A footnote on why any of these rules exist

Richard's episode is about rules that decide who owns a thing. Copyright attaches the moment you make it. AI cannot be an author. A patent needs a human inventor. None of that is obvious and none of it is natural. Somebody wrote it down, and they wrote it down because a harm had already happened to someone.

That is worth sitting with, because it is not unique to intellectual property.

Take oxygen. Ordinary air is about 21% oxygen. OSHA draws its line at 19.5% - below that the atmosphere is officially oxygen-deficient and you are not supposed to send anyone into it unprotected. That is a gap of one and a half percentage points, and your body gives you nothing to notice it by. Oxygen depletion has no smell, no color and no taste. Nitrogen, argon and helium do not poison anybody. They simply take up the room the oxygen used to occupy. PureAire's breakdown of oxygen depletion and how to prevent it notes that a few breaths of depleted air is enough for impaired cognition and coordination, rapid breathing, and in the worst case unconsciousness or death.

Impaired cognition is the cruel detail there. The first thing the hazard takes is the judgement you would need to get yourself out of it.

So the regulation does the work your senses cannot. Someone had to choose 19.5%, write it into law and enforce it, because you cannot feel the difference between air that is fine and air that will kill you. A room full of leaked nitrogen looks exactly like a room.

That is the same shape as Richard's argument about AI and authorship. The law insists a human be the author, and it says so because "who made this" stopped being something you could settle by looking at it. In both cases the rule stands in for a sense we do not have.

The difference is only in what it costs to get it wrong. Miss the copyright question and you lose the ability to enforce something you believed you owned. Miss the oxygen question and somebody does not walk out of the room.

Both are consumer protection. One is just slower.

Alex is the leader of Nuvo Agency, born and raised in Missouri and building home services and B2B websites on a subscription model, no large upfront fee, with the site build, technical and organic SEO, paid media, integrations and automations rolled into one monthly fee. He started in 2015 doing keyword work and traffic chasing, and now spends as much time on what happens after the form fill as before it.

In this episode

• Home services is a new-lead business, not a retention business, a repeat client for the same job you already sold them is usually a bad sign, not a win.
• Why paid social beats organic social for trades companies, crews are doing labor, not photography, and a one-to-three-million-dollar company has no budget for a marketing person to chase before-and-afters.
• The speed-to-lead flowchart, call queue on day one, second call plus voicemail on day two, then an email every seven days for fifteen days. Worth five to ten points of close rate.
• Sixty-seven leads from ChatGPT in an entire year, on an account running three hundred to six hundred leads a month. Alex's read on what AEO and GEO are actually worth right now.
• ChatGPT's Yelp licensing deal, and the groans he got when he told a client they now have to fix their Yelp reviews.
• Read the SERP before you promise the keyword, “attic insulation” is Owens Corning, Home Depot and Lowe's; “foundation crack repair” is shopping and informational with no businesses on it. No volume column tells you that.
• Where your impressions actually go, ten searches a month in the AdWords API versus eleven hundred impressions in Search Console, plus AI Overview citations counting as organic impressions.
• Publish the pricing, a padded range, every factor that moves it, localized. Alex calls it the easiest E-E-A-T win in home services, regardless of company size.
• Honesty as a sales strategy, six to nine months for a brand-new domain, no guaranteed rankings, and turning down a job because the repair method itself was dishonest.

Chapters

• (00:00) Meet Alex Radetic, a decade of home services marketing out of Missouri
• (01:01) Why home services never gets a repeat customer
• (02:46) Why paid social beats organic social for a trades company
• (04:05) Speed to lead: the flowchart that beats more traffic
• (06:16) The black hole after the conversion
• (07:36) AEO, GEO, and sixty-seven leads from ChatGPT
• (11:55) Yelp, reviews, and reputation management 2.0
• (13:59) Say the thing you actually do
• (15:25) Keyword research you can't do from a volume column
• (17:35) Where your impressions actually go
• (21:21) Foundation repair is an education business
• (23:02) Interview your own crew for content
• (24:08) Put the pricing on the website
• (25:45) Turning down the work you can't stand behind
• (27:42) Why he won't guarantee a ranking
• (30:20) The low-hanging fruit: E-E-A-T you can actually ship
• (33:20) Where to find Alex Radetic

Notable quotes

“A five percent increase in close rate can actually net you more revenue than a twenty percent increase in leads year over year with the same close rate.”
, Alex Radetic

“I looked at last year, and the entirety of last year they only got sixty-seven leads directly attributable to ChatGPT. And I'm like, okay, well that's worthless.”
, Alex Radetic

“It doesn't matter how small a company you are. If you're willing to publish price range information for specific types of jobs, Google loves that stuff.”
, Alex Radetic

Things mentioned

• Jeremy cites Jake Melendy's lead response study, 1,824 businesses, and 68% never respond inside 24 hours (04:05).
• Matt Brooks on educating your off-site customer service team, so the answer engines have something true to repeat (13:59).
• Jon Henshaw's line that the best thing you can do to influence LLMs is fix your broken product.
• Jeremy interviewing the installation manager and the CEO at Permacast in Florida, to mine real jobs for content (23:02).
• Advanced Web Ranking's study putting People Also Ask click-through somewhere around ninth or tenth position.

Resources & links

• Nuvo Agency, Alex's subscription-model home services and B2B websites
• Alex Radetic on LinkedIn, where he does his organic posting
• Alex on swaying the LLMs: get branded, get into news stories, get talked about on Reddit. That is a complete guide to link building & authority problem, not a prompt problem.
• Turning a job walkthrough with your installation manager into an article is exactly the human-certified, expert-sourced content play.

About the show

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Full episode archive at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.

He opens with the client who wanted to save money and pulled an operating agreement off the internet for his LLC. It was not an operating agreement. His partner was supposed to run the distilling side of a new vodka brand and instead got, in Phil's words, a little bit too fond of the juice and slept at the plant. There was no legal way to remove him, the partner sued first, and the client nearly lost the $50,000 he had put in.

What Phil covers

• The co-founder conversation nobody wants to have. Vision, commitment, time horizon, and the hard one: if we part ways, how does that look? A founders' agreement is a prenup, and people in agreement do not want to think about it.
• Write the business plan anyway. It will be wrong. The planning process is what forces you to answer who does what and where the money comes from.
• How to spot the wrong lawyer in one call. If they get hostile or cannot be bothered to talk to you, that is your answer. Phil also points founders at technology accelerators. He sits on the board at Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania.
• Lead response. Jeremy reads him the numbers from the Ignitvio Lead Response Study and asks where his firm actually falls. Phil answers honestly: a 24-hour target today, staged email flights in Lawmatics, and a plan to have a receptionist call web sign-ins inside five to ten minutes.
• Regulation designed in, not bolted on. FDA work at J&J across pharmaceuticals, diagnostics and devices. Recognise the regime early and you build for it instead of redesigning after the fact.
• AI in law firms. The firms that embrace it will be looking at the ones that forbid it in the rear view mirror, and the lawyers filing hallucinated case citations are getting sanctioned for it. Phil has his staff use private mode and play.
• The Credo. Robert Wood Johnson wrote it in 1943 as the majority stockholder and put stockholders last, after doctors and nurses and patients, suppliers, employees and communities. Enron had a beautiful statement of principles too. Nobody enforced it.
• Pi and the Ace of Diamonds. The five values Phil's own team picked together: Professionalism and Integrity, then Accountability, Communication, and Effectiveness/Efficiency.

His book is Avoid Startup Failure: Learn the Top Ten Causes of Failure for Technology Startups and How to Turn Them to Your Advantage, on Amazon in softcover, Kindle, Audible, and Spanish softcover. The Amazon link is an affiliate link.

More from Phil on the business divorce problem and on handling a partnership dispute, and there is more on scaling without losing your core over at SEO Arcade.

Connect with Phil Crowley

• Crowley Law: crowleylawllc.com
• LinkedIn: Phil Crowley
• His book, Avoid Startup Failure (affiliate link), and the book page on his own site
• His podcast, From Lab to Patient, Garage to Market
• The Johnson & Johnson Credo

Hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More interviews with small business owners at Unscripted Small Business.

Key takeaways

• Intelligence is now effectively free and unlimited. Which leaves judgement and wisdom as the only things that still scale with a person attached.
• It is taking tasks, not jobs. The people in trouble are the ones whose role is entirely a list of tasks.
• IQ, EQ, AIQ. His framework for what a leader now has to hold at once.
• Curiosity has to come before creativity. You cannot generate anything worth having about a question you never asked.
• The Moneyball play compounds. One per cent better each week is roughly sixty-eight per cent more output over a year.
• Never hand AI strategy to the IT department. It is an operating decision, not an infrastructure purchase.

On this page

• Intelligence went free
• Tasks, not jobs
• IQ, EQ and AIQ
• The Moneyball play
• Customer service, last and best
• Why slop is a reputational risk
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Intelligence went free

The opening move of the workshops he runs with chief executives is to take the thing they have been selling off the table. If raw analytical capability is now abundant and cheap, nobody is paying you for being clever.

What is left is judgement, which is knowing which of the available answers is the right one here, and wisdom, which is knowing which question was worth asking. Neither compresses well.

Tasks, not jobs

The reassurance and the warning arrive together. The unit being automated is the task, not the role, which means most jobs survive in a changed shape.

The exception is the role that was only ever a stack of tasks with a person on top managing them. Brett is direct that those people are the ones who should be worried, and that the fix is to move up into deciding rather than doing.

He cites the framing that easy tasks become automated, hard tasks become easy, and impossible tasks become possible. That third clause is where the opportunity actually is and where almost nobody is looking.

IQ, EQ and AIQ

• IQ, which used to be the whole game and is now the cheapest input in the building.
• EQ, which is what makes anyone follow you into a change they did not ask for.
• AIQ, which is knowing what these systems can genuinely do and, more usefully, where they will confidently mislead you.

The reason it works as a framework is that it stops the conversation being technical. A leader who is strong on two and blind on the third will make predictable mistakes, and you can name which ones.

The Moneyball play

For a small business he does not recommend transformation. He recommends compounding. One per cent better each week, across the whole team, is roughly sixty-eight per cent more output by the end of the year.

The point of framing it that way is that nobody has to be convinced of anything dramatic. It is a small enough ask to survive contact with a busy week, which is the only test that matters.

His concrete example is request-for-proposal responses going from thirty or forty hours down to about two. That is not a strategy, it is a Tuesday, and it is where most of the available value sits.

Customer service, last and best

His advice is counter-intuitive and correct. Customer service is the last place to deploy this, because it is where a bad answer costs you a relationship rather than a draft.

It is also the best place once you have it right, for exactly the same reason. The stakes that make it dangerous are the stakes that make it valuable.

The structural warning attached is about ownership. AI strategy handed to the IT function becomes a procurement exercise, and procurement exercises do not change how a business operates.

Why slop is a reputational risk

Owners tend to weigh generated content as a quality question. Brett weighs it as a trust question, which is a larger number.

Publishing volume that says nothing is not neutral. It teaches the reader that your name is attached to filler, and that lesson is expensive to unteach. There is a longer version of that argument in what actually works in LLM search.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• Is AI going to take my job?
• What should a small business automate first?
• What is AIQ and how is it different from AI literacy?
• How do I get a team to adopt AI without a big programme?
• Should AI strategy sit with the IT department?
• Is it safe to put AI in customer service?
• How much reputational damage does generated filler actually do?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Jared Harman on AI being worth more in operations than in creative, which is the agency-side version of the same finding.
• Think BIGGER with AI on Substack, and the LinkedIn newsletter of the same name.
• AI First Leadership on YouTube.

Find Brett Schklar

His site is brettschklar.com. Hear more small business conversations at Unscripted Small Business.

Cite this episode

Schklar, Brett. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “AI Isn’t Taking Your Job. It’s Taking Your Tasks.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscripted-small-business.castos.com/episodes/ai-isnt-taking-your-job-its-taking-your-tasks

Matthew and his wife ran a company together for twelve years before they had it valued. The number disappointed them. The business had been flat for roughly a decade and they could not explain why. He found a researcher who had mapped how companies change as they grow, started running the business by that map, and three years later revenue had tripled, the team had gone from about eight people to 40, and they sold for ten times the year-twelve valuation.

Complexity is counted in people, not revenue

The stages have nothing to do with how old a business is or how much it sells. They track headcount, because headcount is what drives complexity.

"It's rather the number of people in the business that really are the highest correlation to this level of complexity." — Matthew Pohl

"So if you have one to 10 employees, you're in stage one. If you have 11 to 19, you're in stage two. Stage three is from 20 to 34 employees. And it continues to go up until you hit stage seven." — Matthew Pohl

Stage seven runs to 350 employees. Stage three has a name that tells an owner exactly what it will demand of them: the delegation stage.

The five challenges of stage two

Stage two, the ramp-up stage, covers 11 to 19 employees. Five challenges show up there so reliably that the ReWild team calls them the classic challenges:

• Hiring quality people
• Inadequate sales
• Leadership staff gap
• Limited capital to grow
• Weak cash flow

Hiring is hard at that point for a structural reason rather than a personal one: you are doubling the size of the organisation you had in stage one, and you have not hired that many people before.

Businesses get stuck "primarily because they are dealing with stage specific challenges and they're trying to use an old rule book." — Matthew Pohl

Why this one is worth your time

Most growth frameworks ask for a valuation, a consultant, or a five-year plan before they tell you anything. This one asks for your employee count. That is the whole entry price.

Guest: Matthew Pohl, The ReWild Group · rewildgroup.com
Host: Jeremy Rivera · Unscripted Small Business

Read the full episode recap and takeaways

Sherri walks through the pre-flight checks that decide whether a campaign converts or embarrasses you (inventory, store geos, landing pages, promo consistency), makes the case that AI cannot replace the human in the loop, and names the channels nobody is crowding: Amazon reviewers, Pinterest, Twitch and LinkedIn. Creators can pitch her team through the BabbleBoxx influencer sign-up.

Read the full recap: Selling a Pool Is Harder Than Selling Mascara

In this episode:

• Why small local brands have the biggest influencer opportunity — and why fear, not budget, blocks them
• Awareness creators vs. creators who actually move product, and asking for trackable sales data
• The pre-flight checklist: criteria, inventory, store geos, landing pages, promo consistency
• “If it’s happening to the influencer, it’s happening to the consumer”
• “The universe is your CRM” — why a SaaS platform became an agency
• Can AI replace the influencer? “Isn’t that just an ad unit?”
• The channels almost nobody books: Amazon reviewers, Pinterest, Twitch, LinkedIn, Substack
• Going past the tent poles — the November 1st promo nobody runs
• Bootstrapping, a 20-person lifestyle business, and turning down the wrong client
• Remote team culture built on trust rather than monitoring software
• Why physical is coming back: mailbox moments, merch, events, community

Connect with Sherri: babbleboxx.com · LinkedIn · case studies and trend reports via team@babbleboxx.com

More episodes: Unscripted Small Business, hosted by Jeremy Rivera.

James spent eighteen years in marketing and public relations at agencies around the country, took a three-year detour running his own restaurant in Buffalo, and has spent the last two years working in AI full time. Core Order isn't an AI agency — he calls it a growth architecture firm, and the distinction is the whole argument.

In this episode

• The question that comes before the tool — not which platform to buy, but what you are trying to make structurally better.
• Why tools go unused — departments each buy their own, a few people adopt them, and the company's data ends up scattered exactly where AI can't reach it.
• Homebrew vs. off-the-shelf — pull data from the CRM you already pay for via API or an MCP server, then build the narrow workflow around it.
• Security and hallucination — the only two objections James hears in every room, and how he answers each.
• Financial data specifically — locked-down databases, enterprise accounts where your inputs aren't training the model, and locally hosted open-source models.
• An agent swarm that researches prospects — feed it a domain and a contact name, get back a company profile and recommended services.
• Regulated industries — capturing HIPAA constraints, red lines and approved language in the discovery session instead of after something goes wrong.
• Four hours a week to thirty minutes — the concrete win, and why the reclaimed time goes back to your people rather than into a headcount cut.

Chapters

• (00:00) Villain origin story — eighteen years in PR, and a restaurant
• (03:09) What a “growth architecture firm” actually does
• (04:39) The subscription graveyard every business has
• (06:25) Homebrew or off-the-shelf?
• (08:09) Making sure AI says the right thing about you
• (10:29) Internal workflows first, AI search later
• (11:28) The two objections: security and hallucination
• (12:41) Where the wins actually show up
• (13:50) Is your financial data safe?
• (15:38) Case study: an agent swarm that researches prospects
• (17:22) Hot take — superpower or distraction
• (18:50) Regulated industries and approved language
• (21:39) Which verticals are primed
• (23:40) The pain point underneath everything is time
• (25:14) On being kind to the robots
• (26:10) Imposter syndrome at the frontier
• (28:45) AI slop and the rising value of human work
• (31:11) Where to find James Ernst

Notable quotes

“The first question you should be asking is not which tool should we buy, but what are we trying to make structurally better?” — James Ernst

“AI could either be a superpower or a distraction.” — James Ernst

“I don't leverage AI to write anything for me, because that is such a part of the human process that I want to keep.” — James Ernst

Resources & links

• Core Order — James's growth architecture firm
• The Core Order blog, including Why Enterprise AI Investments Fail and Intelligence Is a Commodity
• James Ernst on LinkedIn — where he's most active, and happy to talk AI with anyone
• Full write-up of this episode
• AI & Small Business hub — what other founders on the show are actually doing with AI
• On keeping the writing human: human-certified, expert-sourced content

About the show

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Full episode archive at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.

Cameron is broker, owner, and founder of Emerson Property Management, serving several hundred owners across Greater Houston while running the whole operation from California. He started the company after he couldn't find a manager for his own rentals — while at risk of losing his oil-and-gas job and carrying a lot of debt — and has done it full-time for six years (and unofficially for over ten). Returning listeners first met him in Episode 1: Building a Property Management Company With Integrity.

In this episode

• Why speed-to-lead is the cheapest growth lever there is — and how slow follow-up is "just lighting money on fire"
• The two hires that changed the business: a dedicated salesperson for inbound owner calls and a marketing person
• How agent referrals and "accidental landlords" drive Emerson's pipeline in a higher-rate, higher-inventory market
• Turning on SEO only after operations were solid — and why Cameron was deliberately slow to marketing
• Using AI as a delegation tool, not magic: after-action reviews on evictions, screening-criteria checks, and saved-prompt analytics
• Why the biggest AI gains go to novices, not veterans — new hires absorbing senior knowledge fast
• The "give them the recipe" moat — why publishing everything doesn't hand away the business
• RTMs (remote team members) as the first step toward AI, and the delegation-vs-abdication line
• Applying the theory of constraints — focus is now the scarce resource

Chapters

• (00:00) Meet Cameron Tope: Houston property management, run from San Diego
• (01:27) The marketing engine: a salesperson, agent referrals & accidental landlords
• (03:48) Speed-to-lead: "you're just lighting money on fire"
• (07:50) AI as delegation, not magic: AARs, screening & novices vs. veterans
• (13:46) The give-it-all-away moat: "we can give them the recipe"
• (16:56) RTMs and the delegation-vs-abdication line
• (20:49) Remote ops & offshoring pitfalls: the Raven Tools story
• (29:18) Theory of constraints: focus is the scarce resource
• (31:23) The roadmap: own Houston, build a life, don't sell
• (34:08) Where to find Cameron

Notable quotes

"You spend $20,000 a month on marketing, but you don't have anybody answer the phone, and you get back to them two days later — you're just lighting money on fire." — Cameron Tope"We can give them the recipe, but it's not going to taste the same." — Cameron Tope"RTMs are kind of the first step towards AI. If you have a good process, you can delegate it." — Cameron Tope

Resources & links

• Emerson Property Management — everything's there, including Cameron's free accidental landlord guide for owners deciding whether to rent or sell
• Cameron's first appearance: Building a Property Management Company With Integrity
• On turning process friction into content: human-certified, expert-sourced content
• For service businesses tightening their SEO and fulfillment: SEO advisory
• Getting your name out through interviews: podcast-powered link building

About the show

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Find more episodes at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.

Richard's ideal client is an established coach making around $20k/month who's stuck under a "referral ceiling" — great at the work, no predictable sales system. His agency's job is to install the foundation, dial in the offer, and only then turn on paid acquisition. Along the way he makes a sharp case for answer engine optimization (AEO), email marketing, and never betting your whole livelihood on a single platform.

In this episode

• The CRM foundation comes first — centralize communications in GoHighLevel, get a company phone number off your personal cell, and build speed-to-lead before you ever run ads.
• Don't turn on ads until the offer is dialed in — and why he won't work with a coach whose offer is under $4,000–$5,000.
• Price to cover your cost of acquisition — collect enough cash upfront to pay CAC twice over, charge upfront (or half now/half in 30), and stay far away from pay-on-results.
• The coach-to-advisor shift — reposition so a successful client keeps you for the next milestone instead of graduating away from you.
• AEO/GEO in practice — "build your website so an AI cites you," and title blog posts as the exact questions prospects type into ChatGPT.
• Email is the most underutilized channel — value-add sends weekly, the jab-jab-jab-hook rhythm, and why he's never unsubscribed from Grant Cardone.
• Never rely on one platform — the creator with millions of followers and zero emails who nearly lost everything in the TikTok outage.
• The authenticity paradox — how to market credibly for profit without becoming the person prospects "can smell."

Notable quotes

"You need to be building your website to where it's not necessarily geared towards a human being visiting it, but an AI visiting it." — Richard Hickman"Who reads blogs anymore? AIs do. Perplexity reads your blog. ChatGPT reads your blog." — Richard Hickman"Social media is great, but don't rely on it, because it could go away in an instant and we've seen it happen." — Richard Hickman

Resources & links

• Free AI visibility audit for coaches: coachingaiaudit.com — checks whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude cite you, then gives pointers to fix it.
• Piqued Consulting — Richard's marketing agency for high-ticket coaches.
• Richard on Instagram: @piquedconsulting
• Richard's new podcast, The Business of High Ticket Coaching — launching soon.
• Go deeper on AI visibility & answer engine optimization.

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Every episode at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.

Louis has built and sold companies the hard way — a plumbing business a broker valued at nothing, a later business sold for $5M, and another scaled to $35M and 450 staff. He's also the author of The B Myth (The Busyness Myth). Across the hour he trades practical, hard-won tools with host Jeremy Rivera on delegation, SOPs, creativity inside parameters, using AI without producing slop, and beating the "badge of honor" trap of being busy.

In this episode

• Why a broker said Louis's plumbing business was worth nothing — because he did the accounts, hiring, and quality control himself
• The delegation shift that let him sell his next business for $5M (and later scale one to $35M and 450 staff)
• Why every stage of growth brings "different levels, different devils" — and how to borrow someone who's already been there
• Building SOPs and checklists that survive "Chinese whispers" (a.k.a. telephone) as teams go remote and offshore
• Where to enforce parameters and where to deliberately leave room for creativity
• The Friday AI stand-up where every team member brings one new AI tool they've learned
• Treating AI as an "Iron Man suit" — "creativity in, creativity out" — instead of drowning people in AI slop and "clod hopping"
• The $100/hour post-it rule, the post-time planner, and "eat the frog" to beat productive procrastination

Chapters

• (00:00) Intro — why should you trust this guest?
• (00:38) "Your business is worth nothing" — the $5M delegation lesson
• (03:56) Owning a job vs. owning a business
• (06:29) Different levels, different devils
• (10:01) Systems for remote and offshore teams
• (12:00) SOPs and checklists (the 100-points-of-ID example)
• (18:56) Surviving "Chinese whispers" as you scale
• (22:56) Creativity within parameters + the Friday AI stand-up
• (25:00) "Creativity in, creativity out" — killing AI slop
• (28:56) AI as an "Iron Man suit" (and the blend humans still need)
• (38:48) The Busyness Myth: busy as a badge of honor
• (40:44) The $100/hour post-it rule
• (44:29) The post-time planner + eat the frog
• (51:06) Where to find Louis and the book

Notable quotes

"Louis, your business is worth nothing."— Louis Swart (quoting the broker)"Would I pay somebody a hundred dollars an hour to do this task?"— Louis Swart"Creativity in, creativity out."— Louis Swart

Resources & links

• Louis's book — The B Myth (The Busyness Myth)
• Louis Swart's site (free post-time planner & tools) — louisswart.com
• Iron Brij — ironbrij.com.au
• Connect with Louis on LinkedIn and Instagram
• On avoiding AI slop, Louis and Jeremy get into why founders still need human-certified, expert-sourced content rather than volume for volume's sake
• Louis's "hire the pro instead of DIY-ing it for six months" point is exactly the case for fractional SEO advisory

About the show

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Find every episode and recap at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com, and browse past guests by topic at unscriptedseo.com.

Key takeaways

• Agent and advisor are not the same job. Booking flights and hotels is the part Expedia and an AI assistant already do perfectly well.
• Travel advisors are barely regulated, and she wishes they were. No individual licence, no continuing education, and a host agency’s licence number is enough to start selling.
• The commission is being paid either way. A Disney cruise costs the same whether you book direct or through her, so the only question is who collects it.
• She outsourced the half she is bad at. A host agency runs the back-end financials, a local firm runs payroll, and she does not pretend to enjoy spreadsheets.
• Every personal trip is a marketing asset. Her gym analogy is the whole social strategy, and she is genuinely baffled that most advisors skip it.

On this page

• Agent, advisor, and which one you need
• The licensing gap nobody talks about
• Where the money actually comes from
• Selling travel by going on holiday
• Chapters and timestamps
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Agent, advisor, and which one you need

None of that is necessarily hard. What you actually need is a travel advisor.

— Ali Raymer

Her opening move is to concede the entire objection. You can book your own flights. Expedia works, the apps work, an AI assistant will happily do it. The booking layer is not where a person adds anything any more, and she says so before anyone else can.

What is left is judgement, and she describes it the way anyone selling a service against a free tool eventually has to. A client arrives certain they want Santorini because of a video. Ten minutes of conversation with them and their partner reveals that what they have actually described is Portugal.

So many of the conversations that I have go down that path.

— Ali Raymer

She calls this the marriage counsellor part of the job. It is also the part a booking engine structurally cannot do, because it requires disagreeing with the customer.

The licensing gap nobody talks about

Asked what regulation shapes her work, she gives an answer against her own commercial interest.

I think that we should have higher regulations, much like realtors do.

— Ali Raymer

Realtors carry individual licences and have to keep them current. Travel advisors do not. Someone can sit under a host agency, use that agency’s licence number, and start booking other people’s holidays this week.

Even with realtors, you have to do continuing ed every year. We aren’t required to do that.

— Ali Raymer

Her practical advice to consumers is to interview the person the way you would interview any other professional, because the industry will not do the filtering for you. Her worry is not fraud so much as absence: people who like travelling but will not answer the phone when something goes wrong in Greece.

Where the money actually comes from

Two lines. A planning or consult fee on genuinely custom trips, often waived on simple ones, and commission from suppliers. She puts a typical advisor yield at around twelve per cent.

The interesting part is how she handles the price objection, which is that there usually is not one.

Either Disney is getting that extra 10 % commission or a small business owner like myself is.

— Ali Raymer

She does not fight the points-and-miles crowd either. She builds the whole trip, loads it with the hotel chain her client hoards points for, and lets him book those rooms himself. She still manages the trip and still earns on everything else.

Selling travel by going on holiday

Instagram and Facebook, split by age. Millennials and Gen X on one, retired boomers with time and money on the other. Nothing exotic, and no paid budget mentioned.

If I went to the gym and looked at my trainer and he didn’t have muscles, I wouldn’t go to that gym.

— Ali Raymer

So every trip she takes personally becomes content, roughly monthly. She also reports, from the customer side, the shift marketers keep arguing about. At the end of a consult call she asks who she can thank for the referral, and the answer has started coming back as an AI tool rather than Google.

If you run a local business, hear that and wonder how you would ever prove it, the SOP for proving a local booking actually came from search is the unglamorous version of the answer.

Chapters

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• What is the difference between a travel agent and a travel advisor?
• Do travel advisors need a licence?
• Does using a travel advisor cost more than booking direct?
• How do travel advisors actually get paid?
• Can I still use my own points and miles with an advisor?
• How should a small service business use Instagram and Facebook?
• Are customers really starting to find small businesses through AI tools?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• another travel agency owner on what AI still cannot book, making the same case from a different desk.
• Jim Hauck on leaving corporate IT to become a travel guardian angel, for the version of this job that starts much later in life.
• the Tennessee CPA and attorney Jeremy name-checks mid-episode, on the financial and legal side she deliberately hands to someone else.

Watch the interview

Find Ali Raymer

peaceandpearltravel.com, and Ali Raymer on LinkedIn, where she writes for the advisor trade rather than the traveller.

Cite this episode

Raymer, Ali. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “You Don’t Need a Travel Agent, You Need an Advisor.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscriptedsmallbusiness.com/why-you-dont-need-a-travel-agent-you-need-an-advisor-ali-raymer/

Joshua Altman, Managing Director of Beltway Media and a fractional Chief Communications Officer (CCO), joins host Jeremy Rivera on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast to explain why the metrics most small businesses chase are quietly misleading them — and what to build instead.

We get into the "Four Languages" model (what people READ, SEE, HEAR, and EXPERIENCE), why a solopreneur can benefit from fractional comms just like a 250-person company, how Reddit backfires when you fake it, why buyer journeys now take 30+ touchpoints you'll never track, and how to use AI as a genuine tool for research and machine-readable pages — without letting it write your brand.

If you've ever felt duped by your analytics dashboard, this one's for you.

⏱️ CHAPTERS
00:00 Meet Joshua Altman & Beltway Media
00:55 What "fractional" + Chief Communications Officer actually means
02:08 Aligning internal and external communications
03:51 What size business needs comms? (solopreneur → 250 people)
07:02 The first weeks of an engagement: "Why isn't it working yet?"
08:58 The Four Languages model: read, see, hear, experience
11:43 There are no "content police" — cadence & repurposing
12:29 The red lines: what a CCO won't do
13:46 An unexpected win: Reddit (and how it backfires)
16:06 Build your own community vs. join where they already are
17:24 Fractional CCO vs. CMO — the trust difference
19:02 The biggest communications missteps
19:15 Why attribution is broken: 7 → 30+ touchpoints
21:55 What replaces cause-and-effect? Correlation + judgment
27:22 The Sears catalog lesson
28:28 AI: the worst support rep we have (but the one we've got)
29:15 Agentic AI, bots with wallets & optimizing for machines
32:20 AI research at scale — done right (government sources only)
35:11 Building an SEO Tactics Library with AI in an afternoon
37:47 What you can and can't control in discoverability
38:58 The one rule: everything you produce should be USEFUL
39:27 Where to find Joshua

GUEST — Joshua Altman, Beltway Media
Website: https://beltway.media/
Free tools & quizzes: https://beltway.media/our-free-tools/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuaialtman/
✉️ Email: JAltman@Beltway.media

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
• SEO Teric (Matt Brooks): https://seoteric.com
• Open Source SEO: https://openseo.so/
• Permacast Walls — precast concrete walls in Florida: https://permacastwalls.com/

️ THE SHOW
Unscripted Small Business Podcast — real conversations with the people building and marketing small businesses.
Hosted by Jeremy Rivera.

#SmallBusiness #Marketing #FractionalCCO #Communications #BrandStrategy #ContentMarketing #AImarketing #Reddit #TrustMarketing #Podcast

Key takeaways

• No change is the competitor, not the named rival. A prospect who stays with a worse incumbent has still not bought from you.
• Stop asking for the order. Asking assumes readiness. He argues a properly run process ends with the buyer asking to buy.
• The process is identical in B2C and B2B. What changes is the questions and the cycle, which can run fifteen minutes or two years.
• Authenticity is congruence. Belief, tonality, body language and words either line up or they do not, and people have good detectors.
• Email cannot qualify anyone. Its job is to book the conversation and to record the one you already had.

On this page

• The status quo is the competitor
• Detaching from the outcome
• Empathetic listening and infinite curiosity
• Bridging sales and marketing
• Chapters and timestamps
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

The status quo is the competitor

And here’s our favorite question: what happens if you do nothing? What if you don’t change, which is the biggest competitor for everyone, the status quo?

— Jorge Chavez

The move he is describing is not a closing technique. It is a diagnostic. If nothing bad happens when the buyer does nothing, there is no deal to run, and the polite thing is to find that out early rather than after three proposals.

But the real answer is no change.

— Jorge Chavez

He is specific about the shapes it takes. They keep using a competitor. They do it in house. They have been meaning to sort the website out for years and will get to it. Every one of those is the same answer wearing a different coat.

Detaching from the outcome

The goal can’t be to sell. It’s a byproduct of right thinking and effectively executing your process.

— Jorge Chavez

This is where the episode stops being a sales talk. He argues that a rep who wants the sale will sell less, because wanting it distorts every question they ask. The alternative is uncomfortable: work out whether the buyer can solve the problem without you, and be willing to say so.

And you have to be not seeking yeses and not seeking no’s, but seeking the truth.

— Jorge Chavez

He is equally blunt about why people distrust the profession. Show up, throw up, pressure, overcome objections, chase the yes. His objection to it is commercial before it is ethical. It does not work as well.

Empathetic listening and infinite curiosity

Asked whether empathy is a business superpower, he does not simply agree. He reframes it as a skill with a name.

You have to care. If you don’t care about people, sales, and relationships, you’re in the wrong business.

— Jorge Chavez

Above active listening he puts empathetic listening: suspending your own biases and training long enough to look at the situation from where the other person is standing. His claim is that questions stop being hard to invent once you do it.

We say infinite curiosity is running out of time before you run out of questions.

— Jorge Chavez

Why most adults cannot do this

His diagnosis is that curiosity is a skill people lose after childhood, which is why so many salespeople freeze when the script runs out. It is also why he prefers a live conversation to any amount of written back and forth.

Bridging sales and marketing

He has trained over a hundred chief marketing officers, which gives him an unusual answer to the oldest question in the building. Marketing makes assumptions about a market it cannot interview, and its job is to raise curiosity. Sales makes no assumptions at all.

Instead of making assumptions in sales, you make no assumptions.

— Jorge Chavez

The bridge those CMOs described back to him is that modern marketing has started behaving like the sales side: asking questions tied to real pain rather than announcing services. Not here are our SEO packages but do you feel your site is reaching the right market.

The closing-the-loop section is the one to send to anyone running acquisition. Weekly review of lead quality rather than lead count, a first-person narrative writer who actually knows the business, and a tech partner who asks whether a lead was any good. Jeremy’s counter-story is the three-hundred-per-cent lead increase that the sales team experienced as the worst month they had ever had. If you have that problem, the routine for deciding what to ship next when everything looks urgent is a way in.

Chapters

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• Who is my real competitor in a sales process?
• Should a salesperson always ask for the order?
• Is B2B selling actually different from B2C selling?
• How can I be authentic when I am being paid to care?
• What is empathetic listening and why does it beat active listening?
• Why do so many companies hire the wrong salespeople?
• How do I close the loop between my marketing and my sales team?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Julika Novkova on empathy as a business superpower, the claim Jeremy puts to him halfway through.
• the CPA and attorney whose point about tone in a transcript opens this thread, on what a written record loses.
• Matt Tyner on marketing making the promise and operations keeping it, the same gap seen from the delivery end.

Watch the interview

Find Jorge Chavez

topazsalesconsulting.com, where the contact form asks for a conversation rather than a demo, which is rather the point of the whole episode.

Cite this episode

Chavez, Jorge. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “The Status Quo Is Your Biggest Competitor.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscriptedsmallbusiness.com/the-status-quo-is-your-biggest-competitor-jorge-chavez-on-selling-without-selling/

Key takeaways

• Designing your life is a responsibility, not a luxury. Particularly for owners, who tend to defer the question indefinitely.
• Work-life balance is the wrong model. She works across five pillars instead, because each one falls down independently.
• You have an internal thermostat. It is why people drift back to a familiar level after a gain in income, health or relationships.
• Change is incremental or it does not happen. Most people wait for pain to become unbearable, at which point the change is forced rather than designed.
• The fear underneath visibility problems is being fully seen. Named plainly, by someone who has coached it for twenty years.

On this page

• Why this is a responsibility, not a luxury
• Five pillars instead of balance
• The internal thermostat
• The fear of being fully seen
• Chapters and timestamps
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Why this is a responsibility, not a luxury

Designing your life is not just your first priority, it’s your responsibility.

— Ameera Virani

The reframe lands hardest on business owners, who are the most practised at deferring it. There is always a launch, a hire, a quarter. She has watched enough people reach the top of that ladder to know what is waiting.

No one ever looked back on their deathbed and said, I wish I had spent more time at work.

— Ameera Virani

Delivered by someone who spent twenty years backstage with people who built empires, which is what stops it being a platitude.

Five pillars instead of balance

She rejects work-life balance outright. Balance implies a scale with work on one side and everything else on the other, which is already the wrong picture. She works across five pillars: health, business or career, wealth, fulfilment and relationships.

The difference matters practically. A scale can be tipped back. A pillar that has been neglected does not tip, it fails, and it takes part of the structure with it.

The time audit

Her diagnostic is unglamorous: write down where the week actually went, then sort it against the five pillars. Most people discover the starving pillar is not the one they would have guessed.

The internal thermostat

Her model for why people revert. You raise income, health or the quality of your relationships, and then something quietly returns you to the level you are used to. She starts clients on what they actually desire rather than on tactics, because a tactic applied against a thermostat is wasted.

And she is clear about the pattern underneath it: we run subconscious scripts, and most people wait until the pain is unbearable before rewriting one. That is a change happening to you.

It’s never about changing everything, but it is about taking those small steps forward towards the life that you desire to live.

— Ameera Virani

The fear of being fully seen

Asked what she runs into most often, she does not say time, money or discipline. She says the fear of being fully seen.

If you know what you should be publishing and you are not publishing it, that is the thing worth examining before you buy another course on consistency. The practical constraints are usually real. They are also usually not the reason.

Chapters

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• How do I design my life on purpose rather than by default?
• Is work-life balance realistic for a business owner?
• Why do I keep returning to the same level after progress?
• What is a time audit and how do I run one?
• Why do I avoid being visible even when I know I should be?
• How do I change without overhauling everything at once?
• What are the five pillars of a designed life?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Cecily North on the three years she lost calling it a hobby, which is the same avoidance wearing a business costume.
• Mark Pearson on keeping a human at the director level, on what an owner stays responsible for once the machines do the rest.
• The machine-readable version of this episode, a plain-text file with every quote attributed to whoever actually said it. Paste it into ChatGPT or Claude and ask it anything about the conversation.

Find Ameera Virani

ameeravirani.com

Cite this episode

Virani, Ameera. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Design Your Life on Purpose.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscriptedsmallbusiness.com/ameera-virani-designing-your-life-is-your-job/

Key takeaways

• SEO did not get replaced, it graduated. Doing good SEO is already doing answer-engine work, and backlinks still matter because the systems doing the citing still lean on them.
• The funnel gained a third stage. Getting paid needs a catalogue an agent can read, with schema and SKUs, plus a calendar and checkout an agent can operate.
• The volume will be B2B reorders, not consumer discovery. Which means the unglamorous repeat-purchase supplier is more exposed than the consumer brand.
• Recency is a trust signal, and breadth beats depth. Every model searches differently, so recent citations across many places beat one excellent placement.
• Keep a human at the director level. He raises the counterweight himself rather than waiting to be asked.

On this page

• SEO graduated, it did not get replaced
• The third stage: getting paid
• The volume is quiet B2B reorders
• Recency, breadth, and keeping a human in the chair
• Chapters and timestamps
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

SEO graduated, it did not get replaced

SEO has graduated into the agentic world as well. And that is the AEO, that is LLM Visibility.

— Mark Pearson

A useful corrective to the rebrand-everything reflex. The practical corollary he draws is that backlinks have not stopped counting, because the systems doing the citing are still leaning on the ranking systems that use them.

the more places that your business can get seen and cited so that the AI is building up that credibility for you

— Mark Pearson

Press releases, blogs, directories, socials. The unit of work is presence in many places rather than perfection in one.

The third stage: getting paid

His framing is three steps rather than two: get found, get chosen, get paid by AI. The first is answer-engine work everyone is already arguing about. The third is a payment rail, and almost nobody has built for it.

It requires a catalogue a machine can read, with schema and discrete SKUs, plus a calendar and checkout an agent can actually operate. His example is a chiropractor turning a ten-pack of visits into a purchasable, schema-tagged item — which is what productising a service means once the buyer is software.

He points at the Stripe and OpenAI partnership, a competing Google protocol, and Home Depot, Lowe’s, Etsy, Wayfair and Shopify storefronts as places this is already running. He also notes the United States is trailing China here.

The volume is quiet B2B reorders

they are business to business of the agents just doing a lot of those like reorders, you know, monthly reorders on things.

— Mark Pearson

This reframes who should prepare first, and it is not who the coverage suggests. The consumer brand imagining an agent doing someone’s Christmas shopping is a long way behind the supplier whose customers reorder the same thing every month without thinking about it.

Recency, breadth, and keeping a human in the chair

the consistency of blogging and the recent citations, just recency in general is really, really good for AI.

— Mark Pearson

Combined with breadth, because every model searches differently. Being cited recently in many places beats being cited beautifully in one. Jeremy connects the same idea back to entity work and the about page that tells the machines who you actually are.

you don’t want to give it full agency. You don’t wanna just let it run your life

— Mark Pearson

The counterweight to everything else in the episode, and he raises it unprompted. Use the model to create rather than to offload, because it hallucinates and it is working from borrowed anecdotes.

Chapters

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• What is agentic commerce and does it affect small businesses?
• Is AEO different from SEO?
• Can AI agents actually complete a purchase?
• How do I make my services readable by an AI agent?
• Do backlinks still matter for AI visibility?
• Which businesses are most exposed to agentic buying first?
• How much autonomy should I give an AI agent?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• what an owner still owes their own week, which is the question left over once the machines are handling the reorders.
• when the side project has to start behaving like a business, and what waiting on that actually costs.
• a speaker-labelled text file of the whole interview, carrying the full transcript for anyone who wants to check a claim in context.

Find Mark Pearson

agentbuyable.ai.

Cite this episode

Pearson, Mark. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “On Getting Cited by AI Agents.” Unscripted Small Business, 10 August 2026. https://unscriptedsmallbusiness.com/mark-pearson-on-getting-cited-by-ai-agents/

JEREMY RIVERA: I’m curious what your advice is right now for SMBs in manual services — tree trimming like McAllister Tree Service, installing concrete walls in Florida, doing home repair in Tennessee. If you’re geo-based and doing services, what does that look like from your perspective?

BRAD POULOS: I actually love those kinds of businesses. They’re never gonna go away. A lot of digital tools may come and go, but a tree trimming service will virtually always be here. The thing that’s changed over the past ten years is that the really good players are both good at executing their trade and good at executing digital marketing.

It’s becoming necessary to stand above the crowd and to get the leads first. I’m a member of a group that has a wedding photographer in it, and that wedding photographer is spending two hundred dollars a day on Facebook ads. So you better be good at it when you’re spending six thousand dollars a month.

Brad Poulos is an educator and consultant in the small business space. He teaches in the entrepreneurship department at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, where he has been on faculty for about fifteen years. Alongside his teaching, Brad consults to small businesses in Canada and the United States, primarily those in the $5–50 million revenue range. He is the author of three books — Most Problems Solve Themselves, The Small Business Operator's Manual, and From Pitch to Payoff — and operates a business planning and cadence system for small business owners at confidentoperator.com.

What We Cover

• Why lean startup replaced the traditional business plan — and what that means for founders today
• The SaaS expansion trap: why staying in your niche beats being pretty good at five things
• The Barbados test for knowing whether you own a business or own a job
• How to delegate outcomes instead of tasks, and what that looks like in practice
• Organic vs. mechanistic org structure — and how to get the right people in the right seats
• When to seek angel funding vs. bootstrapping, and why the VC carrot comes with a stick
• Brad's controversial take: a post-pandemic generation that struggles to solve problems

Episode Highlights

Brad opens with a story that reframes how most people think about business planning. Early in his career, he raised two million dollars from Bell Canada's board using a thick business plan full of projections — and had never spoken to a single prospective customer before the meeting. That was the old playbook. Today's curriculum is built on lean startup methodology: validate with real customers before you write a single number. The infrastructure shift matters too — what once required custom bank-approval code is now a Shopify checkbox. Entrepreneurship is more democratic, but that cuts both ways.

The episode hits its stride when Brad and Jeremy dig into what it takes to actually own a business versus a high-paying job. Brad's test is clean: "If you can't go to Barbados and sit on the beach and you're making money, you do not have a business. You own your job." The fix isn't hiring more people — it's changing what you hand them. Jeremy's framing lands hard: don't delegate tasks, delegate outcomes. A-players figure out the tasks themselves. B-players need the list. Knowing the difference is what separates a good operator from a frustrated one.

Brad introduces a framework for thinking about org design that's been around for decades but stays underused: the spectrum from organic organizations (high autonomy, outcomes-focused, multi-directional communication) to mechanistic ones (consistency-first, top-down, execution-driven). His McDonald's example is memorable: the fries are solved. You don't want an entrepreneurial person in the fryer questioning the process. For local service businesses, the same principle applies — knowing which roles need A-players and which need reliable executors is what makes a small business actually scalable.

Brad closes with his most controversial take: the post-pandemic generation of students is significantly weaker at problem-solving than previous cohorts, and he attributes it primarily to bulldozer parenting — parents who remove every obstacle before their child encounters it. His recommended read is Jonathan Haidt's The Coddling of the American Mind, which argues that children are anti-fragile: they get stronger through challenge, not weaker. For business owners hiring from this cohort, the organic vs. mechanistic distinction matters more than it used to.

Connect with Brad Poulos

Website: bradpoulos.com

Planning System: confidentoperator.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bradpoulos

Books on Amazon: Most Problems Solve Themselves  ·  The Small Business Operator's Manual  ·  From Pitch to Payoff

About the Show

The Unscripted Small Business Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera and features candid, unscripted conversations with small business owners, operators, and entrepreneurs. New episodes drop weekly at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.

Key takeaways

• Operations first, creative last. The logistics and workflow side pays now, with little investment. The customer-facing creative does not.
• AI content has a real cost. Subscriptions, tokens and a development process he describes as a bit of a nightmare.
• He stayed broad on purpose. Working across industries is where he thinks the opportunity is, against all the niching advice.
• The apple you did not ask for. Intangible work invites endless price negotiation, because nobody can see what they are buying.
• Pricing is a stance, not a calculation. He will not raise it because a client can pay more, and will not cut it to win work.
• The same-day return is simplification. If your own network cannot explain what you do, nothing downstream will work.

On this page

• Where AI actually pays
• Staying broad in a niching world
• The apple you did not ask for
• Holding a price with no industry standard
• The cobbler’s children
• Simplify until they get it
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Where AI actually pays

The people who ignore it are gonna end up being left behind. Where there’s a ton of value right now that doesn’t require a ton of investment or time is in the logistical side or the operational side of AI.

— Jared Harman

The distinction matters commercially. Operational gains are cheap, immediate and invisible to the client, which means they improve margin rather than becoming a discount conversation.

Creative gains are visible, and the moment a client believes the work was generated, the price is up for renegotiation whether the quality changed or not.

What we can offer you is an actual voice in the market that is on the other side of that phone or email thread.

— Jared Harman

Staying broad in a niching world

I truly believe that there’s opportunity that comes from working across different industries.

— Jared Harman

Every piece of agency advice for a decade has said niche down. Jared deliberately did not, and his reasoning is about transfer. A tactic that is standard in one sector is often unheard of in another, and that arbitrage only exists if you are in both.

It is a genuine trade. He gives up the referral velocity and the pricing power a specialist gets, and buys a wider view.

The apple you did not ask for

His analogy for the core commercial problem is a good one. Sell someone an apple and the transaction is finished, because both parties can see the apple. Sell someone brand strategy and the negotiation never really closes.

The consequence is that intangible services attract haggling in a way tangible ones do not, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the work.

So like you’ve gotta go in and you gotta kinda like shave the dream down a bit to what will work with what you have.

— Jared Harman

That is the budget conversation, and it is the one most agencies avoid until it is too late to have well.

Holding a price with no industry standard

We’ve adopted the approach of, hey, our pricing’s our pricing, we’re gonna stick with it. Even if there’s a chance to price more just ’cause the client can pay more, we’re not gonna do that. But we’re also not gonna reduce the price just to get the business.

— Jared Harman

we’ve lost clients before because they’ve said we’re not charging enough.

— Jared Harman

That second line is the more interesting one. In a market with no pricing standards, a low quote reads as a quality signal rather than a bargain, and he has lost work by being cheaper than expected.

The cobbler’s children

We we don’t practice what we preach all the time. It’s not because we’re ignoring it, we just literally don’t have time sometimes.

— Jared Harman

An honest admission that most agency owners will recognise. The client work always wins, and the agency’s own marketing is the thing that gets moved to next month, every month.

Simplify until they get it

But if Joe Blow goes to your website or your social channels or wherever, are they gonna have any idea what you’re talking about or what you’re selling?

— Jared Harman

His same-day action is to strip the message back until somebody outside your industry can repeat it. It costs nothing, it takes an afternoon, and it is the highest-return thing on the list.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• Where does AI actually add value in an agency?
• Should a marketing agency niche down?
• Why do clients haggle over marketing but not over products?
• How do you set prices in an industry with no standards?
• Can charging too little lose you the work?
• Why do agencies neglect their own marketing?
• What is the fastest marketing fix a business can make today?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• The full written recap of this conversation.
• Tom Malesic on agency culture and client concentration, from a shop that made the opposite structural bet.
• Lloyd Thompson on making operations measurable, which is where Jared says the AI value is.

Find Jared Harman

One Group Agency is at onegroupagency.ca. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More at Unscripted Small Business.

Cite this episode

Harman, Jared. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Running a Full-Service Agency in the AI Era.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscripted-small-business.castos.com/episodes/jared-harman

Key takeaways

• Treat yourself as a business or the business treats you as inventory. He runs an entertainment company covering merchandise and a roster of other artists.
• Expect the disappointments. His advice to younger artists is not motivational. It is a warning about the base rate.
• He left the label deal on purpose. Signed and then independent again, right before the release he cares most about.
• Quality over quantity, said without apology. He is direct that confidence is not the same as arrogance and is tired of the conversation.
• Pro AI, with limits. He uses it for artwork and flyers, and has had an impostor generate fake tracks in his voice.
• The loss is the material. Divorce, betrayal and losing both parents are where the record comes from, not around it.

On this page

• Choir at five, dancing before rapping
• Being a business, not a talent
• The game of disappointments
• Leaving the deal
• Pro AI, and the impostor
• The other career
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Choir at five, dancing before rapping

He sang in a gospel choir from about five to seven, grew up on Motown and Michael Jackson, and got into performance as a dancer doing Jackson impersonations before he ever made his own music.

His first project came out in 2010. Everything since has been a slow argument with the sound he started from, which is the part most artist origin stories skip.

Being a business, not a talent

The most transferable part of this episode has nothing to do with music. He formed a company, put merchandise under it, and built a roster covering several genres rather than staying a single act.

That is the difference between an artist who gets paid when they perform and a business that has assets. It is also what makes leaving a label survivable.

The game of disappointments

Expect disappointments, because this is the game of disappointments.

— Txldian The Destroyer

It’s not how hard you fall, but how good you get up.

— Txldian The Destroyer

He is describing an industry built on smoke and mirrors, where the visible success stories are a rounding error and most of what is promised does not arrive. Saying so out loud to younger artists is more useful than any encouragement.

Leaving the deal

He was signed, and he left, immediately before the release he rates most highly. Asked to score his own album he gives it twelve out of ten, which he is happy to defend.

and there’s a difference between being cocky and confident. I really hate that conversation because it almost seems like we’re supposed to not believe in ourselves to be widely accepted by society.

— Txldian The Destroyer

It’s quality over quantity. And my quality’s through the roof.

— Txldian The Destroyer

Pro AI, and the impostor

I’m pro AI, not gonna lie.

— Txldian The Destroyer

He uses it for flyers and cover artwork without embarrassment, which is the ordinary small-business use case. The other side arrived uninvited: somebody generated tracks in his style and posted them as him.

His position on it is not defensive. Fakes exist, they always did, and the answer is to be good enough that the difference is obvious.

The other career

He started wrestling professionally the year before this recording, works for an independent promotion, has done backstage commentary and wants to move into a managerial role.

It is the same business logic as the record label. Several income streams, several audiences, one brand carrying all of them.

a lot of people are worried about what’s coming and what’s on the other side of the door, but I don’t worry about knocking because nine times out of ten I’m the one who knocks.

— Txldian The Destroyer

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• How does an independent musician run as a business?
• Is a record deal worth signing?
• What should a young artist actually expect?
• How do you build multiple income streams as a creator?
• Should artists use AI for artwork and promotion?
• What do you do when someone generates fake music in your voice?
• How do you keep going after repeated setbacks?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Chelsea Jambo on building a brand out of pure frustration, the same instinct in a different industry.
• Unscripted Small Business, where the rest of the owner interviews live.
• Rachel Eisaman on pricing without apology, if the confidence argument landed.

Find Txldian The Destroyer

He is on Instagram, Threads and Reddit under the same name.

Cite this episode

Txldian The Destroyer. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Overcoming the Smoke and Mirrors of the Music Industry.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscripted-small-business.castos.com/episodes/txldian-the-destroyer-overcoming-the-smoke-mirrors-of-the-music-industry

What We Cover

• The origin story: how a stuck CEO's love of gaming sparked a four-hour D&D session that became a full consulting method
• Linear thinkers vs. cloud thinkers: Paul's neurospicy framework and why traditional business plans fail half the entrepreneur population
• The authority machine problem: building brand recognition vs. actually acquiring customers — and why they're not the same
• Ride the dragon of passion: Paul's analogy for why chasing fame and fortune directly strips away who you are
• Scale is the enemy of creativity: the Rule of 100 and why 100 loyal customers can build a business that lasts 80 years
• The starving artist myth: the origin story Paul is taking to TEDx — and why creatives were making bank before the industrial revolution

Episode Highlights

The moment everything clicked. Paul's origin story isn't theory — it's a room with a stuck CEO who happened to love gaming. Paul improvised a session where the characters were the CEO's own roles, and the monsters were actual business obstacles: cash flow, unfocused marketing, hiring decisions. After four hours, the CEO said, "Is this what business is? Because if it is, I think I finally understand it and it seems fun." That light-bulb moment became Gamify Business. Paul now runs the game master role for every client until they're ready to take over the campaign themselves.

The neurospicy distinction. Paul divides his clients into two types: linear thinkers (neurotypicals who can follow a process A to Z) and cloud thinkers (ADHD, ADD, autism spectrum — who go A, B, G, Squirrel, Clouds, Graph). He has ADD himself, and his son has ADHD — so the framework is built from lived experience, not theory. His books are engineered with variability baked in: sometimes fill in a blank, sometimes draw circles, sometimes roll dice. He also runs a business personality quiz that places clients into one of six categories — and says he can tell you almost everything he needs to know about someone just from which category they land in.

The authority machine confession. Paul gave one of the most honest answers I've heard on any podcast: despite 18 months of podcasting, TED talks, and speaking events, he hasn't cracked customer acquisition. "I've built an authority machine and not a getting-customers machine. And that's some honest tea from a guy who's in the machine right now." This maps directly to the brand-building vs. conversion split that affects every consultant and content creator — they don't run on the same clock, and confusing one for the other is expensive.

Ride the dragon of passion — and the Rule of 100. Paul's first handhold for any struggling small business: stop chasing fame and fortune directly. "Fame and fortune are two dragons that are very fast. The only way to catch them is to strip away everything that you are. Ride the dragon of passion instead — and then the dragons of fame and fortune follow behind you." His Rule of 100 supports the same logic: you don't need a million buyers to be successful. A hundred consistent customers will make you successful to a point of comfort. A mom-and-pop store dealing with 100 people a day can run for 80 years. Going viral would destroy it.

Connect with Paul Pape

Website: gamifybusiness.com

Business Personality Quiz: gamifybusiness.com/quiz

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/paulericpape

YouTube: @paulpapedesigns

Design site: paulpapedesigns.com

Books: Search "Gamify Business" on Amazon

About the Show

The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera and features candid, unscripted conversations with SEO practitioners, agency owners, and marketing leaders. New episodes drop weekly at unscriptedseo.com.

Jules’ PhD research on creativity and innovativeness turned up something counterintuitive: no single personality trait guarantees a creative leader, but one trait reliably destroys creativity — rigidity. “If you are rigid and inert, you can’t show creativity or innovativeness, even if you have them as natural gifts.” Her work since has been helping founders debug their mindset.

What we cover

• Why rigidity and inertia are the single biggest blockers of creativity and innovation
• The freeze response — the stress reaction beyond fight-or-flight — and why chronic business stress makes freeze a founder’s default state
• Why the amygdala doesn’t block creativity, but does block innovativeness, which needs slower thinking and lower emotional load
• What creativity means in a stucco, window, or home-services business: the way you make decisions and build relationships
• Authenticity as alignment and consistency — not a facade
• Empathy and authentic leadership as the foundation of market-product fit
• Over-engineering in SaaS, and how teams misread what users actually need
• The airplane oxygen-mask rule for founders: set your own boundaries on terms, money, and time first
• The psychology of websites — your site as a “virtual home,” built on your own land, not borrowed land
• Where AI belongs in a workflow, and where a human has to stay in the loop
• The hidden emotional crises of the founder’s journey, and consulting under strict NDA

Quotable

“Without action, business is just having good idea.”

“Business is an activity created by humans for humans. And for humans it’s never enough to do the right thing or to use the right tool. It’s always about feeling right while using the right tools or doing the right thing.”

“Creativity is by design the way you make decisions.”

About the guest

Dr. Julika Novkova, PhD, is a business psychologist and the founder of Juls’ Psychology, a business-psychology consulting practice working with founders, startups, and small businesses on organizational health, creativity, and innovation. She shares free frameworks at julspsy.com and is most active on LinkedIn.

Links

• Full recap and show notes: The Human Side of Small Business
• Watch on YouTube: Debug Your Mindset: Why Rigidity Kills Creativity
• More episodes: Unscripted Small Business

Key takeaways

• The feedback loop is measured in years. A bad decision in property management takes a very long time to reveal itself, which changes how you should decide anything.
• References are worthless, small test jobs are not. No vendor ever supplies a bad reference, so he vets with a cheap job instead.
• Churn is the industry’s quiet number. The average is around twenty per cent a year. His runs closer to ten.
• Remote forces the systems to be real. Running Houston from San Diego removed every option that depended on him being in the room.
• The Texas property code changes every two years. Compliance is not a one-off project, it is a subscription.
• He answers the investing question honestly. Including the part where it is not worth it for everyone.

On this page

• A feedback loop measured in years
• Vetting vendors with small jobs
• Houston from San Diego
• The code changes every two years
• Is rental investing actually worth it
• Where AI helps and where it does not
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

A feedback loop measured in years

When property management’s done well, when you have a system, it looks easy from the outside.

— Cameron Tope

The structural problem in this business is that mistakes are slow. Place the wrong tenant and you find out in eighteen months. Choose the wrong contractor and it surfaces two winters later. There is no fast experiment available.

Which means the discipline has to come from process rather than from learning, because the learning arrives far too late to be useful.

Vetting vendors with small jobs

I’ve found that no vendor, even the ones that were bad, put down bad references.

— Cameron Tope

So the reference check is theatre. What he does instead is an application, proof of insurance and licensing, and then a small job. The small job tells you about communication, timekeeping and honesty for a fraction of what finding out later costs.

After every work order the tenant gets a one to five survey, and the results feed quarterly and annual reviews. That is a feedback loop short enough to actually act on, deliberately built inside one that is not.

It’s not like we’re gonna capture money at the expense of the owner.

— Cameron Tope

That line is aimed at the fee-stacking common in the industry, where the management company quietly earns on every charge passed to a tenant or an owner.

Houston from San Diego

If I have to be involved in every decision, we’re never, never gonna grow.

— Cameron Tope

Moving away from the market forced every informal process to become an explicit one. He could no longer be the fallback for anything, which is the constraint most owner-operators never impose on themselves.

The company has around three hundred five-star reviews and roughly six hundred videos published, which is what the systematisation buys back: capacity for the work that compounds.

The code changes every two years

Texas rewrites its property code on a two-year cycle, and the changes are granular enough to be easy to miss. The day a late fee can be charged has moved more than once.

I think one other thing about the legal side of the business is just pick your battles.

— Cameron Tope

He uses outside counsel by speciality rather than a single firm, which is the same vendor logic applied to lawyers.

Is rental investing actually worth it

He asks himself the question a prospective client would ask and answers it without the pitch. For some people it is not worth it, and he says so.

to me sitting on a pile of money doesn’t do anything. It’s just inert.

— Cameron Tope

His own route into it was defensive rather than entrepreneurial. He was a petroleum engineer at BP when oil went from a hundred and twenty dollars a barrel to about thirty inside a year, and bought a rental because the career suddenly looked fragile.

Where AI helps and where it does not

Maintenance triage and communications summarising are the two places it is genuinely earning its keep, stitched together with automation tooling he cheerfully calls a Frankenstein stack.

On being found by AI tools, he falls back on the things that were always true: reviews and relationships with local agents. Which is a more honest answer than most people give.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• Why is property management so hard to get right?
• How do I vet a contractor or vendor properly?
• What is a normal client churn rate in property management?
• Can you run a property management company remotely?
• How often do landlord and tenant laws change?
• Is buying rental property actually worth it?
• Where is AI genuinely useful in property management?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Cameron’s second conversation, on speed to lead and wasted marketing budget.
• The full written recap of this episode.
• Alex Zweydoff on marketing to owners rather than tenants, the agency side of the same industry.

Find Cameron Tope

Emerson Property Management has an accidental landlord starter kit on the site. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.

Cite this episode

Tope, Cameron. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Building a Property Management Company With Integrity.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscripted-small-business.castos.com/episodes/cameron-tope-building-a-property-management-company-with-integrity-1

What We Cover

• Why property management has a long feedback loop — and why shortcuts show up as $20K–$40K make-ready bills six to twelve months later
• Cameron's QA/QC vendor system: how he vets, tests, and fires vendors using post-maintenance tenant surveys
• Cash flow predictability in property management, private equity's entrance into the space, and the tenant fee problem
• The legal side: Texas Property Code changes every two years, and why Cameron now picks his battles carefully
• Whether rental property investing is actually worth it — and what the internet hype machine gets wrong

Episode Highlights

The Long Feedback Loop

Cameron opens with one of the most honest framings I've heard for why property management is so hard to do well. He calls it the long feedback loop: if you bend a tenant qualification or defer a repair today, you won't know the damage for six months to a year. By the time you walk into the property, you could be looking at a total gut job. It's why systems aren't optional — they're what makes the Emerson approach look effortless from the outside, like Usain Bolt gliding when there's actually fifteen years of compounding work underneath it.

Vendor Vetting That Actually Works

Cameron's vendor process is one of the most replicable frameworks in this episode. He doesn't trust references — no bad vendor ever lists a bad one — so he starts every new contractor with tiny test jobs. Prove yourself on a sink trap before you touch anything bigger. The accountability layer on top is a post-maintenance tenant survey scored one through five, tracked per vendor every quarter and every year. He shared two unforgettable examples of what that system catches — and why continuous review beats a one-time background check.

Cash Flow and the Private Equity Wave

The property management business runs at about twenty percent annual client churn across the industry. Cameron runs Emerson at around ten. That stickiness, combined with geographic diversification across Houston, makes revenue projections very predictable — and it's exactly why private equity is flooding in. Cameron is direct about what happens next: fees get layered onto tenants until both sides are being squeezed. You can read more about how Emerson structures its pricing to stay aligned with owners rather than extracting from them.

Running Houston From San Diego

Cameron moved to San Diego three or four years ago and never moved the business back. His biggest fear was that things would fall apart without him on the ground. They didn't — because the move forced him to build the processes that made remote management possible. If you have to be in every decision, he says, you're never going to grow. The systems either work without you or you don't really have a business.

Connect with Cameron Tope

Website: emersonpropertymanagement.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/cameron-tope-57008994/

YouTube: youtube.com/@emersonpm

Company LinkedIn: Emerson Property Management

About the Show

The Unscripted Small Business Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera and features candid, unscripted conversations with small business owners, founders, and operators about what it actually takes to build and run a business. New episodes drop weekly at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.

Key takeaways

• AI on bad data does not fail, it accelerates. You get wrong answers faster and with more confidence.
• A wrong prior period carries forward forever. Which is why the clean-up has to come before the automation.
• Most small businesses cannot attribute a lead. That is why they resist paid marketing, and they are not wrong to.
• The cash conversion cycle is the model that matters. Cost of a lead, cost of inputs, and the gap between paying and being paid.
• Fake citations are a process failure, not a junior failure. The people getting caught have half-adopted the workflow.
• Models fold under the mildest pushback. Confident answer, then instant reversal, which is the worst combination in regulated work.

On this page

• Accelerated inaccuracy
• The cash conversion cycle
• Why professionals resist paid marketing
• Holding both licences
• The fake citation problem
• Confident, then instantly not
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Accelerated inaccuracy

With all the advancements in technology and AI, it is trying to plug in some of those tools on the accounting side, for example, with inaccurate fundamental data. And so you just get really accelerated, inaccurate information.

— Knight Lancaster

So if the prior end point is wrong, it just carries the wrong information forward.

— Knight Lancaster

Accounting compounds by design. Every period starts from the last one, so an error does not sit still, it propagates. Automating on top of that does not introduce the problem, it multiplies it and makes it harder to see.

Which reverses the usual order of operations. Clean the books, then automate. Almost everyone does it the other way round because automation is the exciting half.

The cash conversion cycle

Asked for the financial models that actually serve a small business, he goes to the cash conversion cycle rather than anything more sophisticated.

• What does a lead cost you, all in.
• What do your inputs cost, and how fast do they move.
• How long between paying for something and being paid for it.
• How much cash has to sit in the gap so the business survives a slow month.

It is not clever and it is the thing that kills profitable businesses, which is the point.

Why professionals resist paid marketing

Most don’t have the infrastructure to track incoming leads, to attribute the, you know, really the source of the leads.

— Knight Lancaster

Professional services firms are frequently accused of being marketing-averse. Knight offers a more sympathetic explanation. Their compensation models credit whoever brought the revenue in, and without attribution nobody can prove the advertising did.

So the spending looks like a cost centre with no owner, and it gets cut. Fix the tracking and the resistance largely dissolves.

Holding both licences

Because they’re normally saying opposite things and frankly a lot of times don’t have a huge incentive to work together.

— Knight Lancaster

The lawyer optimises for protection. The accountant optimises for tax. Left to themselves those two produce contradictory instructions, and the owner is the one who has to referee a subject they do not know.

His accounting firm concentrates on law firms specifically, where trust accounting and attorney billing software are a genuine moat, and he positions the offer as a whole accounting department rather than a bookkeeper or a fractional finance director.

The fake citation problem

But I think the biggest issue is they have halfway leaned into the process.

— Knight Lancaster

The lawyers filing briefs with invented case law are not, on his account, careless juniors. They are senior people who adopted the tool and skipped the verification step that a junior would have been required to perform.

It is a process gap dressed up as a technology story, and the fix is the boring one.

Confident, then instantly not

You get a confident response, but the second you say, hey, I don’t think that’s right, I mean, you don’t have to push that hard.

— Knight Lancaster

In law and finance that combination is worse than being wrong. A tool that is confidently incorrect and then instantly agrees with whatever you suggest cannot be used as a check on anything, because it will simply reflect the user back at themselves.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• What happens when you automate accounting on bad data?
• What financial model should a small business actually run?
• Why do law firms and accountants avoid paid marketing?
• Why would someone hold both a CPA and an attorney licence?
• How are lawyers ending up with fake citations in filings?
• Can you trust an AI answer in a regulated field?
• What regulatory surprises catch small businesses out?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Meaghan Wall on commingled funds and offer profitability, the same clean-books argument from the accounting side.
• The written recap of this conversation.
• Unscripted Small Business, for the rest of the owner interviews.

Find Knight Lancaster

The law firm and the accounting firm run separately, both from middle Tennessee.

Cite this episode

Lancaster, Knight. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Navigating Finances, Marketing and Law in Tennessee.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscripted-small-business.castos.com/episodes/knight-lancaster-navigating-finances-marketing-law-in-tn

Key takeaways

• Bookkeepers lump all revenue into one line. Which hides the fact that your best-selling offer may be your least profitable.
• Commingling funds voids the protection you formed the company for. Her hot take, and she means it literally.
• Fractional is not freelance. Bookkeeper, finance director and tax under one roof, deliberately not sold separately.
• Windfall revenue needs a different cash plan. Including negotiating when contractors get paid, so the peaks fund the troughs.
• State tax rules vary more than people expect. California wants sales reported county by county.
• Her accounting software is wrong about forty-five per cent of the time. She uses it daily and checks all of it.

On this page

• Flying blind on offer profitability
• The hot take about commingled funds
• What fractional actually buys you
• Cash flow when income arrives in lumps
• State nexus and sales tax
• Software that is wrong forty-five per cent of the time
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Flying blind on offer profitability

a lot of my clients come to me because they don’t have insight into their offer suite profitability.

— Meaghan Wall

The mechanism is dull and expensive. A standard bookkeeping setup records revenue as revenue. It does not split it by product, so the business can see that it made money overall and cannot see which of its five offers is subsidising the other four.

The consequence is that people scale the wrong thing. The offer that sells most is often the one with the worst margin, and without the split there is no way to know.

The hot take about commingled funds

So if you have an LLC, if you have an S Corp, if you have a C Corp, any of these things, you are indefensible if you are commingling your funds.

— Meaghan Wall

This is the one she wants owners to act on immediately, because it is not an accounting preference. The whole point of the corporate structure is separation, and paying for personal things from the business account is evidence that no separation exists.

The fix costs nothing. Separate accounts, and a genuine transfer when money moves between them.

What fractional actually buys you

Her agency sells the whole finance function rather than a role. A bookkeeper doing the recording, a finance director doing the thinking, and a tax specialist doing the filing, deliberately not available separately.

The argument for bundling is that the failures happen in the gaps. The bookkeeper does not know what the tax position needs, the tax preparer sees the year once it is over, and nobody owns the connection between them.

The first thirty days are always the same: clean the books until they would survive scrutiny, then set up the account structure the business will run on.

Cash flow when income arrives in lumps

I always say that cash flow is queen and it’s also baby, right?

— Meaghan Wall

Creator and agency businesses often earn in bursts. A launch, a large contract, a seasonal spike, and then quiet. Standard advice built around even monthly revenue does not survive that shape.

Her practical lever is the payment timing on the cost side. Negotiating when contractors invoice and get paid moves the outgoings towards the months when the money is actually there, which is cheaper than borrowing and easier than forecasting.

State nexus and sales tax

Selling online means selling into jurisdictions that have opinions about it. Nexus rules decide where you owe, and they are not intuitive.

California is her example of the worst case, requiring sales to be reported county by county rather than as a single state figure. It is the sort of obligation that goes unnoticed until it is several years old.

Software that is wrong forty-five per cent of the time

But you’re always going to need a human eye on those things because I would say probably 45 % of the time it’s wrong.

— Meaghan Wall

She is not against the tooling. She uses it every day for scanning bank feeds and categorising expenses, and simply treats it as a first pass rather than an answer.

And I think the more you use AI, the better you get at prompting it and the better you get at knowing, what can I use this for successfully

— Meaghan Wall

Which is the honest version of AI adoption in a regulated field. The skill being built is knowing where it fails.

it’s all using the system, the tax system to your advantage, which I am fully for.

— Meaghan Wall

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• How do I find out which of my offers is actually profitable?
• Does mixing business and personal money really matter?
• What is a fractional CFO and when do I need one?
• How do I manage cash flow with irregular income?
• Where do I owe sales tax if I sell online?
• Can I trust AI bookkeeping software?
• What does an accountant fix first in a messy set of books?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• The full written recap of this conversation.
• Knight Lancaster on why automating bad books makes things worse.
• She is on Instagram as @thehotgirlcfo.

Find Meaghan Wall

The Hot Girl CFO covers fractional finance direction, bookkeeping and tax under one roof.

Cite this episode

Wall, Meaghan. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Stop Flying Blind on Profit.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscripted-small-business.castos.com/episodes/meaghan-wall-says-stop-flying-blind-on-profit-the-hot-girl-cfo-on-offer-profitability-commingled-f

Guest: Mason McCumber, SEO and AI expert — buildwithmm.com Host: Jeremy Rivera

About Mason McCumber

Mason McCumber is an SEO and AI expert based in Houston, Texas. He has built hundreds of tools and resources to help business owners and individuals learn and apply AI and SEO strategies. He consults with startups and private equity-backed companies and runs buildwithmm.com, where he publishes guides, tools, and training content.

What We Cover

→ The shift from manual AI prompting to agentic workflows — and why most business owners are stuck being the driver instead of the dispatcher → How to reduce AI hallucination and drift using persistent memory, feedback loops, and Obsidian markdown logging → Why all major AI models produce similar output and what that means for content differentiation → Using automation (Zapier, Make) alongside AI for genuinely repeatable business tasks → Practical wins with AI-powered PowerPoint, Excel formulas, and project management — plus Mason's upcoming ZapTime.ai

Episode Highlights

Mason opens with a memorable analogy: the AI engine has always been powerful, but most business owners have been driving the car themselves. Agentic tools like OpenClaw, Copilot, and Codex mean the AI can now drive — users only need to act as dispatchers, defining the destination and correcting the route when needed.

On AI reliability, Mason is refreshingly candid: he personally does not use AI to write most of his own content. He observes that mass-produced AI content increasingly lacks soul, and predicts Google will penalize it more aggressively. His recommendation is to pair human insight with AI execution — not replace one with the other.

For long-term AI memory, Mason relies on Obsidian — a markdown-based note system that creates a searchable, persistent database of transcripts, meetings, and working documents. He pairs this with a critical rule: always instruct AI to leave a clear trace of its steps. Repeatability, he argues, is scalability.

Mason closes with concrete wins for any business: using AI to generate HTML-based slide presentations instead of PowerPoint, automating Excel formulas, and his upcoming ZapTime.ai for AI-assisted time and task tracking. His single best recommendation for business owners with teams is to use AI for project management first.

Connect with Mason McCumber

Website: buildwithmm.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/masonmccumber Upcoming: ZapTime.ai — AI-assisted time tracking and task management

Key Topics

• The importance of face-to-face engagement in marketing efforts for small businesses
• Balancing AI tools with authentic connection and communication
• Narrowing business focus and utilizing data to track progress
• Creative approaches for marketing in non-sexy, technical niches
• Strategies for strategic planning, goal setting, and team alignment
• Building a legacy through core values and community involvement
• Cash flow management and adapting to seasonal ebbs and flows
• The significance of team training, internal communication, and incentive systems

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction to Kate Hendrickson and her approach to strategy
00:16 - The multifaceted life of Kate and her experience in leadership and consulting
01:26 - How small businesses can develop marketing strategies in 2026
02:07 - The value of face-to-face and personal interactions as key marketing tactics
03:02 - The challenges and authenticity concerns with AI and social media
04:40 - Over-reliance on SaaS tools versus human connection in marketing
05:54 - The responsible use of AI: efficiency vs. inauthenticity
06:55 - Using AI for practical day-to-day tasks, including education for children
07:23 - The analogy of AI like Waymo — human oversight still necessary
07:59 - Approaching creative marketing in technical or "boring" niches
08:35 - How values and vision influence marketing and branding in less glamorous industries
09:35 - Engaging with community and building trust through core values
10:04 - Narrowing focus and leveraging storytelling for small business growth
11:49 - The common pitfalls of small business business plans
13:08 - Using data and metrics to track progress effectively
15:08 - Practical advice on website analytics and conversion tracking for SMBs
16:24 - The importance of accountability partners for reactive small business owners
17:52 - Questions around planning for exit and succession in small business strategy
19:31 - Incorporating social good and legacy-building in your company’s mission
21:09 - How to foster community and culture within your organization
22:50 - Managing cash flow and financial metrics, including Profit First alternatives
25:54 - Seasonality and adapting operations for seasonal ebbs and flows
26:28 - Easy entry points for marketing check-ins with clients
27:20 - Customized solutions for marketing gaps and ongoing partnership
29:43 - Key topics discussed but not yet addressed (team development and communication)
30:31 - Communicating goals effectively to your team for aligned growth
31:32 - Building incentivization and recognition systems for employee engagement
32:15 - The importance of human connection over superficial perks like pizza
33:35 - Creating a workplace environment where employees care and innovate
34:09 - The ongoing role of human relationships in a tech-driven business world
35:08 - Lessons learned from mismanaging human resources and balancing investment
37:07 - Why valuing experienced employees can be a strategic advantage
37:49 - How to connect with Kate Hendrickson and collaborate on strategy
38:25 - Final thoughts and contact information

Resources & Links

• TheStrategieLane.com — Kate Hendrickson's website
• Kate Hendrickson on LinkedIn
• Kate Hendrickson on Instagram

Connect with Kate Hendrickson

• Website: thestrategielane.com
• LinkedIn: Kate Hendrickson
• Instagram: @katehendrickson

Key Topics

• The importance of planning your business exit early, even when growth is the focus
• Differentiating between lifestyle businesses and companies built for sale
• How to intentionally build systems and processes for long-term value
• Key legal documents like operating agreements and their evolving role
• Creating a resilient company culture rooted in mission, values, and intentional hiring
• The pros and cons of franchise models and geographical expansion
• Partnership considerations: when to collaborate, how to align goals, and managing conflicts
• The impact of industry specifics on regional and national expansion strategies
• Brandon’s advice on overcoming pride and seeking mentorship for business growth
• Handling family-owned businesses and balancing personal relationships with professional success
• Practical tools, assessments, and upcoming book for transitioning from job to asset

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction to Brandon Moon and TD Pine Advisors
02:00 - Why all business owners should plan their exit strategy from the start
04:10 - Differentiating lifestyle vs. growth-oriented businesses
06:00 - Building systems and processes for long-term value
08:15 - Key legal documents: operating agreements and their importance
10:20 - Cultivating a company culture that survives leadership changes
12:30 - The role of mission, values, and culture in a successful business
14:40 - Expanding geographically: regional considerations and market research
16:30 - When and why to consider partnerships in business growth
17:50 - Brandon’s hot take: Pride as a barrier to success
19:00 - Family businesses: managing relationships and succession planning
20:50 - Practical assessments and resources to prepare your business for exit
22:15 - Connecting with Brandon Moon and upcoming book release

Resources & Links

• TD Pine Advisors
• Exit Readiness Assessment
• Brandon Moon on LinkedIn
• Upcoming Book: From Job to Asset

Connect with Brandon

• LinkedIn: Brandon Moon
• Website: tdpineadvisors.com

In this episode, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Juliana Weiss-Roessler, co-founder of WR Digital Marketing, to talk about the marketing habits that separate thriving small businesses from those stuck in a perpetual feast-and-famine cycle. With 15 years of experience working directly with business owners — plus deep experience in nonprofit marketing dating back to her work with TV's Dog Whisperer — Juliana brings a refreshingly grounded perspective to email marketing, local SEO, client relationships, and why marketing as a to-do list almost never works.

Key Topics Covered

• Why nonprofits need to operate like businesses — and what for-profit companies can learn from serving two audiences at once
• Email marketing as the highest-ownership, most overlooked channel for small businesses
• How social platforms have reduced organic reach to 1–2% and why building your email list is the antidote
• The retargeting bridge: using your email list as a custom audience for paid campaigns
• Local vs. national SEO — and why owning a regional pond beats chasing a national ocean
• Stop treating marketing as a to-do list — and start treating it as a business process with measurement and iteration
• The real low-hanging fruit for every new client: their existing customer base
• Imposter syndrome, client honesty, and what happens when egos override expert advice

About Our Guest

Juliana Weiss-Roessler is co-founder of WR Digital Marketing, a full-service digital marketing agency based in Austin, TX. WR Digital works with small businesses and nonprofits across industries including legal, health, pet care, and nonprofit sectors. Juliana's experience spans 15+ years and includes content strategy for over 75 small businesses and the Emmy-nominated Dog Whisperer series.

Guest Links

• WR Digital Marketing
• Free SMB Marketing Strategy Toolkit
• Email Marketing Services
• LinkedIn: Juliana Weiss-Roessler
• Instagram: @weissroessler

Host Links

• Jeremy Rivera — About
• Unscripted SEO Podcast

Resources Mentioned

• Keep America Beautiful — community event partnership programs
• Digital Goliath Blog — Marketing Insights — performance marketing perspective

Episode Timestamps

• 00:00 — Introduction & Juliana's background
• 01:36 — Navigating nonprofit marketing
• 03:54 — Community partnerships and nonprofit SEO
• 06:17 — Email marketing vs. social media
• 08:13 — The Helpful Content Update and platform dependence
• 11:31 — Local vs. national SEO strategy
• 15:44 — The soapbox: marketing as a process
• 18:10 — Client story: dog training event (1 to 8 conversions)
• 20:10 — Understanding the full client business model
• 22:08 — Agency-client communication and meeting cadence
• 23:54 — Imposter syndrome and honesty in client relationships
• 26:00 — Skilled help vs. strategic help
• 28:37 — The space cooler keyword story
• 32:11 — Low-hanging fruit: existing customers
• 33:35 — Outro and resources

Key takeaways

• The customer is the hero. Your business is the guide. Most marketing copy has this exactly backwards, and reads as though the product were the protagonist.
• A vision statement and a mission statement are different documents. One describes the mountain. The other describes the path up it.
• Twenty-five to thirty words, no jargon. His rule for both, and his reason: nobody can leverage a statement nobody remembers, including the board that approved it.
• Boring products are only boring to people who do not need them. Underneath the external problem sits an internal one, and underneath that a sense of injustice.
• Winning the machines is now a third job. Make the site readable, make the content substantive, and prove that other humans trust you.

On this page

• The customer is the hero, and you are not
• Vision, mission, and thirty words
• Making a car battery interesting
• Getting the machines to trust you
• Chapters and timestamps
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

The customer is the hero, and you are not

But if you want an effective marketing message, you need to write one in which the customer is the hero.

— Bruce Ashford

He walks the pattern out in full, and it is worth following even if you think you know it. A hero wants something. A problem appears that is too big to solve alone. A guide arrives briefly, shows empathy and credibility, hands over a plan, calls the hero to action, and names what happens if they act and if they do not.

The guide in the story is your business. You’re the guide. You appear briefly. You’re in the story, but you’re not the hero of it.

— Bruce Ashford

His explanation for why so much marketing misses this is structural rather than a matter of taste. Marketing split into specialisms, social, user experience, design, build, and the one discipline that got dropped along the way was the message itself.

It’s a storyline of every movie that’s ever sold tickets. There’s a few indie movies that don’t follow the storyline. They also don’t sell tickets.

— Bruce Ashford

Vision, mission, and thirty words

A vision statement is a statement of the mountain that your small business or nonprofit intends to scale.

— Bruce Ashford

The mission statement is, and here’s the path we’re going to take to reach the peak of that mountain.

— Bruce Ashford

Then the constraint that makes them usable: twenty-five to thirty words, no technical jargon, and not an opportunity for everyone in the C-suite to insert a favourite phrase. He is scathing about the usual output, and specific about why it fails. It cannot be leveraged as marketing because nobody remembers it, including the people who voted it in.

The words that we use to talk about ourselves are the differentiating factor between whether a person buys or doesn’t buy, whether they donate or don’t donate.

— Bruce Ashford

Making a car battery interesting

Handed the hardest version of the question, he takes it apart into three layers. External: I need a battery. Internal: I am tired of replacing it every eighteen months, I work two jobs and I have three kids. And then the third one, which is the layer nobody writes to.

Every car owner deserves a battery that lasts longer than a year and a half. That is a justice claim, and it is what turns a dull product into something a person recognises themselves in.

Marketing is not manipulation, it’s not spin.

— Bruce Ashford

His defence of that is simple. If the pattern is followed honestly, all you have done is describe the customer’s actual experience back to them in their own language and shown that you can fix it.

Getting the machines to trust you

He splits it into three categories and admits the first is the dullest. Make the back end genuinely readable by machines, because they are optimising for effort.

The machines are looking to conserve calories.

— Bruce Ashford

Second, publish content substantive enough and human enough that a model treats you as an authority. His one concrete tip is an expandable FAQ on the homepage and other significant pages, asked in the language a customer would actually use and answered the same way.

The third category is you have to show the AI that other human beings trust you.

— Bruce Ashford

Reviews that name the business and ideally the product. Two audiences to win rather than one, as he puts it, with no pressure. For the technical half of that, the machine-readable companion file is the step-by-step version, and the playbook for shaping what the models repeat about a brand covers the trust half.

Chapters

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• How do I write a marketing message that actually persuades?
• What is the difference between a vision statement and a mission statement?
• How long should a mission statement be?
• How do you market a boring product?
• Should a mission-driven business become a nonprofit?
• How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT or Claude?
• Can AI write good marketing copy on its own?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• a nonprofit consultant on why the marketing is not landing, from the same corner of the sector.
• a fractional CFO on the cash-flow question he closes with, which is the thing he names as his own weakest area.
• Brett Schklar on AI taking tasks rather than jobs, for the other half of the argument about what a machine can be handed.

Find Bruce Ashford

theashfordagency.com. He is clear about what he does not do, which is SEO and graphic design, and equally clear about the two things he does.

Cite this episode

Ashford, Bruce. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Why Your Customer Is the Hero and You Are Not.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscriptedseo.com/why-your-customer-is-the-hero-and-youre-not-with-bruce-ashford/

His book is called 168 Hours, after the number everybody gets. As he puts it, the NBA MVP has the same week as the last man on the bench. One of them just spends it differently.

What you'll hear

• The pie chart split three ways - work, family, rest - and why taking from one always means giving from another
• Why a weekly cadence beats a daily or a monthly one, argued through diet and fitness
• Analysis paralysis, and his blunt read that the same people will find the next obstacle to stand behind
• The book as a worksheet whose deliverable is your own business plan, not somebody else's
• What a youth soccer player emailing "I have less than an 80, I'm sitting out this game" teaches about accountability
• Succession he lived rather than advised on, when his father died and his brother took over the family business

The episode turns unusually candid partway through. Zaneta says out loud that she is thinking of closing her own side business, and Chris coaches her on air instead of selling to her. His answer is that there is no right answer - go do, reflect, adjust, repeat.

The full write-up is here: What a CPA and Attorney Taught Me About Reclaiming My 168 Hours.

Chris practices law at Papin Law Firm and posts regularly on LinkedIn. 168 Hours is on Amazon under his name.

More small business conversations at Unscripted Small Business. Hosted by Zaneta Chuniq Inpower.

The route there was not linear: near-professional eSports, a computer science course in Brazil, pandemic dropshipping from China, a $1M info product, then nutraceuticals.

“I even took a bit of loss on my first month and I was thinking about giving up.” — Thiago Cordeiro

What he actually explains

• The funnel. Roughly 90% of traffic through Meta, the rest native. The offer is a 40 to 50 minute video sales letter built on a story and a unique mechanism, shown to people who have never heard of the brand.
• Loss in month one, seven figures in month three. He lost $10-15K in his first month in supplements, made adjustments, was profitable in month two.
• Where AI stops. He uses it for audience research and first-pass structure, and is blunt that copy written end to end by a model lands on the same generic promises as everyone else.
• Why the front end can break even. Affiliates get a fixed CPA that flattens front-end margin. The money is on the backend: email, SMS, coaching, nutrition guidance.
• Scaling past yourself. Pick a business partner who is your opposite, then stop being the operator.

The written recap, with the affiliate economics laid out, is here: Thiago Cordeiro: zero to seven figures with direct response.

“Use AI for research and maybe write the base structure of the scripts, but then you gotta come in and review with your expertise.” — Thiago Cordeiro

“You need to know how to become a leader and train other people to become leaders at their departments.” — Thiago Cordeiro

Related episodes

On the delegation problem Thiago describes, Andrew Poles on why scaling yourself is the key to scaling your company. For the other side of the affiliate relationship, Holly Homer on affiliate marketing and AI slop is the publisher's view of the same channel. And on handing paid media to a machine, what full AI PPC management actually looks like.

Key takeaways

• Zero point zero is a positioning decision, not a chemistry one. Stripping the THC out entirely turns a regulatory patchwork into a much simpler sales conversation.
• The 2018 farm bill created a problem it never intended. The synthetic cannabinoid market followed from a definition, not a policy.
• Restricted categories are sandboxed. Trust takes far longer to build when the platform starts from suspicion.
• Doing it right shows slowly. Doing it wrong shows immediately. That asymmetry is the whole emotional difficulty of learning search.
• He deliberately refuses to launch constantly. Twenty years of corporate brand management taught him the opposite habit and he had to unlearn it.
• Momentum is the hot take. Habit stacking, applied to health and to the business at the same time.

On this page

• Why zero point zero
• The mushroom blend
• A patchwork, not a rulebook
• Six months, ten hours a day
• Slow on purpose
• The momentum machine
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Why zero point zero

Full-spectrum extract keeps trace THC under the legal threshold. Kyoto adds a further step and removes it entirely, reaching non-detectable.

The reason is commercial as much as chemical. A product with no THC in it at all sidesteps a whole category of state-level argument, workplace testing anxiety and platform advertising refusal. It costs more to make and it removes several conversations you would otherwise have to win.

The mushroom blend

Lion’s mane, reishi, chaga and cordyceps, dual extracted to break down the cell walls, blended with raw cacao. Not psychedelic, and he is careful to say so before anyone asks.

He leaned on an outside specialist to formulate it rather than assuming his hemp expertise transferred, which is the same instinct that shows up everywhere else in the episode.

A patchwork, not a rulebook

The 2018 farm bill defined hemp by THC content, and the synthetic cannabinoid market grew out of the gap that definition left. His view is that the bill was never aimed at what it produced.

Because the regulator does not treat these as dietary supplements, oversight falls to the buyer.

Since the FDA isn’t regulating it as a dietary supplement, it’s really important that individual consumers do the research on the product and the brand they’re buying.

— Mark Gilliland

Which is why lab result transparency is the marketing, not an appendix to it.

Six months, ten hours a day

I’ve literally spent the last six months, at least 10 hours a day, seven days a week, teaching myself SEO and just breaking things fast on my site and fixing them and learning.

— Mark Gilliland

In my very short experience going from zero to 100 on SEO in six months: doing stuff right, you don’t see results for a very long time and you just have to have faith. But when you do something wrong, I’ve seen it real fast.

— Mark Gilliland

That asymmetry is the honest description of learning this work, and it is why so many people give up in month three.

In this category, trying to rank for ‘CBD gummies’ is just not going to happen for 99% of brands. Google sandboxes you just because you’re in a restricted category, and it takes a long time to build trust.

— Mark Gilliland

The counter-argument for hiring help is the plumber parable that comes up mid-episode: five pounds for hitting the pipe, ninety-five for knowing which pipe to hit.

Slow on purpose

I spent way too long in corporate brand management where if you’re not launching a new SKU every month, you’ve failed.

— Mark Gilliland

I deliberately keep everything very slow and methodical and simple.

— Mark Gilliland

Five products in six years is a deliberate refusal of the habit he was trained into. Each addition has to earn its place rather than filling a quarterly slot.

It’s a buffet — try everything and build your plate how you want.

— Mark Gilliland

The momentum machine

His closing argument is about habit stacking, and it applies to both halves of his life. Small changes attached to existing routines, accumulating until the direction of travel changes on its own.

He wrote up the conversation on his own site as well, in the full episode recap.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• What does THC-free actually mean on a hemp product?
• Which functional mushrooms are in a typical blend and why dual extract them?
• How is CBD regulated, and who is checking?
• Can you learn SEO yourself in six months?
• Why is it so hard to rank in a restricted category?
• Should a small brand launch products constantly?
• What is habit stacking and does it work in a business?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Chelsea Jambo on building a wellness brand around education, a close relative of this episode.
• The SEO Tactic Library, for the plays Mark was working out the hard way.
• Unscripted Small Business, for the rest of the owner interviews.

Find Mark Gilliland

Kyoto Botanicals sells direct, and publishes lab results for every batch.

Cite this episode

Gilliland, Mark. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “From Botanicals to Business.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscripted-small-business.castos.com/episodes/from-botanicals-to-business-hemp-mushrooms-the-seo-journey

Key takeaways

• Autonomous means end to end. Not suggestions for a human to approve. Hundreds of agents processing hundreds of thousands of data points an hour.
• Ninety to ninety-five per cent of inherited accounts are misconfigured. Businesses losing money with no idea why.
• A landing page per ad variant, deployed automatically. The thing agencies promise and almost never actually do.
• Eighty per cent of customers arrive through AI tools. With no advertising spend of his own, which is its own case study.
• Hallucination is handled with context, not hope. Custom training and tight grounding rather than trusting a general model with a budget.
• His hot take: the traditional agency model has an expiry date. He would say that, and he has the managed spend to argue from.

On this page

• What autonomous actually means
• The accounts he inherits
• One landing page per variant
• Keeping a model away from the budget
• Found by machines
• The expiry date
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

What autonomous actually means

We are now essentially replacing entire Google Ads teams. It runs itself 24-7 — measurably better than what a human can do.

— David Pourquery

The claim is stronger than the usual automation pitch because there is no approval step. Campaign structure, bidding, creative variants and budget allocation are all handled by the system, continuously, at a rate no team could match.

Whether that is comfortable is a separate question from whether it works, and he is not especially interested in making it comfortable.

The accounts he inherits

90, 95% of the accounts we take over — what we see is really tough. Businesses losing money with absolutely no idea why.

— David Pourquery

This is the more useful half of the episode for anyone not buying his product. The baseline is terrible. Conversion tracking that fires on the wrong event, campaign types the account should never have used, budgets pointed at terms that never converted.

Which means most of the improvement any competent operator delivers in month one is not sophistication. It is repair.

He also handles the budget overspend behaviour the platform is known for, where daily caps are exceeded on the platform’s own terms.

One landing page per variant

Dynamic landing pages, one per ad variant, deployed automatically. It is the single most obvious idea in paid search and almost nobody does it, because at human speed the maintenance cost is prohibitive.

Remove the maintenance cost and the message match becomes free, which is where a meaningful share of the performance gain sits.

Keeping a model away from the budget

The obvious objection to autonomous spending is that these systems make things up. His answer is custom-trained models with tightly controlled context rather than a general assistant given a credit card.

It is the same lesson every serious deployment reaches. The reliability comes from what you feed it and what you refuse to let it decide, not from the model being clever.

Found by machines

I haven’t spent a dime on marketing. 80% of our customers come from LLMs recommending Groas.

— David Pourquery

A company selling advertising automation growing entirely without advertising is a neat piece of evidence for a shift a lot of people are still arguing about.

It is also a narrow case. A new category with few named competitors is exactly the situation where a model has to recommend somebody, and being the clearest description of the category wins.

The expiry date

His hot take is that the traditional agency model is finished. He is selling the replacement, so weigh it accordingly, but the argument is not empty: if execution is automated and the accounts were mostly misconfigured anyway, what remains is strategy, and strategy is a much smaller retainer.

Next on the roadmap is broader campaign type support, continued model improvement and possibly other advertising platforms.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• What does fully autonomous PPC management mean?
• How many Google Ads accounts are actually set up correctly?
• Should every ad variant have its own landing page?
• How do you stop an AI system hallucinating with a budget?
• Can a company grow without spending on marketing?
• Are people really finding software through AI tools?
• Is the traditional agency model finished?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Zeke Camusio on why the measurement underneath all of this is broken.
• Jared Harman, running a traditional agency, on where he thinks AI actually helps.
• Hosted by Jeremy Rivera.

Find David Pourquery

Groas is the platform, and he is on LinkedIn.

Cite this episode

Pourquery, David. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Autonomous Google Ads.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscripted-small-business.castos.com/episodes/autonomous-google-ads-what-full-ai-ppc-management-actually-looks-like

Their argument to Jeremy Rivera is blunt: most owners treat credit card points as loose change that shows up on a statement, then cash them out at a penny each. Played properly, the same balance is worth four to ten times that.

“So you're spending the money anyways, so why not turn that into tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in free travel?” — Justin Froeber

What they actually cover

• Points are untaxable. Justin's read: card rewards are treated as a rebate on spending, not earned income, so the travel value carries no tax liability.
• Payroll on a credit card. The 2.9% processing fee is real, and it is also a deductible business expense. Justin walks the math on $100,000 of payroll: $2,900 in fees, 200,000 points, and $8,000 to $20,000 of premium travel out the other side.
• The redemption gap. A million points is roughly $10,000 as cash back, or $40,000 to $100,000 in business and first class. Same points, different exit.
• Card-by-expense allocation. Advertising, supplies and software often earn 2x to 4x while a default card earns 1x on everything.
• Building the audience. Jordan scripts search keywords into organic video so it keeps earning views long after the feed moves on.

The full written recap of this conversation, with the numbers laid out, is here: The Business Expense That Pays You Back.

“Points and miles are the fifth largest currency in the world.” — Justin Froeber

“Luxury travel is not reserved only for the ultra wealthy.” — Jordan Egbert

Where to find Justin and Jordan

Concierge and business-owner services at Elite Travel Hackers. Their newer education arm is Elite Points and Miles, with a community at Skool. Jordan posts on TikTok as counting.countries.

Related episodes

Travel as an actual business function comes up again with Jim Hauck, the travel guardian angel. For the tax side of what Justin describes, Doug Johnson on what every business needs to know about their taxes is the companion listen, and Meaghan Wall on offer profitability covers the bookkeeping that has to be right first.

More small business interviews at Unscripted Small Business.

Discover the truth about aging (spoiler: 90% is in your control!), learn why consistency beats quick fixes every time, and get insider advice on building systems that create unforgettable customer experiences. Whether you're in the beauty industry or running any service-based business, Denise's wisdom on turning customer complaints into growth opportunities will change how you think about feedback.

What You'll Learn

• The 90/10 Rule of Aging: Why lifestyle choices matter more than genetics
• From Rolodex to App: How to evolve your business through technological changes
• The Membership Model: Building recurring revenue while promoting wellness
• Systems for Consistency: Creating repeatable excellence in customer experience
• Clean Beauty Movement: Understanding what goes on your body matters as much as what goes in it
• Marketing in a Crowded Space: Standing out in beauty and wellness
• Constructive Feedback: Turning complaints into competitive advantages

Key Timestamps

[00:18] - Denise's 38-year journey in the spa industry and founding of DuBois Beauty
[01:27] - What the "spa lifestyle" really means
[03:57] - The science of aging: 10% genetics, 90% lifestyle
[05:30] - The hidden dangers in personal care products
[07:29] - Evolving from paper books to e-commerce
[10:24] - The importance of the human face in marketing
[12:09] - Why video testimonials are the #1 lead generator
[15:16] - 2026 plans: Focusing on membership and longevity
[17:44] - Operating in Albany and Saratoga Springs, NY
[20:23] - Essential advice for aspiring spa entrepreneurs

Featured Quotes

"The American Academy of Dermatology suggests that really about 10% is genetics and about 90% is influenced by our everyday lifestyle choices. So we truly do have control more than we think over how we do age."

"We do need to be mindful of not only what we put into our body, but what we put onto our body."

"Word of mouth remains the number one lead generator."

"Consistency is key. There's no such thing as a one and done treatment to achieve a person's beauty and wellness goals."

"Constructive feedback can be what makes the difference between you growing and being the best you can be or choosing to just make excuses about why something happened."

About Denise Dubois

Denise Dubois is the visionary Founder of DuBois Beauty, an acclaimed Clinical Esthetician and wellness expert with over three decades dedicated to skin health. Her unique perspective comes from running a successful clinical practice (Complexions Spa) and developing a retail brand built on the philosophy that clean, simple, and nature-based ingredients deliver superior, professional results at home.

As author of Living Beautifully, Denise bridges the gap between internal health, lifestyle, and external skin appearance, empowering people with actionable, expert-backed advice that demystifies skincare and inspires a balanced approach to beauty and self-care.

Guest Links

DuBois Beauty (Clean Beauty Brand)
https://duboisbeauty.com/

Complexions Spa Locations:

• Albany, New York - Wolf Road
• Saratoga Springs, New York

In this episode

• Child bedlessness: the problem in child poverty almost nobody names
• The restlessness at 35 behind a life that looked perfect on paper
• The first build with his Boy Scouts, and the congregation that wanted in
• The Facebook post that returned dozens of children sleeping on floors
• Haley, six years old, who had only ever slept in the back seat of her mother’s car
• What a bed changes beyond sleep: grades, mood, friendships, sleepovers
• The chapter model that scaled it to 440+ chapter presidents and four countries
• Why 160,000 children remain on the waiting list

“I believe true joy comes when you stop thinking about yourself and you start thinking about someone else.” — Luke Mickelson

“You might not change the world, but you’re going to change someone’s world. And that world might just be yours, and that’s totally fine.” — Luke Mickelson

“I’m just a farm kid from Idaho. I’m nobody special. This started because some dad in some podunk town got up off the couch.” — Luke Mickelson

Read the full recap: How I Built the World's Largest Bed-Building Charity From My Garage

Connect with Sleep in Heavenly Peace: shpbeds.org

Hosted by Zaneta Chuniq Inpower. More at Unscripted Small Business.

She is a Certified Travel Advisor and a Verified Travel Advisor who is also, still, a special collections and local history librarian. She started the agency in 2014, after asking herself what she would do if money and time were no object. The answer was driving, road trips, and seeing places.

What you'll hear

• Why friends and family are usually the worst first clients - they overstep, expect free work, and do not respect professional fees
• The one-time new client fee, why it is charged upfront, and why some agents bury fees inside supplier taxes instead
• Networking outside your immediate circle as the real path to paying clients
• How travel agents actually get paid, and the services that generate no commission at all
• Use AI to research the itinerary, book it with a human - what happens when a Scotland rental sells out from under your clients mid-trip
• Letting the client base pick the niche: Disney and Universal gave way to custom multi-country European itineraries

The full write-up is here: Cecily North on Building a Travel Agency, and Why AI Can't Replace a Human Agent.

Cecily also hosts Life Between Flights, a podcast for new travel agents covering the business side almost nobody covers - SEO, bookkeeping, client acquisition, websites. She is on Instagram as @lifebetweenflightspod.

More small business conversations at Unscripted Small Business. Hosted by Zaneta Chuniq Inpower.

Josie shares her unique perspective on what makes home renovations special: "You're taking something that's already there and already has flavor. It already has its own embodiment, and you are tweaking it, aesthetically smoothing it out, maybe changing some of the rhythms there in the space, but you're ultimately still keeping the foundation and the bones the same."

Discover why she believes the most beautiful spaces happen when you marry older charm with newer aesthetics.

Small Jobs Lead to Big Trust

"To me and Alec, there's no small job. Every job has an impact to the customer and to the family that's living in the home."

Learn how H&H Construction builds long-term client relationships by starting with small repairs—drywall holes, baseboard fixes—and growing trust over time into major kitchen remodels, bathroom transformations, and home additions.

Design Based on Feel, Not Just Function

"How you're wanting a space to feel should often dictate how you develop this space."

Josie reveals her signature question for every client: "What do you want it to feel like when you walk in?" This approach moves beyond standard kitchen triangles and bathroom layouts to create truly personalized spaces.

Forever Home vs. Resale Value

The Davis team offers honest consultation about when to invest in customization versus following market standards. "If you're planning to be there forever, then we really want to customize it to what you're wanting to feel."

Favorite Projects: Wet Rooms & Historic Homes

Josie describes her love for wet rooms—bathrooms where the entire space becomes the shower with seamless tile work that's "almost like artwork." She also shares stories of renovating homes from the 1930s and 40s, preserving original hardwood floors and historic fireplaces while upgrading everything else.

When NOT to Build an Addition

Josie offers refreshingly honest advice: "Some houses, the way that they're structured, they're just perfect the way they are. Sometimes it's meant to be that way. And so adding onto that changes the feel of that home. I would say, 'Nah, friend, just go ahead and find a new place that you can grow into.'"

But when an addition IS right? "You get the right contractor and the right budget, and you can do just about anything."

Sometimes home exterior additions like concrete fences, landscaping or driveway replacement can be a better solve for improving home values for sale, when you don't plan on living in the home for the longterm vs renovation for your own living wants/needs.

Sunrooms: Being Outside Without Being Outside

"A sunroom is being outside and enjoying outside without being outside."

Alec and Josie explain the difference between sunrooms and covered patios, climate-controlled versus non-conditioned spaces, and how they've transformed decks, porches, and even sheds into beautiful year-round living areas.

Decks Built for Tennessee's Terrain

"We're in Cookeville, Tennessee. There's a lot of mountain ranges. You can't have a patio without flat land."

Alec shares his passion for custom deck designs: "I love anything that's out of the norm, anything that's different." From multi-level decks to grand staircases, fire pits to octagonal designs, discover why decks are the perfect solution for Middle Tennessee's challenging terrain.

Construction as a Marriage

"Construction is a marriage of a certain form. You're gonna be spending a lot of time with those people."

Josie offers candid advice about choosing a contractor: "If you meet us and you don't want to go get coffee with us, then find a contractor that you really enjoy speaking with." Learn why relationship matters so much in construction projects that can take months.

The Midsize Advantage

Unlike large corporations with streamlined processes, H&H Construction dedicates time to getting to know each client personally. "We have more time, and we carve out more time to be very specific with the customer themselves."

Josie reveals she'll spend hours researching specific kitchen formats or design styles just for one client's unique vision.

Faith, Family & Business Values

"Alec and I want to talk. We want to pray over your family. We want to meet your children if you're willing. We want to encourage you in steps of life."

Discover how the Davis family integrates their faith and values into their business, teaching their children about craftsmanship while treating every client like family.

Key Topics Covered

• Renovation Philosophy - Preserving character while modernizing function
• Kitchen & Bathroom Remodels - Creating vision for homeowners who struggle to see possibilities
• Wet Rooms - Seamless, modern bathroom design
• Home Additions - When to build, when to walk away, and roofline considerations
• Sunroom Construction - Climate-controlled vs. non-conditioned spaces
• Custom Deck Building - Multi-level designs, pergolas, and Tennessee terrain solutions
• Client Relationships - Why "construction is a marriage"
• Forever Home vs. Resale - Tailoring approach to client goals
• Historic Home Restoration - Marrying 1930s-40s charm with modern aesthetics
• Business Values - Faith, family, and honest consultation
• The Midsize Contractor Advantage - Personalization over cookie-cutter solutions

Guest Bios

Alec Davis

Alec Davis is a licensed Tennessee General Contractor (BC-A/r) and certified HVAC technician with over a decade of hands-on experience in residential construction. He founded H&H Construction in 2014, initially focusing on mobile home remodeling before transitioning to full-time residential renovations in 2020.

Alec specializes in transforming old structures into restored beauty, with expertise spanning framing, trim-out, custom deck construction, and complete home systems. He holds an Associate's degree in Business and is a graduate of the Nashville State Workforce and Community Development Program.

Construction runs in Alec's blood—passed down through generations—and today, he continues that legacy by teaching his two young children the value of hard work, integrity, and craftsmanship.

Josie Davis

Josie brings the creative vision and design expertise to H&H Construction, spending hours researching specific formats and styles for each client's unique needs. Her design philosophy centers on how spaces feel rather than just function, asking every client: "What do you want it to feel like when you walk in?"

She handles client relations with a relationship-first approach, dedicating time to truly understand each family's goals, priorities, and vision for their home. Her commitment to personalization sets H&H apart from large corporations with standardized processes.

Memorable Quotes

On Renovation:

"Renovations are really special because you're taking something that's already there and already has flavor. It already has its own embodiment, and you are tweaking it, aesthetically smoothing it out." — Josie Davis

On Every Job Mattering:

"To me and Alec, there's no small job. Every job has an impact to the customer and to the family that's living in the home." — Josie Davis

On Design Philosophy:

"How you're wanting a space to feel should often dictate how you develop this space." — Josie Davis

On Honest Consultation:

"Some houses, the way that they're structured, they're just perfect the way they are. Sometimes it's meant to be that way." — Josie Davis

On What's Possible:

"You get the right contractor and the right budget, and you can do just about anything." — Josie Davis

On Seamless Additions:

"In my opinion, a good addition never feels like an addition. It feels like you've successfully continued to walk through the house from start to finish." — Josie Davis

On Choosing a Contractor:

"Construction is a marriage of a certain form. You're gonna be spending a lot of time with those people." — Josie Davis

On Finding the Right Fit:

"If you meet us and you don't want to go get coffee with us, then find a contractor that you really enjoy speaking with." — Josie Davis

On Creating Vision:

"A lot of people don't have vision for space. We help create that vision for people who struggle with seeing their space and what it could be." — Alec Davis

On Custom Decks:

"I love anything that's out of the norm, anything that's different. We've done multi-level decks, decks with grand staircases, decks with fire pits within them, octagonal decks." — Alec Davis

On Core Values:

"At the core of our work is a simple principle: build well, work honestly, and treat every project as if it were our own home." — Alec Davis

On Client Relationships:

"Alec and I want to talk. We want to pray over your family. We want to meet your children if you're willing. We want to encourage you in steps of life." — Josie Davis

Resources & Links

H&H Construction

Website: handhcookevilleremodel.com

Phone: (931) 329-5754

Email: davishandh@gmail.com

Address: 541 S Willow Ave Suite 101#528, Cookeville, TN 38506

Portfolio: View Their Work

Facebook: H&H Remodels

Service Area: Cookeville, Sparta, Smithville, McMinnville, and all of Middle Tennessee

Services Offered

• Home Renovations & Remodels
• Kitchen Remodeling
• Bathroom Remodeling (including Wet Rooms)
• Home Additions
• Sunroom Construction
• Custom Deck Building
• Electrical Work
• Plumbing
• HVAC Installation & Service
• Drywall & Painting
• Flooring Installation
• Tile Work
• Trim & Finish Carpentry

Episode Summary

Chad T. Jenkins grew up on a small farm in South Carolina, started his first real estate deal at age 11, and spent 25 years building over 50 businesses across wireless phones, data centers, construction, HVAC, GPS leasing, and more. Then he stopped. Not because he failed — but because he found something better: engineered collaboration.

In this episode, Chad breaks down the framework he calls the VCR Formula (Vision + Capability × Reach = Success), explains why most entrepreneurs suffer from a WHO deficiency, and shares how his CoLAB community grew to 700+ collaborations in just 18 months — outpacing his entire 25-year history of starting companies.

Jeremy and Chad also dig into the real role of AI in entrepreneurship, how to structure collaboration outcome splits, and why "showing up at the receiving dock" is the ultimate growth strategy.

What You'll Learn In This Episode

• Why an 8-year-old riding horses at auction is the perfect metaphor for understanding leverage
• The John Baptiste Say definition of an entrepreneur — and how it reframes everything
• The WHO deficiency: what's really blocking growth for most entrepreneurs and business owners
• The VCR Formula (Vision + Capability × Reach = Success) — and how to map your P&L to it
• The four types of Capability: ownership, ability, capacity, and cash
• The four types of Reach: eyeballs, minds, hearts, and DNA-level
• Why "Future Backward" planning beats "Current Forward" every time
• How to structure a collaboration outcome split (the 10-20 / 60-80 / 10-20 rule)
• What Chad calls the "Idea Economy" — and why the task economy is over
• How to use AI as a PhD-level assistant without losing your human competitive edge
• The "Name the Baby" tool for creating intellectual property from collaborations

Key Quotes

"A true entrepreneur is someone who relentlessly seeks leverage." — Chad T. Jenkins

"Stop trying to grow through effort. Start focusing on what you have, combining it with what others have, and ask one question: How do you want to split the outcome?" — Chad T. Jenkins

"The only thing cash does is pay for somebody's vision or buy somebody else's capability." — Chad T. Jenkins

"Always show up at the receiving dock, not the procurement office. Future money is always up for grabs." — Dean Jackson (via Chad T. Jenkins)

Resources Mentioned

Chad T. Jenkins / SeedSpark

• Website: seedspark.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chadtjenkins
• CoLAB Programs: seedspark.com/programs
• CoLAB Partner™: seedspark.com/colab-partner
• Kickstarter Events (twice monthly): seedspark.com/colab-kickstarter
• CoLABcon (October, Charlotte NC): seedspark.com/events
• Tools (Name the Baby, Future Backward): seedspark.com/tools
• Books (Friction Fuel, Just Add a Zero): seedspark.com/resources/books
• Blog: seedspark.com/resources/blog
• Real Collaborations: seedspark.com/collaborations
• New Book Preorder — The Code to Collaboration: seedspark.com

Strategic Coach / Dan Sullivan

• Program mentioned: Strategic Coach FreeZone

Mentioned Companies / People

• Matt Brochup / SEO-Teric
• Zach Kadish / Conductor
• Dean Jackson (coined "receiving dock" principle)

Host Jeremy Rivera

• Unscripted Small Business Podcast
• Jeremy Rivera SEO
• SEO Arcade — Podcast-Based Content & Link Building
• White Label Podcast Service
• Repurpose Video Content for SEO
• The Future of SEO & AI Writing Tools

About the Guest

Chad T. Jenkins is the founder of SeedSpark, a Charlotte, NC-based organization known as a leverage partner for entrepreneurs worldwide. Over 25 years he started more than 50 businesses across industries ranging from wireless phones and GPS leasing to construction and real estate investment. In the past 18 months, he's pivoted entirely to building collaborations through his CoLAB community — which now represents 700+ businesses ranging from $2M to $35B in annual revenue.

He is the author of Friction Fuel and Just Add a Zero, and his new book The Code to Collaboration is available for preorder now on Amazon. He speaks globally at entrepreneur conferences and hosts twice-monthly CoLAB Kickstarter events.

About the Host

Jeremy Rivera is an SEO consultant and entrepreneur with 19+ years of experience. He is the founder of SEO Arcade, a unique podcast-based content and link building service, and hosts the Unscripted Small Business Podcast — a series dedicated to authentic conversations with entrepreneurs, SEO professionals, and small business owners. Jeremy specializes in converting podcast interviews into comprehensive SEO content marketing strategies.

Subscribe to the Unscripted Small Business Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Feedback? Connect with Jeremy at jeremyriveraseo.com

This conversation covers the evolution of SEO in the age of AI, why customer interviews are non-negotiable, how to structure content for both humans and LLMs, and why quarterly planning beats annual marketing plans in today's rapidly shifting landscape.

Guest Bio

Sara Nay is the CEO of Duct Tape Marketing, where she has spent 15 years helping small businesses build effective marketing strategies. She recently authored Unchained: Breaking Free from Broken Marketing Models, offering a fresh perspective on escaping outdated marketing approaches that no longer serve today's businesses.

Connect with Sara Nay

• Website: ducttapemarketing.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/saranay
• Book - Unchained: unchainedmodel.com

Key Topics Covered

• [00:00] Introduction and Sara's journey from intern to CEO
• [01:20] The reporting problem: cutting through vanity metrics
• [04:14] Why beautiful websites fail without customer journey mapping
• [06:07] SEO evolution: from keywords to questions in the AI era
• [08:50] Showing up in AI search results and LLM citations
• [11:57] Local SEO strategy for service businesses
• [13:26] The strategy-first process: interviews and customer journey mapping
• [15:12] The power of leadership and customer interviews
• [19:15] E-commerce vs. service business strategy differences
• [21:16] Year one to year two: evolving campaigns with quarterly sprints
• [24:38] Content strategy for AI visibility
• [26:50] The future of authority and backlinks
• [27:30] Co-marketing as a multiplier for small businesses

Best Quotes from This Episode

"A website should help people get to know, like, trust, and even be able to try your services and buy your services. Yes, it should look nice—that is important. But the content and the journey that you're guiding people on is what I would argue is the most important piece of the puzzle."

"Don't discount all the ways TN businesses can save costs on energy"

"We're not just creating marketing strategy for people anymore. We're creating marketing strategy for people AND AI."

"When people skip over leadership interviews and ideal client interviews, that's where they waste time, energy, and money on marketing in the long run."

"Gone are the days where you can just publish content and hope it shows up. You have to be very focused on what you're putting in the content, but also how you're structuring it."

"I believe you can't really plan for marketing further than three months at this time because it's changing, shifting, and evolving so much."

Resources & Links Mentioned

Duct Tape Marketing Resources

• Duct Tape Marketing Homepage
• Fractional CMO Services
• The Marketing Hourglass / Customer Journey
• Marketing Hourglass System
• Ideal Customer Development
• Google Business Profile Optimization

Sara's Book

• Unchained: Breaking Free from Broken Marketing Models

Tools Mentioned

• Answer the Public - Question-based keyword research tool
• SEMrush - SEO and keyword research platform
• Ahrefs - SEO toolset and backlink analysis

SEO Arcade Resources

• SEO Forecasting 101: Methods, Metrics, Tools, and Challenges
• SEO and Brand Building

Industry Expert Articles

• Local SEO: The Definitive Guide - Backlinko
• Customer Journey Funnel Guide - Usermaven
• If You Aren't Showing Up in AI Search by 2026, You Literally Won't Exist - Michael McDougald, Right Thing SEO

Related Unscripted SEO Podcast Episodes

• The People First Framework with Keith Breseé
• More episodes at UnscriptedSEO.com

Businesses Mentioned in the Episode

• SEOteric - Mark Williams-Cook's agency
• Permacast Walls - Precast concrete wall company (case study)
• Atlanta Legal Care - Regional law office example
• Stair Handrail - E-commerce example
• Doxa Custom Homes - Custom home builder example

Key Takeaways

1. Strategy must come first. Before diving into tactics, businesses need to understand who they're targeting and with what message. Skipping foundational work leads to wasted resources.
2. The customer journey drives everything. Map to stages of know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer. Each stage needs specific metrics beyond vanity numbers.
3. Content must be structured for humans AND AI. With LLMs influencing search visibility, format content with FAQs, clear headings, and direct answers to questions.
4. Local businesses need hyper-specific strategies. Google Business Profile optimization, reviews, and local keywords matter far more than national branding tactics.
5. Plan in three-month sprints. The marketing landscape evolves too quickly for annual plans. Quarterly deep dives allow adaptation while maintaining strategic focus.
6. Co-marketing multiplies reach without multiplying costs. Email swaps, cross-promotion, and partnerships expand your budget through relationships.
7. Authentic expertise beats generic AI content. Real interviews and genuine subject matter expertise create content that stands out from AI-generated sameness.

About the Host

Jeremy Rivera is the founder of SEO Arcade and host of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, with 19 years of experience in SEO and digital marketing. He specializes in converting podcasts into comprehensive SEO content marketing strategies.

• Website: seoarcade.com
• Podcast: unscriptedseo.com

In this episode

• The cruise boom: lines selling into 2027 and 2028, and first-time cruisers surging
• His sweet spot — adults-only and luxury lines, and why ship size matters
• The luxury tier explained: all-suite, all-inclusive, and the crew-to-passenger ratio
• What an advisor really does — uncovering what makes a client happy, then pricing good, better, best
• The pivot: a layoff after a banner year, and realising how unhappy he had been
• Purpose over numbers, and building a business around integrity and giving back
• Becoming a content creator later in life with the Life in the Baggage Claim podcast

“I like to think of myself as a travel guardian angel. I’m out there looking over you, making sure things go right.” — Jim Hauck

“People don’t realize travel advising is not about the travel, it’s about research.” — Jim Hauck

“My dad said to me many times, if there’s anything you do in life, make sure you leave the water cleaner than when you got in it.” — Jim Hauck

Read the full recap: Why I Left Corporate IT to Become a Travel Guardian Angel

Connect with Jim: jphauckadventures.com

Hosted by Zaneta Chuniq Inpower. More at Unscripted Small Business.

Key takeaways

• Audio builds a specific kind of trust. Different from video, and he points at the neuroscience for why.
• Five business outcomes from one medium. Plus a sixth: genuinely original, human-sourced content.
• The scarcity premium. A conversation between two subject matter experts is one hundred per cent original every time. Nothing else you publish can claim that.
• The hundred per cent response rate. Cold outreach asking for a meeting gets ignored. An invitation to be interviewed does not.
• The smoothest upsell he ever saw happened live on a customer interview. Nobody was selling. That was why it worked.
• Start at two episodes a month. Going from four back to two reads as retreat, and you cannot undo it quietly.

On this page

• Why audio is different
• Five outcomes, plus a sixth
• The scarcity premium
• The invitation nobody declines
• Start at two
• From 110,000 to 250,000
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Why audio is different

Tom’s case for audio over video is not about production cost. It is about the listening context. Somebody has your voice in their ears while driving or walking, uninterrupted, for half an hour. Very little else in marketing gets that.

The result is a parasocial familiarity that arrives before any commercial conversation does, which changes what the first meeting is like.

Five outcomes, plus a sixth

• Thought leadership, because you are visibly the person asking the questions.
• Client development, because the invitation is a legitimate reason to contact anyone.
• Audience engagement, because a subscriber is a returning relationship rather than a session.
• Sales collateral, because the recording is reusable in every follow-up.
• Marketing material, because one conversation produces a month of derivative content.
• And the sixth: original, human-sourced content that did not exist anywhere before you recorded it.

That last one has become the commercially interesting item on the list, for obvious reasons.

The scarcity premium

Everything else a business publishes competes with an infinite supply of similar material. A recorded conversation between two practitioners does not, because it did not exist until the moment it was recorded.

For a professional services firm that is the whole argument. You cannot out-publish the internet, and you can be the only source of a particular conversation.

The invitation nobody declines

The tactic is simple enough to be uncomfortable. A cold email asking a senior person for a meeting is ignored. An invitation to be interviewed about their expertise is accepted at a rate that makes the rest of business development look inefficient.

It is not a trick, which is why it works. You are genuinely offering them something, and the relationship starts on the correct footing.

His best example is an upsell that happened live on a customer interview, entirely because nobody in the conversation was trying to sell anything.

Start at two

Two episodes a month, for a small business, and he is firm about the direction of travel. Publishing four and then dropping to two is visible and reads as decline, whereas going from two to four reads as success.

Set the cadence at the level you can hold in a bad quarter, not the level you can hold in a good one.

From 110,000 to 250,000

His daily news show went from a hundred and ten thousand downloads to two hundred and fifty thousand in two months, which he attributes to consistency and format discipline rather than promotion.

The longer written version of this argument is in the full recap.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• Why podcast instead of blog or video?
• What business outcomes does a podcast actually produce?
• Is podcast content really original in an AI era?
• How do I get senior people to reply to outreach?
• How often should a small business publish episodes?
• How do you grow podcast downloads?
• Can you sell on a podcast without it feeling like selling?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Brett Schklar on why generated filler is a trust problem, which is the flip side of the originality argument.
• Shane Barker on getting cited where competitors already are.
• Unscripted Small Business, for the rest of the interviews.

Find Tom Fox

The Compliance Podcast Network is where all of his shows live. Hosted by Jeremy Rivera.

Cite this episode

Fox, Tom. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Podcasting as the Most Powerful Content Engine in SEO.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscripted-small-business.castos.com/episodes/tom-fox-podcasting-as-the-most-powerful-content-engine-in-seo

In this episode

• What a franchise consultant actually answers, and who it is not for
• The entrepreneurial assessment used up front to match people to systems
• Following your strengths versus chasing a hot trend
• Rich’s own cautionary tale: the gym he bought and sold in nine months
• The biggest myths — that franchising means food, and that you need half a million dollars
• Semi-passive versus owner-operated, and keeping your job while a manager runs it
• Who thrives as an owner: veterans and burnt-out executives
• The industries that are relatively AI-proof: plumbing, HVAC, senior care

“There’s like 8,000 franchises out there. So trying to find the right one for yourself on your own can be very difficult.” — Rich Potter

“It’s gonna cost you $2 million to buy a McDonald’s. You’ll be lucky if you net 80, $90,000 a year on something like that.” — Rich Potter

“As is the occupational hazard that we hear about when you start becoming a franchise consultant, you end up being a franchise owner eventually.” — Rich Potter

Read the full recap: How I Bought the Wrong Franchise So You Don't Have To

Connect with Rich: franchiseheroes.co

Hosted by Zaneta Chuniq Inpower. More at Unscripted Small Business.

Key takeaways

• The truck is the easy day. The cost is the hundreds of hours around it, which is what move management actually sells.
• She quotes high on purpose. A direct reaction to movers who lowball and then raise the price once the furniture is loaded.
• Her team is organisers and interior designers. The floor plan conversation happens before move day, not on the driveway.
• She turns a consumer mess into a business relationship. Painter, landscaper and movers deal with her team instead of a stressed homeowner.
• Vendors get interviewed long before they are needed. The same discipline as everything else in the operation.
• She is honest that referrals are not a marketing strategy. Seventeen years in, and she says so out loud.

On this page

• It is not the furniture
• Organisers and designers, not movers
• Turning a homeowner’s mess into a business relationship
• Quoting high with intention
• Interviewing vendors early
• The honest answer about marketing
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

It is not the furniture

It’s not the furniture that’s the hard part in a move, right? I mean, that wraps up, gets on a truck and comes off all in the same day. It’s the 300 plus hours you spend packing boxes, right?

— Rachel Eisaman

The whole business follows from that sentence. The visible, priced, comparable part of moving is the one day everyone focuses on. The expensive part is the months either side, and it is invisible until you are inside it.

Move management sells the invisible part, which is why explaining the service is most of the sale.

Organisers and designers, not movers

Her team is staffed with professional organisers and interior designers rather than moving crew. That is a deliberate skills choice, because the work is decisions rather than lifting.

The furniture floor plan is the clearest example. Deciding where things go belongs weeks before the move, not while two people stand holding a sofa in a doorway. Getting that conversation into the right week removes most of the chaos of the day.

Turning a homeowner’s mess into a business relationship

The structural trick is that she converts a consumer transaction into a business one. The painter, the landscaper and the movers all coordinate with her team, who do this every week, rather than with a homeowner who does it twice in a lifetime and is currently exhausted.

Everyone involved performs better, because the person on the other end of the phone knows what they are asking for.

Quoting high with intention

I actually quote high and I do that with intention.

— Rachel Eisaman

She is reacting to a specific predatory practice. A low estimate wins the job, then the price rises once your possessions are physically on somebody else’s vehicle and you have no leverage at all.

Quoting high loses her work at the enquiry stage and never produces that conversation. It is a deliberate trade of conversion rate for trust, made by someone whose business runs on repeat clients.

Interviewing vendors early

Electricians, plumbers and moving companies get interviewed long before she has a job for them. That way the choice is made calmly rather than under a deadline, and the relationship exists before it is needed.

It is the same principle as the floor plan. Move the decision to a week where you can think.

The honest answer about marketing

I think the thing that’s been best for us is really doing good work and having our clients want to refer us. But that’s not a marketing strategy. So let’s talk again in three more years and see if I have a better answer.

— Rachel Eisaman

Refreshing, and correct. She has burned money on paid search and on local magazine placements, and January and February are quiet regardless. Referrals have carried the business and she is clear-eyed that this is not the same as having a plan.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• What does a move management company actually do?
• Why are moving estimates so often wrong?
• Should I quote high on purpose?
• When should the furniture layout be decided?
• How do I vet trades before I need them?
• Do referrals count as a marketing strategy?
• What are the slow months in a home services business?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Jared Harman on holding a price in an industry with no standards.
• Cameron Tope on vetting vendors with small test jobs, the same discipline in property management.
• Unscripted Small Business, for the rest of the owner interviews.

Find Rachel Eisaman

Joli Residential is at joliresidential.com, on Instagram as Joli Residential, and Rachel is on LinkedIn.

Cite this episode

Eisaman, Rachel. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “It’s Not the Furniture.” Unscripted Small Business, 2025. https://unscripted-small-business.castos.com/episodes/rachel-eisaman-its-not-the-furniture-what-a-move-actually-costs-you

In this episode

• What an ADU is, and why it beats buying a second property for most LA homeowners
• From picture editor to owner-builder to consulting to going full time
• ROI on the back of a napkin: the cheapest ADU lands near $150K and about $1,000 a month
• The passive-income myth — rentals are roughly 80% passive, not 100%
• How LA housing policy moved from state law to local law and cut through NIMBYism
• Delegating without clipping people’s wings
• The two things Gil still refuses to hand off: sales and the books

“There’s nothing worse that you can do to someone competent than micromanage them and cut their wings off.” — Gil Vaisman

“Right now my goal is to be useless in my own business. My job in my own business is to get myself out of it.” — Gil Vaisman

Read the full recap: How I Turned My First DIY ADU Into a Full-Time Construction Business

Connect with Gil: goadu.com

Hosted by Zaneta Chuniq Inpower. More at Unscripted Small Business.

Rachel brings a unique perspective as a third-generation entrepreneur who cut her teeth managing 400 to 1,200 estimates daily at her parents' printing company before moving into corporate marketing roles at Verizon Wireless and Ticketmaster. When the pandemic hit and she was furloughed, she went full-time on her consulting business and never looked back.

In this conversation, Rachel shares how her Profit Multiplier program helps consultants find at least $100,000 in hidden profit—with one client already seeing a 52% year-over-year sales increase and another at 42% growth, all without adding staff. She also gets refreshingly honest about the moment every entrepreneur faces when they think "maybe it would be easier to just get a job" and how to push through it.

The most tactical segment comes when Rachel describes losing her project manager of three years and her husband's challenge: what if you automated 80% of the role? Three weeks of intensive work later—mapping processes, rewriting SOPs, and building automations—she went from working 3 a.m. to 7 p.m. to finishing by 5:30 for dinner. Her example of turning meeting note-takers into automated task creation systems is something any consultant can implement immediately.

Rachel also challenges the common advice to just "talk about yourself more" when marketing your consulting business. Her reframe: make the client the hero of every success story. When you showcase their transformation and challenges, prospective clients see themselves achieving the same results.

The conversation touches on why systems beat hustle every time, the importance of interconnected tools rather than disconnected apps, and Rachel's ambitious goal to help 100 small businesses double by 2029. She argues that when small businesses grow, the ripple effects extend far beyond revenue—to their families, communities, local little leagues, and neighboring businesses in ways that large corporations simply don't replicate.

For consultants struggling with inconsistent lead flow, Rachel's core message is clear: you're not lacking talent, you're lacking structure. And more hustle won't fix a business that isn't built on a proven growth system.

Connect with Rachel directly at rachelminion.com or explore her consulting frameworks at rockstarrandmoon.com—that's Rockstarr with two R's at the end.

Rachel's current reading stack includes Alex Hormozi's $100M Offers and $100 Million Leads, which she returns to regularly for fresh ideas on testing and experimentation.

About the Host

Zaneta Chuniq Inpower is a marketing professional and entrepreneur based in Atlanta with experience across multiple industries including resume writing and personal branding.

About the Guest

Rachel Minion is the founder and Head Rock Star at Rockstarr & Moon, a RevOps organization helping B2B consultants escape the grind cycle and build predictable, scalable profit. A third-generation entrepreneur, Rachel previously contributed to the Verizon Wireless website rebuild and led marketing at Ticketmaster before going full-time on her consulting practice during the pandemic. She's based in Northeast Florida.

Episode produced by Unscripted Small Business

Interview edited and formatted by Jeremy Rivera

Key takeaways

• The taboo belongs to the other side of the room. Her reframe: it is not taboo for women, it is taboo for men.
• The business started in frustration, not opportunity. A refusal she could not accept, and no product she could buy instead.
• Symptom-based formulation, not person-based. One product covers every symptom inside a hormonal phase, modelled on multi-symptom cold medicine.
• Funding for women’s health is being crowded out. Support for startups is real and it is aimed almost entirely at technology.
• It is not a tea company. Correcting that misreading is a permanent part of the job.
• Education is the growth lever. The product is downstream of it.

On this page

• Whose taboo is it
• The appointment that started it
• Symptom-based, like cold medicine
• Raising money for women’s health
• Not a tea company
• Education as the product
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Whose taboo is it

And it’s kind of come to the realization that it’s not really taboo for women, it’s taboo for men.

— Chelsea Jambo

It is a small reframe that changes the marketing entirely. If women are not the ones who find the subject uncomfortable, then softening the language for their benefit is solving a problem they do not have.

It’s what I like to call the chaos phase, where you’re like, well, I’m still menstruating, but also I’m experiencing the symptoms of hot flashes, I’m also feeling depressed, it’s just pure chaos.

— Chelsea Jambo

The appointment that started it

We ended the appointment with him saying, you’re 24, you don’t have breast cancer, I’m not putting my name on it.

— Chelsea Jambo

It’s not like I’m saying I have a cold. It’s like I’m trying to figure out if I have a risk of having cancer, a serious disease, down the line, and his refusal shocked me.

— Chelsea Jambo

Her grandmother was in stage four. Her mother had found a lump. She was asking about risk, not diagnosis, and was refused on the basis of her age.

What followed was taking inventory of her own health, finding she was living on over-the-counter painkillers for debilitating period pain, and looking for something that targeted the symptom rather than numbing everything.

Symptom-based, like cold medicine

The formulation decision is the most interesting business choice in the episode. Products in this category are usually built around a type of person. Hers are built around a symptom.

• Heavy bleeding, cramps, bloating and mood changes each get addressed rather than each customer type getting a product.
• One product therefore serves very different women who happen to be in the same phase.
• The explicit model is multi-symptom cold medicine, which nobody expects to be personalised.
• Formulations were developed with specialists and naturopaths, with attention to how the herbs interact.

Raising money for women’s health

We’re hearing a lot about support for small businesses and startups, but the category is often toward AI and tech.

— Chelsea Jambo

The funding is genuinely available and it is pointed somewhere else. A wellness brand for hormonal health is not what most of the current programmes were designed to back, which shapes what she can build and how fast.

Us women, we have a voice, we have a platform, we’re half the world’s population. Let’s talk about this, let’s start changing the narrative, and let’s provide other women with education.

— Chelsea Jambo

Not a tea company

People saw the tea and they’re like, oh, you’re a tea company. And I’m like, no, we’re not a tea company, we’re a women’s wellness company.

— Chelsea Jambo

The format of the product keeps becoming the category in people’s heads. It is a familiar problem for anyone whose delivery mechanism is more recognisable than their purpose, and the only fix is repetition.

Education as the product

Growth comes from teaching rather than selling, which is slower and produces customers who understand what they bought. Retail expansion is planned, and the education has to come first for it to land.

Because I think the best brands and the best projects are those built out of pure passion.

— Chelsea Jambo

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• Why is women’s hormonal health still awkward to talk about?
• What is perimenopause and what does it feel like?
• Why formulate a product by symptom instead of by customer?
• How hard is it to raise money for a women’s wellness brand?
• How do you correct a misunderstanding about what your company is?
• Can education be a growth strategy?
• What advice does a founder give someone starting from frustration?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• The full written recap of this conversation.
• Mark Gilliland on building a wellness brand in a category the regulator ignores.
• Meaghan Wall on the finance side of a young product business.

Find Chelsea Jambo

Our Body is at ourbody.ca, and the brand is on Instagram as shopourbody. Hosted by Zaneta Chuniq Inpower. More at Unscripted Small Business.

Cite this episode

Jambo, Chelsea. Interviewed by Zaneta Chuniq Inpower. “Building a Tea Brand That Actually Sees Women’s Hormonal Health.” Unscripted Small Business, 2026. https://unscripted-small-business.castos.com/episodes/chelsea-jambo-building-a-tea-brand-that-actually-sees-womens-hormonal-health

Host: Jeremy Rivera — SEO Arcade Founder & Freelance SEO Consultant

Guest: Dave Gulas — President & Co-Founder of EZDC 3PL

Sponsored by: Cookeville Sunroom Company

About the Guest

Dave Gulas is the president and co-founder of EZDC 3PL, providing warehousing, fulfillment, and transportation services for manufacturers and e-commerce brands. With 20 years in medical/pharmaceutical sales and over three years in logistics, Dave brings a customer-first approach to the 3PL industry.

Dave also hosts the Beyond Fulfillment Podcast, featuring real stories from entrepreneurs — available on the EZDC Blog and all major podcast platforms.

Episode Summary

In this conversation, Dave shares how he and his partner identified a gap in the 3PL market — legacy providers weren't delivering the customer service that growing e-commerce brands needed. Three years later, EZDC has built a reputation for responsiveness and genuine care.

Key Topics Covered:

• Why e-commerce brands reach a "graduation point" where outsourcing fulfillment makes sense
• The importance of warehouse management systems (WMS) and automated integrations
• How behind the meter energy for AI data centers is the type of industry changing changes we can expect 
• Common mistakes when scaling a business — saying yes to the wrong customers
• Bootstrap vs. funded startups: which succeed more often?
• The unglamorous reality of entrepreneurship
• Why personal branding matters more than ever in 2026

Resources & Links Mentioned

About EZDC 3PL

• EZDC 3PL Homepage
• About EZDC
• Packaging and Kitting Services
• Retail Logistics and Warehousing Services
• The Kentucky Advantage: Why a Central Hub is Key for Nationwide 3PL
• EZDC Blog & Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

Connect with Dave Gulas

• Dave Gulas on LinkedIn

SEO & Marketing Resources

From SEO Arcade:

• SEO Forecasting 101: Methods, Metrics, Tools, and Challenges
• The Revenue-First SEO Strategy That's Actually Working
• Opportunity Sizing in SEO
• How a Podcast Generates Links, Content, Audience, Citations & Authority
• White Label Podcast Service

From Jeremy Rivera SEO:

• SEO Basics for Small Business
• Simple, Effective Link Building
• SEO ROI
• Developing a Style Guide for Your Personal Brand
• Jeremy Rivera's SEO Resume & Experience
• Hire Jeremy Rivera
• SEO Services & Pricing
• Cookeville SEO Services

Also Mentioned

• Michael McDougall — Right Thing Agency: What to Do When SEO Rankings Drop After a Site Launch

Key Quotes from This Episode

"We saw a vast amount of complacency within the market to where legacy big box 3PLs were just not providing the proper service to e-commerce brands." — Dave Gulas

"Our guiding principle is we want to treat our customers as if it's our business in terms of we're gonna operate with urgency." — Dave Gulas

"Entrepreneurship has been glamorized so much in recent years... But let's be real about what it's really like to be an entrepreneur." — Dave Gulas

"Having a personal brand is more important than ever. People do business with people and faceless nameless brands are really losing ground." — Dave Gulas

"Struggle creates strength... It's really nature's way of making you stronger. Certainly entrepreneurs can relate to that." — Dave Gulas

Key Takeaways

1. Customer service is a competitive advantage — In industries plagued by complacency, responsiveness and genuine care can differentiate your business from legacy competitors.
2. Know when to say no — Chasing every deal and trying to be everything to everybody can hurt your business. Niching down and being selective about clients leads to better outcomes.
3. Content marketing creates inbound leads — Podcasting, blogging, LinkedIn posting, and appearing on other shows creates a flywheel effect that brings customers to you when they're ready.
4. Bootstrap companies often outperform funded ones — Patience and consistent daily actions beat rushing to scale before you're ready.
5. Personal branding matters more than ever — In an age of AI-generated content, people crave authentic human connection. Founder-led companies with visible leaders are winning.
6. Struggle creates strength — Like the fable of the premature butterfly, entrepreneurs need to go through challenges to develop the resilience required for success.

Subscribe & Follow

• Podcast: Unscripted Small Business Podcast
• Host: Jeremy Rivera on LinkedIn | SEO Arcade | JeremyRiveraSEO.com
• Guest: Dave Gulas on LinkedIn | EZDC 3PL

Have questions about e-commerce fulfillment? Reach out to EZDC 3PL for a quote.

Need help with SEO strategy for your business? Contact Jeremy Rivera for consulting

The Costanza Theory: How Doing the Opposite Built a 21-Year Business Empire

Guest: Bill Kasko, Founder & CEO of Frontline Source Group
Host: Jeremy Rivera
Podcast: Unscripted Small Business by Be Sharp Digital Marketing

Episode Summary

In this episode, Bill Kasko shares how he built a successful recruiting and staffing agency by doing the exact opposite of industry standards. From inverting the traditional sales model to being the first company to publish pricing online, Bill's "Costanza Theory" has disrupted an entire industry for over two decades.

We dive deep into the evolution of customer service technology, the fragmentation of the search landscape, and how AI is creating both opportunities and challenges for businesses. Bill also shares his insights on the current job market and why honest communication wins more business than overselling.

Key Topics Discussed

The Costanza Theory in Action

• How inverting the traditional sales-to-recruiter ratio created competitive advantage
• Why being the only company with a pricing page became their #1 traffic driver
• The importance of customer convenience over business convenience

Technology Evolution & Customer Service

• Early adoption of online chat 21 years ago
• The rise and fall of chatbot effectiveness
• 24/7 scheduling and weekend service calls
• Why AI agents still aren't quite ready

The Changing Search Landscape

• Why presence across multiple platforms is now essential
• How TikTok became the #2 search engine for young users
• The challenge of getting indexed across different search engines
• Reddit dominating 60% of search queries

AI's Impact on Business

• The rise of fake candidates using AI tools
• How HR departments are adopting AI faster than job requirements
• The cognitive decline concerns with AI dependency
• Why verification processes had to evolve

Honest Marketing Philosophy

• Why transparency builds more trust than overselling
• The importance of setting realistic expectations
• How detailed information (like gravel driveway delivery specifics) improves customer experience

Guest Information

Bill Kasko is the Founder and CEO of Frontline Source Group, a staffing agency and executive search firm with over 21 years of experience. Known for their industry-disrupting five-year placement warranty and contrarian business approach.

Connect with Frontline Source Group:

• Website: frontlinesourcegroup.com
• LinkedIn: Follow their company page for white papers and industry insights
• Specialties: Executive Search, IT Staffing, Accounting, Legal, Administrative

Host Information

Jeremy Rivera is an SEO expert and digital marketing strategist who hosts the Unscripted Small Business podcast, featuring conversations with entrepreneurs and business leaders about real-world challenges and innovative solutions.

Referenced People & Companies

• Michael McDougall - Rightthing Agency
• Matt Brooks - SEOteric (discussed LLM hallucinations)
• Mike Buckby - Knowatoa (quoted on ChatGPT as customer support)
• Cookeville Sunroom Company - Used as an example of a local service, small business providing sunroom additions in Cookeville

Key Quotes

"I'm not that smart of a guy, Jeremy. I'm just not. These are just stupid things that I have stumbled on over 21 years and realized that business people sometimes are stupid." - Bill Kasko

"We don't like to fail. It's so simple. Like, have an honest conversation with someone, especially a service business, if it's something that you know is going to be a struggle." - Bill Kasko

"When you start doing the opposite of everybody else, it will work. Now I tell people when they call and give me a hard time about it. No, it doesn't work. You're right. Don't do it. Stay away from it. It's horrible." - Bill Kasko

Main Takeaways

1. The Costanza Principle Works: Doing the opposite of industry standards can create breakthrough competitive advantages
2. Customer Convenience Trumps Business Convenience: 24/7 availability and immediate response times differentiate you from competitors
3. Transparency Builds Trust: Being honest about challenges and timelines converts better than overselling
4. Multi-Platform Presence is Essential: Success requires being found across Google, Bing, TikTok, Reddit, and emerging AI platforms
5. Technology Adoption Requires Patience: Don't jump on trends before the technology actually works reliably

Industry Insights Table

Innovation Area Traditional Approach Frontline's Approach Result Sales Model 20 salespeople, 10 recruiters 1 salesperson, 20 recruiters Better candidate quality wins business Pricing Transparency No pricing pages in industry First to publish pricing online #1 traffic driver to website Customer Service Hours Monday-Friday, 8-5 only 24/7 scheduling, weekend calls Competitive differentiation Placement Guarantees 90-day standard 5-year warranty Industry disruption, client confidence

Resources Mentioned

• Search Platforms: Google, Bing, TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, Perplexity
• AI Tools: ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot
• Business Tools: Online chat systems, scheduling platforms, IP tracking for verification
• Industry Associations: American Staffing Association

Related Services & Industries Discussed

• Legal staffing and lawyer recruitment
• Commercial real estate hiring challenges
• Technology sector impacts
• Healthcare and pharmaceutical staffing
• Administrative and executive assistant placement

Listen & Subscribe

 Listen to this episode: Unscripted Small Business Podcast

 Subscribe on your favorite platform:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Podcasts
• Stitcher

Contact Information

Questions or feedback? Reach out to Jeremy Rivera or connect with our guests directly through the links above.

Want to be a guest? Email the show through our Unscripted Small Business website.

Episode Overview

Tianna Mamalick brings 12 years of SEO expertise focused exclusively on small businesses. In this conversation, she reveals why working with SMBs is more rewarding than enterprise clients, how to honestly manage expectations while delivering real results, and why she went back to human-written content after testing AI extensively. If you're a small business owner wondering what actually works in SEO right now, this episode cuts through the hype with practical, proven strategies.

Why This Episode Matters for Small Business Owners

Running a small business means every marketing dollar counts. Tianna specializes in helping businesses with limited budgets compete effectively by focusing on what drives actual revenue—not just traffic or rankings. She shares her formula for pairing SEO and paid ads that works specifically for service-based businesses, and explains why your service pages matter more than blog posts right now.

Key Discussion Points

The Small Business Advantage Unlike enterprise clients where a 20% conversion increase gets a polite "that's nice," small business owners email about life-changing results: hiring their first employee, taking their first vacation, or investing in business growth. For Tianna, this feedback makes the work meaningful.

Honest Expectations Setting

• Three-month minimum commitment required
• Clients must have budget they can afford to lose completely
• Not every market works the same (example: Pilates in Las Vegas vs. other cities)
• Regular check-ins at three months to evaluate if the strategy is working

The SEO + Ads Formula While ads don't directly boost SEO, they strategically help prime new pages through engagement. When expanding to multiple locations, running targeted ads on new service pages helps get Google Business Profiles moving faster and improves location-specific performance.

What's Actually Working in Content

• Service pages are the priority: Every service needs its own detailed page
• Blog posts are secondary: Focus on key blog content, not volume
• Collaboration posts: Feature complementary businesses (example: makeup company writing about top lotions that pair well with their products)
• Opinion-based content: Take hard stands on your values and approach

The AI Content Experiment Tianna's agency tested AI-generated content extensively—and none of those articles ranked well. They've gone 100% back to human-written content, using AI only for creating outlines based on top-ranking competitors. The reality: people want authentic mistakes and real human voice.

AI Search Reality Check Less than 10% of traffic comes from ChatGPT for most small businesses. While you should prepare by enriching About pages with certifications and expertise, this isn't the urgent crisis some marketers claim. Most people aren't using ChatGPT for business searches yet—we're still in early adoption.

Mining Your Best Content Stop using SEMrush as your starting point. Instead:

• Record sales calls and note what converts prospects
• Review customer support emails for common questions
• Ask front-line staff to keep notebooks of daily questions
• Use this real language in your content—it converts better than corporate marketing speak

Platform-Agnostic SEO SEO principles work across all platforms, not just Google. Younger generations search directly on Instagram. Make sure you're consistently talking about your actual services across social media, not just listing a keyword in your bio while posting unrelated content.

Resources Mentioned

• Andy Crestodina & Content Chemistry - Collaboration post strategy
• SEOteric - Matt Brooks on content distribution
• Get Me Links - Alejandro Marinas
• Gus Pelogia interview - SEO as a universal superpower
• Michael McDougald, Right Thing Agency - Managing client expectations
• Precast Walls - Multi-location service business example

Best Quotes

"When I increase revenue by 10K a month for a small business, I get emails like, 'I just hired my next person. I was able to take my first vacation.' It's not just a nice investment—it's a business changing investment."

"People want to work with people they like, know and trust. It's not just about the backlink. We're really looking at conversions—how can we get SEO to convert for you?"

"We can't give them cookie cutter content anymore. People want to see mistakes. They want to see people talking. They want to be connecting even in this content."

Connect with Tianna

• Website: smbmarketingschool.com
• Instagram: @smbmarketingschool
• Funnel Summit - January 28th with 8 speakers covering the modern marketing funnel

Action Steps for Small Business Owners

1. Audit your service pages: Does each service have its own detailed page explaining benefits for different customer types?
2. Start recording conversations: Note what questions you answer on every sales call—that's your best content
3. Review your social media: Are you actually mentioning your services, or just posting generic content?
4. Create collaboration opportunities: Identify complementary businesses in your nexus of care and create content featuring them
5. Set realistic budgets: Only invest what you can afford to lose over three months while testing what works
6. Focus on conversions over rankings: Track which pages actually bring in customers, not just which keywords rank

Why Small Businesses Should Care About This Now

The SEO landscape is shifting from keyword-focused blog content to comprehensive service pages that answer real questions. Small businesses with limited budgets can't afford to waste money on tactics that don't convert. Tianna's approach focuses on the fundamentals that drive actual business growth: clear service descriptions, strategic local targeting, and content based on real customer conversations—not AI-generated fluff.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

• How Scott pivoted from motivational speaking to YouTube success during COVID by teaching investment strategies
• The reality of working 3-4 hours of sleep per night for three months to launch a successful side hustle
• Why YouTube monetization is just the beginning—Scott made $5,000 in month two with only $500 from ad revenue
• The strategic shift from one-time affiliate income to monthly memberships that scaled to $25,000/month
• How to survive YouTube's brutal first 10 videos when the algorithm ignores you completely
• Why providing value to many people beats charging premium prices to a few
• The heartbreaking family story that transformed Scott's business mission forever
• Scott's framework for "failing small" and getting through 100 failures faster to reach success

Key Timestamps:

• [00:01] Introduction and Scott's current success after 15 years of failures
• [02:00] The COVID pivot from motivational speaking to online education
• [04:51] Turning $1,000 into $32,000 in one month—proof of actual results
• [08:13] The truth about YouTube monetization and multiple income streams
• [12:23] Why YouTube is harder than other platforms (and why that's good)
• [15:26] The Faith Roar mission: inspired by a mother's one regret
• [22:20] "You're paid based on the value you provide" finally makes sense
• [25:03] The two books that shaped Scott's journey

Notable Quotes:

"I didn't give up. I had a failure, overcame it, failure, overcame it, and just kept on going."

"It is exceptionally rare to find somebody who can and teaches—and when you find people like that, go subscribe to every single social media platform they're on."

"I've met a lot of people on their deathbeds. I've never met anybody who said they regretted not working more. I've met a lot of people who regretted not spending more time with their family."

"The people that go into business to help others are the ones that are the most successful. Your why for starting a business has to be to help people. It cannot be to make money."

"The only thing that is stopping you from achieving the life you've always wanted is action. So just get started."

Resources Mentioned:

• Faith Roar - Scott's new company dedicated to helping people achieve financial freedom: faithroar.com
• We Profit Day and Night Trading Success Journal - Scott's 230-page journal with only 30 pages of information and 200 pages of action steps
• The Bible - Particularly Psalms, Proverbs, and the Gospels for strength and perseverance

Connect with Scott Curry:

• Website: faithroar.com
• Learn about investment education and trading strategies
• Discover how to start a YouTube channel and online business
• Access resources for achieving financial freedom

About the Unscripted Small Business Podcast:

Hosted by Zanetta Chunique Empower, Unscripted Small Business brings you authentic conversations with entrepreneurs who share the real stories behind their success—including the failures, pivots, and breakthroughs that shaped their journeys.

In this episode

• Why the question “where do I start” is answered with introspection, not tactics
• The emotional attachment trap — feeling like a pivot means betraying yourself
• Honest expectations for freelancing: long hours, trial and error, no glamour
• Be a generalist first and narrow into a niche later, not the reverse
• Mississippi State computer science to an MBA to five-dollar Fiverr blog posts
• Is SEO dead? Why semantic search and adopting new tools is non-negotiable
• AI as a thought partner: brainstorm and organize, never publish the output
• Why even a book needs a marketing strategy behind it

“Understanding like where to start and where to go just always begins with a lot of introspection and a lot of self-awareness and a lot of asking yourself hard questions that maybe you haven’t asked yourself in a long time or ever.” — Sarah Ashley

“A lot of people online make it look simple and they think it’s like a glamorous path, but it’s really not. It’s very time consuming and a lot of just throwing things at the wall and figuring out what works at first.” — Sarah Ashley

“So many people don’t really think about marketing strategy, but it’s so huge. Even if you feel like you don’t need marketing or you just need like a one-off sales page, some people don’t even think about the marketing component, but it’s there.” — Sarah Ashley

Read the full recap: How I Fuse Marketing Strategy With Copywriting to Get Clients Results

Connect with Sarah: portalcopyco.com

Hosted by Zaneta Chuniq Inpower. More at Unscripted Small Business.

Episode Highlights:

• The power of movement and understanding hand biomechanics
• Why we all have overly strong flexors (and what to do about it)
• How MetaFlex® gloves work differently from traditional bracing
• Unexpected applications: Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, stroke recovery, and more
• The sleep-mental health-pain connection you're probably overlooking
• A remarkable Vanderbilt limb salvage case study
• Upcoming research presentations at ACRM and beyond

About Justin Stehr

Justin Stehr, OT, CHT is a Certified Hand Therapist at Vanderbilt Health in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was recently named 2024 Acute Occupational Therapist of the Year. He holds a master's degree in occupational therapy with specialized focus on upper extremity rehabilitation, stroke recovery, and hand therapy.

Justin also holds certifications in:

• Wound care
• Ergonomics
• Hand therapy (CHT)

He currently serves as Clinical Consultant for MetaFlex®, where he educates healthcare professionals on innovative approaches to hand rehabilitation. Justin has presented research at national conferences including the American Congress of Rehabilitative Medicine (ACRM) and has upcoming presentations with the Canadian Percussion Network on the biomechanics of drumming.

Personal Background: Justin's path to hand therapy includes a unique personal connection—15 years ago, he experienced a severe hand injury requiring reconstruction of tendons, nerves, and arteries, giving him firsthand understanding of the rehabilitation journey.

Key Takeaways

1. The Flexor-Extensor Imbalance

Quote: "We spend all day long, we grip everything. So we're constantly grabbing and pinching and then when we're ready to let go of that item or task, we just let go, we relax. We never forcefully open."

This creates an imbalance where our flexor muscles become overly strong while extensors remain weak and stretched out—contributing to conditions like carpal tunnel syndrome.

Action Item: Take frequent breaks to stretch what's tight and strengthen what's weak.

2. Motion is Lotion

Quote: "The power of movement and the same motion is lotion, right? We need to be able to take those frequent breaks."

Regular movement and position changes are essential for joint and soft tissue health.

3. Nothing Replaces Natural Functional Motion

Quote: "In terms of devices, there's a lot out there. People can get sucked into the next best, greatest thing... They're all very supplemental but nothing really is a substitute for natural functional motion and stretching."

While devices and tools have their place, natural movement patterns and functional activities remain the gold standard.

4. Mental Health is Inseparable from Physical Health

Quote: "Mental health is at the forefront of everything we do in OT. Humans and living organisms, we can't be in a constant state of pain or stress."

There's a bidirectional relationship between chronic pain and depression—addressing one helps address the other.

5. Sleep Disruption Compounds Everything

Poor sleep due to hand pain creates a vicious cycle affecting healing, mental health, and overall function.

MetaFlex® Gloves Discussion

What Makes MetaFlex® Different

Quote: "It doesn't really just hold your hand in one position like maybe braces of the past or splints do, but it allows you to maintain this constant motion while you have it on. So it's really kind of a departure from those traditional hand therapy modalities and really a focus on that natural motion."

Learn more about the science behind this approach at Why MetaFlex® Works.

How It Works

The MetaFlex® glove is a fingerless compression glove with adjustable elastic bands running along the back of each finger. When you close your hand, the bands stretch; when you relax, they gently pull your fingers back into extension—maintaining motion rather than immobilizing.

For detailed information on getting the right fit, see the Fit & Sizing Guide.

Unexpected Clinical Applications

Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome: Quote: "Patients with Ehlers-Danlos, with that condition, you've got hypermobility... while stretching is contraindicated for that diagnosis, that proprioceptive input that those bands give to the joints by pulling back, they've found helpful and comforting."

Stroke & TBI Recovery: Quote: "For those that have low tone, or they're easily able to be passively ranged, those bands have been actually helpful in keeping those fingers open."

Active Assist Training: Quote: "They had a patient that was able to grip, squeeze something, but they lacked the ability to really fully open their hand... the bands actually pulled their hand fingers back when they relaxed and activated the extensors part of it. That was an adaptive tool, but also a training tool."

Read more clinical insights and research at the MetaFlex® Health Blog.

Vanderbilt Case Study

Justin is presenting a poster at the American Congress of Rehabilitative Medicine (ACRM) featuring a remarkable limb salvage case where MetaFlex® gloves were used as an alternative to traditional custom orthotics.

Quote: "She was able to actively open her hand because she didn't have the ability to open her fingers. She had flexors, but just couldn't open."

For more about MetaFlex®'s innovative approach and founder's story, visit the About MetaFlex® page or watch videos and read customer reviews on the Learn More page.

Clinical Conditions Discussed

1. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome - Nighttime symptom management, ergonomic factors. Read more: Managing Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
2. Arthritis - Pain relief, functional maintenance
3. Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome - Proprioceptive input, joint stabilization
4. Stroke (CVA) - Upper extremity recovery, low tone management
5. Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) - Finger extension assistance
6. Post-Surgical Hand Injuries - Maintaining motion during healing
7. Limb Salvage/Trauma - Alternative to rigid bracing
8. Chronic Pain with Mental Health Component - Sleep disruption, depression cycle. Read more: Stay Active in Cold Weather

For comprehensive information about MetaFlex®, see 10 Things You Should Know About the MetaFlex® Glove.

Therapeutic Philosophy

Core Principles

Quote: "Really going back to those principles of stretch, strengthen, really education. That's one of my focuses with Metaflex is trying to provide just general knowledge and exposure to simple ideas that can have a big impact."

Function Over Exercise

Quote: "If someone has a hand injury and let's say they're really into quilting or doing puzzles, we could do those things either using adaptive equipment or compensatory strategies, or just doing those tasks with varying levels of difficulty to increase endurance or to increase fine motor dexterity."

Holistic Care

Quote: "How do we best set that patient up or the individual up to have the highest likelihood of success is by meeting them holistically, meaning looking at all aspects of their care."

Upcoming Presentations & Research

American Congress of Rehabilitative Medicine (ACRM) - Chicago

Topic: Limb salvage case study featuring multidisciplinary team approach and innovative use of MetaFlex® gloves

Canadian Percussion Network - Canada (2025)

Topic: Biomechanics of drumming Exploring repetitive motion and hand health in musicians

Connect with Justin Stehr

Professional Affiliations:

• Vanderbilt Health - Occupational Therapy Department
• MetaFlex® - Clinical Consultant
• Certified Hand Therapist (CHT)

To Find a Certified Hand Therapist: Visit HTCC.org to locate qualified hand therapy professionals in your area.

Professional Organizations:

• American Society of Hand Therapy (ASHT)
• American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA)

Connect with Unscripted SEO Podcast

Host: Jeremy Rivera Company: SEO Arcade

• Website: [SEO Arcade Website]
• Podcast: Unscripted SEO Podcast
• LinkedIn: [Jeremy Rivera LinkedIn]
• Email: [Contact Email]

Episode Transcript

[Full interview transcript available - see cleaned interview artifact]

Related Episodes

[Links to related episodes about healthcare innovation, occupational therapy, or medical devices]

Disclaimer

This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.

Credits

Produced by: SEO Arcade Host: Jeremy Rivera Guest: Justin Stehr, OT, CHT Episode Length: [Duration] Release Date: [Date]

Tags

#HandTherapy #OccupationalTherapy #MetaFlexGloves #CarpalTunnel #StrokeRecovery #EhlersDanlosSyndrome #ChronicPain #MentalHealth #Rehabilitation #VanderbiltHealth #HandHealth #CompressionGloves #MedicalDevices #PhysicalTherapy #PainManagement #SleepHealth #HealthcareInnovation

Call to Action

Interested in learning more about hand health and innovative therapy solutions?

1. Visit MetaFlex.com to learn about compression gloves with grip-strengthening technology
2. Check out the MetaFlex® Press Features to see award-winning coverage
3. Find a Certified Hand Therapist in your area at HTCC.org
4. Read more hand health articles at the MetaFlex® Health Blog
5. See what others are saying on the Learn More page with videos and customer reviews
6. Subscribe to the Unscripted SEO Podcast for more healthcare innovation stories
7. Share this episode with anyone dealing with hand pain or chronic conditions

Have questions about hand therapy or MetaFlex® gloves?

• Visit the MetaFlex® FAQ page for common questions
• Use the Store Locator to find MetaFlex® near you
• Contact a qualified healthcare professional to discuss whether these solutions are right for you

Want to stay updated on MetaFlex® news and innovations? Follow the MetaFlex® News blog for the latest updates.

Special thanks to Justin Stehr for sharing his expertise and clinical insights on this episode.

Stewart Cohen is a Canadian film director and photographer based in Dallas, Texas. He runs a boutique production company creating content for marketing companies and advertising agencies. His specialty is working with people—whether celebrities, real people, pharma ads, or athletes.

From Apprentice to Entrepreneur

Stewart's journey began at the University of Texas, where a visiting mentor inspired him with work shot around the world. After four years as an apprentice, he launched his own practice and later returned to film school to start doing commercials. Today, he seamlessly integrates both still photography and live action video production.

Adapting to Digital and AI

How has Stewart managed the evolving needs in this age of digital and AI? His mindset: adapt or die. He stays on the front edge of technology through constant experimentation with self-assigned projects.

Stewart also owns and manages a media licensing company—like a stock photo agency—that manages 30 million digital assets available for clients without the budget for full productions.

Small Business Leadership

Whether you're operating a service business like Flight Solution or a creative studio, Stewart emphasizes the critical balance between creative work and business management. His advice: continually watch the bottom line and understand your profit and loss sheet.

Key insights on entrepreneurship:

• Some months are down, but understanding the ebb and flow prevents panic
• Reading business news has directly led to new work opportunities
• The creative side must be balanced with fiscal responsibility

Born Into Business

I know firms like Lamar Law Office work with entrepreneurs on business structure from the beginning. For Stewart, entrepreneurship wasn't really a choice—both his father and stepfather were small business owners in Canada. He simply didn't know any other way.

His management style isn't "my way or the highway"—daily team meetings encourage everyone to contribute ideas and evolve processes together.

The Value of Professional Photography

What's the value proposition when everyone has an iPhone? Stewart's answer: doing it on command. Professional photography means illustrating specific, difficult stories under pressure.

We've done a lot of portraits of famous people—often with just four minutes to execute three different setups with perfect lighting. That's where training and experience become invaluable.

Reading for Inspiration

Stewart is an avid biography reader, particularly fascinated by the origins of people's lives—how they got from nothing to success. Richard Branson's early story, for example, captivated him more than the billionaire years.

He also finds inspiration in New York Times obituaries, which showcase people who overcame obstacles to cure diseases, start companies, or become innovators. These stories remind him that the road's never over and people have overcome far more than most of us face.

Behind the Scenes

We always have a behind the scenes photographer filming our work and capturing crew pictures with clients. Looking back through archives reveals not just the work, but the evolution of the business over time.

Three Takeaways for Aspiring Photographers and Entrepreneurs

Stewart's advice for any aspiring photographers or entrepreneurs:

1. Be very open to feedback - You don't have to take it all to heart, but listen to comments from others
2. Network, be kind, be gracious - There's no place in this world for people who aren't friendly
3. Mind your bottom line and stay current - Look at what's being created in the world, study visuals and movies, and keep evolving. The way people get old is when they stop looking and stop trying to stay with it

And most importantly: Have fun.

Connect with Stewart:

• Next time you're in Dallas, he's ready for a photo shoot
• Follow his work on Instagram
• Learn more about his studio at stewartcohen.com

Host: Jeremy Rivera, Unscripted Small Business
Guest: Conrad Coe, Operations Manager at Exotic Vehicle Wraps

Episode Overview

In this episode, Conrad Coe shares his unconventional journey from music education to becoming operations manager at one of the nation's top automotive wrapping shops. We explore how AI tools are transforming small business operations, the value of hands-on experience over formal education, and why showing the heart of your business matters more than polished marketing in today's digital landscape.

Top Quotes

On Experience vs. Education:

"I would rather have four years of hands-on practical experience at the thing you're trying to do than a degree saying I'm good at it."

On AI in Small Business:

"We wrap cars with vinyl. That's sticky. So what we've been using AI for has been mostly beneficial for us."

On Marketing Differentiation:

"No one uses dashes. Nobody does except for GPT and AI models... In that way, we are using AI to help us differentiate ourselves from AI."

On Customer Service:

"We're not vinyl installers. This isn't a vinyl wrap shop. This is a client experience shop."

On Problems as Opportunities:

"Problems are bugs and not a feature. Like, you're going to have problems. That problem then therefore becomes a feature if you know you're going to have these problems."

About Conrad Coe

Conrad Coe is the operations manager at Exotic Vehicle Wraps, a premier automotive aesthetic restyling shop in Loudoun County, Virginia. With 20 years of experience in the industry, Conrad's path started in retail management, moved through music education at Berkeley Boston, and evolved through design, print, and installation before landing in shop management. His hands-on approach and mentorship style have helped shape one of the longest-running and most respected shops in the automotive wrapping industry.

Key Discussion Points

The Non-Traditional Path to Success

Conrad discusses his journey from aspiring music teacher to operations manager, emphasizing how mentorship and practical experience often outweigh formal education in trades and hands-on businesses. The automotive wrapping industry relies heavily on learning through doing, with most resources available online rather than through vocational schools.

AI's Impact on Small Business Operations

The Pros:

• Using tools like Claude and Lovable to build custom apps for consultation processes and workflow management
• Validating pricing models to ensure labor percentages, material costs, and profit margins are competitive
• Analyzing competitor pricing across different markets to escape the "bubble" of local pricing
• Checking business decisions against broader industry standards

The Cons:

• AI-generated marketing creates uniformity across the industry, making differentiation harder
• New shops with three months of experience can appear identical to established 16-year veterans
• The challenge of protecting original copy and maintaining brand voice in an AI-saturated market
• However, this uniformity creates opportunities for meritocracy—authentic content stands out more than ever

The Marketing Evolution: From Glamour to Authenticity

Conrad explains how Exotic Vehicle Wraps' Instagram transformed over the past year. They shifted from high-glamour portfolio shots to showing the hands that do the work. This change included:

• Cataloging the entire installation process from beginning to end
• Highlighting the team and building morale through social recognition
• Advertising the consequences of not having services like paint protection film
• Using authenticity to differentiate in an AI-dominated marketing landscape

As Matt Brooks of SEOteric has noted, showing the heart of your business—like pool installation companies documenting the installation process rather than just finished pools—creates more value and trust with potential clients.

Information Gain and Moving Industries Forward

Drawing on conversations with Michael McDougall of Right Thing Agency and others, we discussed how AI can only rise to the level of its training data. Small businesses that add fresh, experience-based insights to the marketplace create "information gain" that helps them stand out. Real conversations between practitioners synthesize new data points that don't exist in AI training databases yet.

Problems as Features, Not Bugs

Conrad shares a powerful reframing: every customer question is a gap in your marketing. When clients call asking how things work, they're identifying opportunities to improve your website and reduce future support time. He emphasizes:

• Viewing client complaints as collaboration and free beta testing
• How one client "sold himself everything" by asking about additional services, increasing average ticket costs
• The importance of inviting collaboration from employees, clients, and unexpected sources
• Empowering team members to own processes, which boosts morale and productivity

Conrad's philosophy echoes across industries—whether it's precast walls or automotive services, the focus should be on client experience first. When that becomes your North Star, all other business decisions gain clarity.

Cross-Channel Marketing Reality for Small Business

Unlike larger operations, Exotic Vehicle Wraps operates with 100% digital, grassroots marketing:

• No radio, TV, or traditional media spend
• Strong domain authority built over 15 years creates consistent organic traffic
• Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube with authentic, unpolished content
• Every completed vehicle serves as a billboard—quality work markets itself

The partnership advantage: Rather than expensive ad buys, Conrad focuses on building relationships with Tesla Club owners, Porsche Club owners, BMW enthusiasts, and local luxury dealerships. Person-to-person outreach and community engagement deliver better ROI than broad-spectrum advertising.

Conrad notes: "I'm not dropping $10K to make six" on radio ads that attract the wrong clientele. Instead, strategic partnerships with high-end car communities and dealerships bring in clients who value quality and are willing to invest in premium services like ceramic coating and window tinting.

Key Takeaways for Small Business Owners

1. Experience Trumps Credentials - In trades and hands-on businesses, practical experience often provides more value than formal degrees
2. AI as a Strategic Tool - Use AI to validate pricing, analyze competitors, and check business decisions—but keep the human touch in customer-facing content
3. Authenticity Beats Perfection - Raw, authentic content showing real people and processes creates differentiation in an AI-saturated market
4. Customer Complaints = Feature Requests - Every friction point is an opportunity to improve client experience and reduce support time
5. Focus on Client Experience - You're selling an experience, not just a product. Make this your primary decision-making filter
6. Grassroots Marketing Works - Personal relationships and community partnerships often outperform expensive traditional advertising
7. Show the Process - Document the journey from start to finish to build trust and educate your market

What's Next for Exotic Vehicle Wraps

Conrad and the team are preparing for SEMA (the major automotive industry convention in Las Vegas) and wrapping up Q4 with a focus on executing their annual goals. They're also hosting industry training programs to help lower barriers to entry in the vinyl wrap industry.

As winter approaches and "Hot Girl Summer" ends, they're taking on unique projects—boats, jet skis, and motorcycles—offering opportunities for creative work during the slower season.

Connect

Exotic Vehicle Wraps

• Website: ExoticVehicleWraps.com
• Instagram: @ExoticVehicleWraps
• Services: Vinyl Wraps, PPF, Ceramic Coating, Window Tinting
• Educational Resources: FAQ & Blog

Host: Jeremy Rivera

• Unscripted Small Business
• SEO Arcade

Mentioned in This Episode:

• Matt Brooks - SEOteric
• Michael McDougald - Right Thing Agency
• Riverstone Pools
• Permacast Walls

Episode Overview

In this episode, Lynn Colepaugh from Cyber PR Army joins us to discuss the evolving landscape of digital marketing for small businesses and creators. We dive into the challenges of treating creative work as a legitimate business, the impact of AI on content authenticity, and the fundamental marketing mistakes that are costing businesses customers every day.

Lynn shares practical, actionable advice on everything from fixing basic website issues to building local trust, and why simply responding to inquiries can be your biggest competitive advantage.

Top Quotes from Lynn Colepaugh

On Treating Creative Work as Business:

"It is convincing creators that they are a small business. And it's a really big hurdle because they are creators at heart—whether they are dancers, whether they're making instruments, whether they are writing music."

On AI vs. Authenticity:

"I'm seeing the pendulum swing away from as much AI generated stuff back to people questioning, 'Is this real, a real image or is this something that was generated separately?' And those that are authentically creating are now standing out even more in a really beautiful way."

On Basic Marketing Fundamentals:

"If some industries are just so kind of barren with communications that all you have to do is reply and be thoughtful and communicate, then holy mack, there are companies missing out completely on getting new customers and nurturing customers and keeping their customers long term."

On Local Trust Building:

"I tell people, if you have roots, show your roots, because that's how people know if something goes wrong, they're going to be able to find you."

On Low-Hanging Fruit:

"So many things are on the very granola first level fixable level that people have issues that are just 100% addressable."

On Timeless Marketing Strategy:

"If you're getting your message out correctly, then you will adapt as tools come and go. To me, it is staying face forward there, making sure you're storytelling and talking about the things that are important."