don't know, you have to start somewhere.

Honestly, my problem isn't with the people who buy the proven process. It's with the people selling it. Everybody is looking for something. The person reaching for a formula is usually just someone trying to do right by their business with the information they have. The person who packaged the formula and told them it works everywhere knew better.

Where does the formula break down?

At the exact moment somebody claims it works for everyone.

StoryBrand taught me things I still use. The community gave me my first fractional engagement. And StoryBrand frustrated me, because the pitch was that StoryBrand is for everyone, and that's nonsense.

Think about a law firm. Someone looking for a lawyer opens eight tabs. They search for a lawyer in a particular specialty, maybe something pops up as "near me," and then they read those websites to decide who to hire. Engagement on the site is doing real work. Story matters there.

Now my air conditioner dies in July. I type "AC broken, HVAC near me." I need excellent SEO so they turn up at all, a phone number I can see immediately, and confirmation they do emergency after-hours calls. I could not care less about being engaged by their website. I don't want their story. I want a human in my house tonight.

Same methodology. Opposite jobs. One of those businesses needs a StoryBrand website and one of them needs to be findable and reachable at 9pm.

The idea that one framework makes a massive difference for everybody in the world is nonsense, and this is why marketers get a bad rap. It's why I don't much like calling myself a marketer. Marketing itself is the problem, in the sense that there's no one-size-fits-all strategy and the industry keeps selling one anyway.

Do many industries need a website? Absolutely. Do all industries need one? Absolutely not.

I know life coaches who are exclusively referral. No social media, no LinkedIn, not even a landing page. And these are elite coaches. They're bucking the trend entirely, they don't care, and it works, because the absence creates an exclusive feel that a website would destroy.

I have a friend at a financial advisory firm in Canada. National, but a tiny boutique in a small town. They don't have a sign on the door. Their website is barely more than a way to contact them. They do no marketing at all, deliberately, because they want an elite brand that you only find through other elite companies. Being hard to find is the strategy.

Try running any of those businesses off a downloadable playbook and watch what happens.

What do you actually weigh the advice against?

This is the whole thing, so I'll be direct.

You weigh it against your own architecture. Your position, your strategy, your core values. Those can absolutely have foundational pieces you learned from other people, and mine do. But they have to be in place, because they're the metric. Without them you have nothing to measure a new idea against, which is why a founder with no architecture is defenceless against a confident presentation.

And the test runs twice, not once.

Does it work? That's the research question, and research is where I start. If I'm asked to work in a new industry, I'll go to Perplexity and do deep research on a marketing plan, look at what's working for similar businesses, and build a foundation. Then I start unravelling it and thinking outside the box. Research gets me to a starting line. It doesn't get me to an answer.

Do I want to be the business that does this? That's the one almost nobody asks.

When Russell Brunson says fear works, that fear funnels convert, I laugh. Not because he's wrong. He's right. It works, of course it works, that's exactly why it's sold. But do I want to use it? No. It goes directly against a core conviction that we don't use fear to push sales. So the fact that it works is completely irrelevant to me.

Read that again, because it's the part that separates discernment from tactics. "It works" is not a reason. It's one input. Half the advice you'll be handed this year works fine and would still make your business into something you'd be embarrassed by.

What does thinking outside the box actually look like?

An example from work I'm doing now, because I'd rather show you than describe it.

I would never have guessed that a law firm doing webinars would work as well as it does. On paper it's an idea I wasn't sure about, which is a different thing from a bad idea, and the distinction turns out to matter. TLR Law in Winnipeg runs webinars training executors, because if you've just been named the executor of a will you're overwhelmed and nobody has ever taught you what to do. They're the only firm in Winnipeg offering it. They get well over a hundred and fifty registrations, their live attendance sits at or above the general benchmark of roughly 45 to 50% (Livestorm's 2026 benchmark report, across nearly 34,000 sessions), and they close real work out of it.

Notice what made that work. Not the webinar. Webinars are a commodity tactic anybody can copy this afternoon. It worked because a specific firm in a specific city found a specific need nobody else was serving. No playbook produces that. It came from looking hard at that business and asking what only they could do.

And we keep pulling that thread, because the first answer is rarely the last one. That's the motion. You feel it out, you research, you push past the obvious version, and you keep asking what this business can do that nobody else in the market can be bothered to.

Doesn't everyone claim to know what they're doing with AI right now?

Yes, and almost nobody does. It's changing too fast for anyone to be certain, which makes the confidence you're seeing a performance rather than a signal.

So when somebody says definitively "you need to do X with AI" or "you absolutely need to check out this new service," I treat that certainty as the tell.

I downloaded an Open Claw agent and ran it for about six weeks. Then I realised it was far from free, it was costing me real money in API tokens, and I got uneasy about how it was interfacing with my computer. In the end it just didn't work for me, and I got rid of it.

But I tried it. That's the part I'd defend. Most people see something like that and don't even try, which makes them late adopters at best. I think it's my job to test the early ideas and bring my clients the ones that actually make sense once the dust settles. Trying it and dropping it isn't a failure. It's the whole method, and the dropping matters as much as the trying.

What does it cost to skip the discernment?

It's quiet, which is what makes it dangerous.

A year of consuming good advice and applying it wholesale produces no crater. You just arrive at next July with a slightly worse version of the same business, a much better vocabulary for describing what's wrong with it, and a private suspicion that everybody else got an instruction manual you missed.

You didn't miss it. It doesn't exist. There's no proven process. There are good principles, and they get uncovered by asking good questions about your specific business. Nobody can ask those questions from a stage, because they've never met you.

Adapt, don't adopt. That applies to my frameworks too. Chess has principles. It doesn't have a formula. Neither does your business.

Try this: adapt, don't adopt

Take the last piece of advice you were genuinely excited about. The tactic, the tool, the thing somebody confident said you need. Run it through two questions, in this order.

One: does this work? Not "did it work for them." Go and look. Research what's actually happening in businesses like yours, not in the case study you were shown. Give yourself a foundation instead of a testimonial.

Two: do I want to be a business that does this? Write down the answer even if it's uncomfortable. This is where you'll find things that work beautifully and that you should refuse anyway.

If you can't answer the second question, that's your real finding, and it isn't about the tactic. It means your core values and your position aren't written down anywhere firm enough to weigh anything against. Every idea will keep looking equally good, and you'll keep adopting whichever was argued most confidently.

Fix that first. It's the metric. Everything else is downstream of it.

Adapt this to how you think. Write it, argue it out with your business partner, record a voice memo on the drive home. The form doesn't matter. Having something to measure against does.

Sources

Frequently asked

Should I stop following business gurus?

No. Follow the ones who show their reasoning rather than only their results, because reasoning is portable and results aren't. The change worth making is at the point of application. Learning from someone is different from installing what they built, and the second one is where founders get hurt.

How do I tell a principle from a formula?

A principle explains why something works and leaves the application to you. A formula tells you what to do and quietly assumes your situation matches the one it came from. If advice arrives with step numbers and no conditions attached, it's a formula, and the conditions are exactly the part that decides whether it applies to you.

Does that mean frameworks are useless?

Not at all. Every business needs positioning, marketing, sales and lifetime value. Those four are universal. What isn't universal is the version you build, which has to fit your market, your constraints and your people. You adapt the framework to the business. You never adopt one wholesale, including mine.

What if the advice comes from someone who genuinely built something big?

Being right about their business doesn't make them right about yours. Their build worked because of a diagnosis of their market and their constraints, and most of that reasoning never makes it into the content, because it's boring. Real operator experience is worth learning from. It still doesn't transfer as instructions.

Isn't this just an argument for hiring a consultant?

Partly, and I'd rather say so than pretend. But the diagnosis doesn't require me. It requires someone outside the jar with no product to sell you at the end of the conversation. A peer group, a sharp advisor, a business partner who'll disagree with you honestly. It's hard to read the label when you're inside the jar, and that's the only real requirement.

Ready to look at the architecture honestly?

If you've spent a year taking in good advice and the business is roughly where it was, the advice was never the problem. There was nothing to weigh it against. One conversation, 45 minutes, and we'll tell you what we actually see about your architecture rather than what worked for someone else's company. You can read how we work first if you'd rather.

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