John SmallMtn (00:00:00)

Welcome to another episode of Founders Growth. My name is John Hill, AKA Small Mountain. I’m the founder of Adapted Growth. Today on the show we have Kelly Gordon. She is the founder of Dapper Codes, which is an SEO agency. Kelly and I have known each other for a couple of years now and I’m excited to have her on the show. Kelly, can you talk a little bit more about Dapper Codes and who you serve and who you work with?

Kelly Gordon (00:00:20)

Absolutely. So I’ve been doing this for a long time, getting close to 20 years, which is a whole situation. But as far as who we have evolved into, we help home service companies, generally multi-location, be able to come in, figure out what’s wrong, get them more traffic, and go from there. We do work outside of those industries, but that’s our bread and butter.

John SmallMtn (00:00:44)

Epic. Okay. We’ve known each other for a while, we’ve been Facebook friends and networking in the space for a while. I’m excited to do this with you because on the pre-call we talked about some very cool topics to dive into.

The first thing I want to talk about with you is the fact that everyone is talking about being data-driven, but there’s not a whole lot of people who actually are data-driven when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of it. Can you talk a little bit more about the differences between just using it as a buzzword versus using it in your client work to make better decisions?

Kelly Gordon (00:01:20)

Absolutely. Again, like I said, I’ve been doing this a long time. We also do white-label work, so we talk to a lot of different agencies saying that we’re data-driven from a sales perspective—which, as you can speak to, is excellent, right? It’s that buzzword.

Everybody wants data-driven decisions. The problem is most of us don’t actually have it in any tangible way. There’s a couple of facets to that. There is data-driven as in how we react as digital marketers as a category, and then there’s the facet of how I make data-driven decisions for an individual company. If I have a client that comes on and, for whatever reason, has limited or non-existent historical data in GA4 or GSC, how can I make data-driven decisions? There’s no data.

We’re an SEO company—that’s our way of understanding what’s happening. Yes, there’s software where you can get some historical data, but it’s not exactly what’s happening on that site. If we don’t clean the data up, then we don’t have that data. So then how do we tell a client, “You didn’t have the data, so now we have to wait”?

Especially when talking about restaurants or home service—where seasonality is involved—I have to wait a year to really understand how that works. We can make a lot of assumptions, but all of a sudden it’s spring and the pressure washer guy is exploding. Is that because of us, or is that just because everyone is searching for it now?

Then there’s the idea as an agency owner: we make the most from the 20% versus the 80%. If we got rid of the busy 80%, we would be great with this 20%. There is no factual data around that in any way, shape, or form. If you haven’t read the book How Brands Grow, read that. There’s literally nothing around it, but we’ve just accepted it as a thing based on data. But what data? Whose data? It’s mostly non-existent.

John SmallMtn (00:03:37)

Interesting. If someone wants to actually be data-driven, how do you go about doing it the right way?

Kelly Gordon (00:03:50)

When a client comes to us and says that, we make sure that we check everything. How is this set up? Is this tracking exactly what we want? We’re going to delete everything that we don’t want it to track—for example, random events in GA4. Why are we tracking them? What are they? Is that actually triggering the right thing? Keeping it simple, we then monitor that over a period of time: 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, 12 months. Then we’re able to look at that.

What people want to bring up is, “Well, the industry benchmark is X.” I actually don’t care, because the only thing that actually matters is what you did and whether you are getting better. There’s no positive thing that comes out of saying, “The industry standard is X and we’re at Y.” Is your Y 20% better or worse than last quarter or last year?

Then we look at the business and ask what caused that. Especially as marketers, there’s obviously overlap—and you deal with this a lot too, John—between marketing and sales. Both of them have their own issues. How do we make them work together? If marketing is not delivering a high enough quality lead, what is that quality?

I look at businesses in four different categories: pre-validation, validation, leverage, and scale. I bet for that scale company with a proven sales team, if I handed them the leads that the pre-validation company couldn’t close, they probably would close them at a pretty good clip. Then we have to look back at the data: Whose data? What are we doing, and why? That’s also why industry benchmarks don’t matter.

John SmallMtn (00:05:35)

Yeah, everybody is just Googling, “What should my close rate be? What should my no-show rate be? Is my no-show rate low?”

Kelly Gordon (00:05:49)

Right, and asking ChatGPT, who doesn’t know anything about it. I am over clients talking to us via ChatGPT responses. I completely get that people need help and support, but go to other experts and pay them for their time. This is our world, and everybody at this point is realizing why doctors have been saying, “It’s not Dr. Google.”

John SmallMtn (00:06:21)

I’ve been in this space for a while. My business before this was website design, and that’s where I started to learn about SEO and all of these things. I know just enough to be dangerous. I’m curious: with all the AI stuff now, how do you see search changing? Are you pivoting toward AI SEO? Are you still focused on search in the general sense? Do you feel pressure to move into the AI side of things? How does that work for Kelly’s brain and Kelly’s plans?

Kelly Gordon (00:07:04)

The only place SEO for AI comes up is in buzzwords and sales, because it’s ultimately exactly the same thing. If you are doing really good SEO, then AI can figure it out. That’s the deal.

Google ranks everything. Google’s not going to say, “Oh my God, there’s AI.” Of course they have Gemini, but we’ve got everybody else: ChatGPT, Perplexity, all the things. Google is not going to say, “You know what? We’re good, we’re done.” The way that we have ranked forever is fine. Google is the gold standard and has always been the gold standard, which means all of the other platforms are only going through now what Google went through 20 years ago. All of the random vacillations—like “If I do this trick, this happens”—that was the Wild West of Google 20 years ago. They are literally going down the same path.

John SmallMtn (00:08:25)

Whenever I was coming into this area, it was right around when they made the big switch away from volume of links to the quality of links. Even back then, when I was hitting the scene and meeting marketers and SEO people, everyone thought that the sky was falling and that SEO was going to be dead. Then, from the ashes, lo and behold, there are still people being found on search and driving better impact for it.

AI just feels like a similar situation, especially in this one use case of “We’re going all in so we can be found in AI search.” It feels a little too “the sky is falling” and like everything has to change, when people’s patterns and habits get pretty deeply ingrained.

Kelly Gordon (00:08:59)

Correct. Is there a way to use AI that is not like a fancy Google? Of course, but 99% of the population is not using it that way. It really is just another avenue.

Think about what we have: Google organic, Google desktop, Google mobile (which can be different), the Map Pack, and paid options like LSA and PPC. All of these things are just avenues. LSA and PPC also perform better when SEO is really good, which is the same for AI. If you were paying and doing really well for SEO, and now AI is out and someone says that’s why you’re tanking, then your SEO wasn’t good to begin with.

John SmallMtn (00:09:43)

I like that. That’s spicy.

Kelly Gordon (00:09:53)

That literally is the thing. It’s because they were covering up something, or you probably were going to rank anyway.

Even what’s odd is Google will come out and say—I was working on this morning—”We know which backlinks are bad and which ones are good, so you don’t need to disavow.” Then why, when we do disavow, do we consistently get higher rankings?

John SmallMtn (00:10:24)

Here’s one of my long-term questions. I know that anyone running any kind of search algorithm is going to keep a lot of components pretty close to the chest. I saw an article by Rand Fishkin talking about how Google is no longer playing fair with keeping SEOs in the know about what’s really going to drive rank. Do you think that’s a true statement—that they’re trying to keep it obfuscated—or do you think that they’re still playing face up for people who are paying attention and want to do it the right way?

Kelly Gordon (00:11:03)

I think if you pay enough attention—kind of going back to the backlinks thing… Also, it’s funny, I really thought it was you that had posted about Rand Fishkin’s book, but you told me it was not, and I still don’t know who it was! Whoever was on my friends list on Facebook that read it and said you have to read this, tell me, because I thought it was John!

Going back to backlinks: Google has said, “I get it, I know which ones are good or bad.” But if we do a full disavowal—literally go through manually, figure out what’s good and bad—we get better rankings. At first I was mad, and then we had to figure out what was happening. I think they’re saying that’s a feature they want in the future, and if it’s something they want in the future, they need you to leave it alone so they have the data to deal with it. If we’re all fixing it, then they can’t determine what is good and bad to rank it.

There is a grain of salt to be taken, and maybe that’s what Rand is talking about. If you’re paying an expert’s level of attention, you can differentiate between what they said versus what is actually happening. Most people say, “Well, they said this, so we’re going to leave it.” But Google is looking out for Google—100%. It’s PR on both sides.

John SmallMtn (00:12:35)

That’s interesting. I have one more question for you before we dive out of the SEO specifics. My opinion has always been that if you’re just pumping out content—and right now it’s never been easier to pump out a mountain of content—it’s not going to be as effective as if you’re actually able to get backlinks. In your opinion, is it 50/50 content to links?

Kelly Gordon (00:13:25)

What I always say, and how I describe it to clients, is that we used to be in the quantity era of Google. We are now in the quality era of Google.

Most companies cannot afford to pump out high-quality content daily because you need high-quality writers, which takes time. You need more than one—you might need more than 10 to make that happen. That is a big-boy game. We have clients that are in that realm, but what do we do with the local or small businesses that are not paying copywriters on staff?

We have a med spa in a very large city, and before working with us, they paid for around 80 AI blogs a week to hit their site for close to a year. If we were in the quantity era, you may have gotten away with it for a while. But now Google is over it. Then we have the issue where some of it is indexed and some of it is not, creating a mess. The best-case scenario is that low-quality posts were not indexed so we can just get rid of them, but unfortunately, Google caught up and said, “We’re done here.”

In that case, you are much better off just stopping. AI is lazy, period. If it can’t find what it needs in a fraction of the three seconds humans give it, it’s gone. If you’re going to give it 80 blogs a week, month, or year, the quality and the coding behind it has to be so good that it understands what it is. If it’s trash, you might as well not have it.

John SmallMtn (00:15:16)

That leads me to one more SEO-specific question around some of the dogma. One thing I see a lot of people talk about is the idea that you have to write for the people, not for the robots. Knowing how the back end goes, how true of a statement is that? If you’re just writing for humans and not thinking about any of the other stuff, is that good advice or harmful advice?

Kelly Gordon (00:15:52)

It is excellent advice in our day and age, with a caveat: the coding behind the scenes that I mentioned. Do we need an optimized H1 and a few optimized H2s? Yes. Do we need a title and a solid meta description? Yes. Do we need schema? Absolutely. That’s what AI is mostly reading.

From there, talk for humans. AI in its LLM nature is smart enough that over-optimization isn’t what it’s looking for. It understands, as Google has for a long time, what over-optimized means.

John SmallMtn (00:16:35)

Does that mean having the scaffolding set up for the robots so that you can fill in the boxes for humans? Is that a better way to think about it?

Kelly Gordon (00:16:41)

Correct. We have a big employment lawyer in a big city. Since we aren’t employment law experts, we give them the outline scaffolding, they provide the expertise, and then we put it together. I need the expertise; we don’t need it to be generic. Anybody can get generic from ChatGPT. It’s about being specific. That outline and scaffolding from an origination point is important, but so is how it’s integrated into the website.

John SmallMtn (00:17:24)

Switching gears a bit, I’d like to talk about going way back in the day. Can you talk about your first client? How did you find them, and what was that whole process like in the early days?

Kelly Gordon (00:17:36)

I got my first client off of Craigslist. This was before Facebook was big—Facebook was still very new and personal, where you had maybe 50 friends. I would scour the web design section of Craigslist and call or email people. There was a dedicated web design section—though I haven’t been on Craigslist in a decade!

There was a mold testing company out of Columbia, South Carolina (I’m in Greenville). I called the guy, talked to him, and grew his business. We actually have a case study on our site about it. They eventually sold the company. I actually talked to him the other day because I had a question about mold and figured I’d ask him since we still have that relationship. But yeah, it was off Craigslist—which maybe I should have been more worried about as a female driving out to meet a company, but the world was different back then. We did a lot of web design, development, SEO, and growing locations for them. That was a very long time ago.

John SmallMtn (00:19:05)

That is wild. Do you think Craigslist is still a decent way to try to get your first client?

Kelly Gordon (00:19:12)

I’m not going to say no, because I don’t know, and given how much money it made me before, I’m not going to knock it. There are probably different strategies to it now that I don’t know, but we do social selling for our clients. It’s likely just another avenue.

John SmallMtn (00:19:35)

When you think about your path as a founder—all the trials, tribulations, struggles, and wins—what part of your path has been the hardest for you? That might be a revenue gap or a headcount issue. What season challenged you the most?

Kelly Gordon (00:19:53)

There are a couple of things. Personally, it’s making sure that every client has a piece of me in it. Beyond the execution, there’s understanding what a person or company is doing and crafting a custom strategy for them. Yes, there are checkboxes, SOPs, and frameworks, but the origin point is: “What are you trying to do as a human and as a company so we can help you get there, and what does that path look like?”

I am very involved with all of our clients and always have been because that is very important to me. As we grow, that becomes more difficult to do, but I have an amazing team and we meet all the time to make sure those pieces stay in place.

On the other side of the founder journey, I was actually looking at my taxes recently—because it’s tax season, my favorite! Looking at my tax bill for last year, it was more than I made in my first three years top-line. Being able to look at that and say, “Okay, this is a good thing,” requires framing it as progress.

As a person, understanding this path and what we’re trying to build evolves over time. In the beginning, it was about surviving and helping people in a way that I could be compensated for. Now, the shift is: “What are we doing?” Yes, we’re helping our clients, but there are a lot of people on our team. What are their personal goals, and how can we help them reach theirs? How do I steer us to grow sustainably and responsibly? The gamut of how you change over the years is pretty large.

John SmallMtn (00:22:13)

Interesting.

One of the other topics we were talking about when we were trying to figure out where to steer this episode was that you have to know enough to make a good hire or delegate work off to someone else. That makes so much sense to me, but everyone is so focused on “who,” not “how.” There are all these people who just want to be the visionaries and hire an integrator. I think a lot of people want to jump to “I’m smart enough, we’re just going to hire this out.”

Where does this idea show up for you—that you have to be well enough informed to make a good hire or actually delegate work off to someone else?

Kelly Gordon (00:22:56)

Anybody in the agency space hasn’t talked to anyone who hasn’t been burned. If it’s a new company, their brother was burned. This is a whole thing. What’s weird is that I should have understood it more over the years than I did until recently.

For me, I struggled finding a really good bookkeeper. It never lined up with what they said it was going to be, what I thought we had an agreement on, or how it was prepared and delivered. Then it hit me: this is what all of our clients are going through. My problem was that I don’t understand bookkeeping enough to know how to hire for that in the best way. I don’t understand enough about what they’re doing daily to know what’s really required—as a skill set, character, and human. That’s going to be very different for any skill or role you hire for.

When I realized that—because they always say your biggest troubles are because of you—I realized I was not educated enough to do this. This has been a hurdle for 15 years. I should have figured this out long before now!

So, one of my good friends is a CFO of a large company, and I told her, “I need help. I need to understand what’s happening here. How do we set this up in a way that makes sense?” She came over, we discussed it, and now I have a better idea.

Who sets up the machine and who runs the machine are two different people. In our business, I spread myself across all of our clients. Who sets up the machine is different than who pulls the levers every single day.

In normal small to medium-sized businesses, the problem is a lack of education. It’s very easy to be taken from a sales perspective. In a smaller business, when you ask, “What’s our budget? What are we trying to accomplish here?”—imagine how different that conversation is compared to big companies. Big companies have strategists and know what they need; they usually just need lever-pullers. Small business owners don’t know.

John SmallMtn (00:25:41)

Yeah, how many times do you get the response: “Well, I don’t know, what’s it going to cost?”

Kelly Gordon (00:25:44)

Horrible, please! Mainly because you’re opening yourself up to be taken advantage of or sold.

It actually goes back to what I said before: stop talking to ChatGPT, mainly because it’s not as smart as people think it is. It’s just putting words in order in a similar way to what it has read across the internet. Garbage in, garbage out. When you tell it to pull from all these big sources, there’s tons of garbage out there. You can turn the television on and know that’s the case. If it was grabbing all of that and telling you what’s going on in the United States, it would be incorrect. It’s the same concept.

I spend a lot of my time trying to figure out how we solve that and help businesses with it. My dad was a cabinet maker, and ultimately his business failed when we moved. Part of the reason I do what I do is because I could have helped him if I knew then what I know now. I could have solved this for him.

Even really good friends of mine who have their own businesses have no idea. They ask if I can help them, and while I’m not going to take advantage of them, somebody else might. How do we get the information out about what you actually need or don’t need at whatever stage of business you’re in?

There is also the mindset of, “Well, I just want you to do it.” That is going to cost a lot, and it puts the onus on somebody else. As a business is starting and growing, the founder needs to be the one in the trenches to understand what’s happening. Say you were with us and we took everything over from day one. You’ve grown, you have employees and family relying on you, and then I get hit by a bus and the company goes out. Then what? Even if we weren’t trying to take advantage of you, something happened, and you don’t know how to fix it. That’s not fair.

John SmallMtn (00:28:35)

When I first hit the scene and was doing web design, everyone was talking about the book The E-Myth. I remember asking my business partner if I should read it, and he said, “It’ll be helpful, but wait until you start your own thing—it will be more helpful then.” I went through that book after starting my business, and it was all about the idea that you probably have a way of doing things, but it might not be the right way and can lead to frustration.

How is Kelly better at staying informed and avoiding that mistake when delegating, hiring, and putting the right people in the right seats these days?

Kelly Gordon (00:29:11)

That can be hard. Just as companies can mis-sell themselves, so can employees and contractors. “Right people in the right seats” is one of those abstract concepts.

The way we’ve done it through trial and error is recognizing there are button-pushers and strategy brains. I don’t mean that in a hierarchical way; I have plenty of very intelligent people who just want to push buttons to make money. If someone is a button-pusher, either we haven’t been able to automate that task yet or they have to use some form of brain, but there is a full SOP and they are managed by one or two layers above them.

For a junior developer on our team, there are three layers of QA that happen before a project reaches the client to review. The third layer is the account manager. Theoretically, if we have an approved Figma design, it either looks like it or it doesn’t, so it should only take one QA pass. In practice, it’s harder than you’d imagine. Putting in those layers takes more time and costs more money. When you’re custom coding things, narrowing those QA layers just doesn’t work.

Does that mean the first QA person is in the wrong seat? Theoretically yes, but in practice no. Distractions happen, people get busy, and they have a million other things on their plate. Building a company where you only need one QA person works theoretically, but not in practice.

The list of fixes should get smaller through each QA pass. If that’s happening, you’re in an excellent place. Even if we paid a lot more for a senior developer, we couldn’t eliminate those QA seats in practice. You have to have those several layers. The process itself creates the redundancy.

John SmallMtn (00:32:08)

Redundancy is the key thing I’m hearing from you. Even if someone is really great at what they do, you want another set of eyes on it. Don’t just go out and hire superstars and think it’s going to be fine—you need multiple passes.

Kelly Gordon (00:32:39)

That’s not how it works. When I consult agency owners, I teach them: do not hire for a human, hire for the role. If you hire for a human and that human is a unicorn, you are screwed. The company cannot be reliant on a single human in any role.

The smaller the business, the less in your face those issues are. The more the company grows, the more that becomes your main problem.

John SmallMtn (00:33:40)

One of the other things we talked about is how easy it is to put on the cape for people who don’t want to be saved. Sometimes that means going above and beyond to help a client when they are fighting against it, and sometimes it means trying to level up a team member who isn’t actually interested in improving. How has that shown up for you, and how are you better about seeing it and not over-investing?

Kelly Gordon (00:34:16)

We all learn that lesson through experience. It comes down to being very clear on what problem you are trying to solve. Things can become convoluted very quickly if you, as the owner, do not stay laser-focused on what the outcome should be.

I had a plumber come over the other day who wanted to explain everything to me. I don’t care about the details—I just want the outcome. I am direct enough to say it out loud, but most people won’t. I can’t be focused on the nuance of how you’re getting there because I have to focus on other outcomes I’m responsible for.

That’s why as an agency, we try to avoid being overly scheduled in client meetings. It gets convoluted quickly, especially in the small to medium-sized range, because clients want a lot of outcomes. It can be difficult for agency owners to say, “I hear you and I want to help, but that is outside of this scope.” Then clients feel like you are nickel-and-diming them or holding back answers.

Digital marketing is like practicing law or medicine: there is no guarantee. You can take the exact same type of business in the exact same geography and get two vastly different results. When we give advice, there are nuances and caveats that can be hard for smaller companies to understand. They might feel like you just want their money, but the reality is that it is way more complicated than they realize. You have to pay for the consulting, or you have to research it yourself so you know enough to ask the right questions.

John SmallMtn (00:37:50)

In the agency space, everyone talks about picking a niche and going hard into it—”the riches are in the niches.” There is value to standing out and being confident in conversations, but most people pick their niche solely based on whether there is money in it. Can you talk about where that goes wrong for an agency owner—like picking dentists just because they have a high customer lifetime value?

Kelly Gordon (00:38:31)

It’s ridiculous. The only reason you would niche in pre-validation, validation, or early leverage stages is for marketing purposes. It makes it repeatable to say, “We help these people, this is how we do it, buy it.”

As far as the actual business goes—whether we’re dealing with a dentist, lawyer, decking contractor, or restaurant—the core work is the same. The seats doing the work are the same. The only difference is the strategist understanding the nuances of the niche, and for the most part, it’s not rocket science. Insurance and finance are regulated spaces, so that’s a bit different, but in unregulated spaces, people just pick a niche because a guru told them to.

Nitching early on is just an easy angle for marketing and sales, but you limit your understanding of how business actually works if you do it too early. As agencies grow into massive companies, they silo into niches and repeat that process across multiple industries using the same core operational teams.

Saying you’re going to target high lifetime value industries so you can charge them more just to be in their niche is trash. The work is the work, regardless of the niche.

Now, a one-to-two employee company in a small town doesn’t need a high-powered copywriter, whereas a regulated space in a sophisticated market does. That costs more because of the skill level required for the team, not just because of the industry label. Charging $10,000 out the door just because they are personal injury lawyers is arbitrary—the work is the work.

John SmallMtn (00:42:25)

I love that. Speaking to the idea that you’re better served starting off as a generalist and then finding your lane—as opposed to… When I hung my shingle and started working with people, I really thought that the high-ticket realm was going to be a space where I could really help out. I was dabbling in all these other spaces, but I kept seeing all these high-ticket offer owners pissed off that their money was being held in chargebacks and their salespeople were mad. I thought, “I can help here.” They didn’t want my help. They didn’t really want to slow things down and have better alignment; they just wanted to try to fade the buyer’s remorse period easier. If I hadn’t gone through that experience, I would probably still think I could help those people. Part of it is getting kicked in the teeth, as opposed to being too detached from reality and trying to pick a lane before you actually test it out. I know some people who picked a specific niche and now hate all their clients.

Kelly Gordon (00:43:36)

Right. Life is too short for that. There are going to be people that, for whatever reason, you resonate with more. Go be with them. You have to talk to them every day, so it might as well be somebody you enjoy.

John SmallMtn (00:43:46)

Going back a second: you were talking about button-pushers versus strategists. One of the things I talk about with people is the difference between cooks and chefs. Some people reach out to me wanting me to take their calls or lead gen for them, and I tell them we need to have a quick conversation about cooks versus chefs. I’m more of a chef—I want to help with strategy and alignment. You can’t make a cook a chef; they have to decide to go down that path and build the skill set. How do you think about when to hire a strategist versus a button-pusher?

Kelly Gordon (00:44:34)

I try to find button-pushers who want to be more. I can train skills; I can’t train character. It’s a much slower route, but like you said before, for me long and slow is the way to go. We’re going to be doing this hopefully forever, so what difference does it make if it takes three more years?

John SmallMtn (00:45:00)

Changing gears to go into the rapid-fire portion: When someone is starting a business today, hanging a shingle, and wanting marketing—they want to be found, they want SEO and everything—what should someone starting new be thinking about when it comes to search, Google, and SEO?

Kelly Gordon (00:45:35)

Good question. As an agency owner, the space is going to get mad at me about this: in the pre-validation and validation stages, do it yourself. Go out there. I’m not telling you to learn SEO; I’m telling you to go create your own demand. If you do not have your own demand, an agency will screw you, or you’ll feel screwed, because it’s going to take months for some of this stuff to work when you should have been hitting and getting that engine going.

Unless you are incredibly well-funded or this is a side hustle to get started, there are two types of people: those with more money than time, and those with more time than money. Most people have more time than money. If you are starting a business and want to be number one in SEO, but you don’t have a website or a Google Business Profile (GBP), go start a GBP. Get that going, because you’re going to need it. We want to come into businesses that have some form of fire started. I don’t care how small the fire is, but there has to be one. Do not go to an agency to start the fire.

John SmallMtn (00:47:04)

I love that. In the world of social media, everyone has thought leadership, and a lot of it is AI-driven these days. But the longer I stay on this path, the more I appreciate some of that folksy wisdom. What is a piece of advice you see in the form of a tweet or a mantra that you can appreciate now, but had to learn the hard way?

Kelly Gordon (00:47:37)

I don’t care if it takes another three, five, six, or seven years to do it right. Like you said about working with high-ticket gurus wanting you to fix chargebacks or buyer remorse: nobody can fix those. Why don’t we have a service that truly helps?

We stayed small for a long time—I made $5,000 in my first year because it was about learning how this works and who I could help. I wasn’t trying to rake people in and learn on them. I went to school for it and worked in agencies before, but there’s still a learning curve.

For anyone starting anything: start your fire. As long as there’s money coming in, keep it positive. As long as you are in the black, you’re fine. The number of businesses we talk to that are not in the black and looking for a Hail Mary—it’s not going to work. I want to help, but I can’t, and in good conscience, I won’t.

John SmallMtn (00:48:50)

I get called by people looking for silver bullets: “Nothing else has worked, so can you bring me a salesperson?” You realize this is going to take time, right? Nobody comes in and immediately starts hitting it out of the park. Even if you generate inbound leads, there’s a learning curve. When you hand sales off to anyone else, there’s going to be a dip in performance.

Founders don’t know any better—nobody else gets to sell like the founder does. Now there’s pressure on the salesperson, and there’s a lot to figure out. They need room to fail and figure it out. If there is no time because you thought you were going to build something everyone was excited to buy, and that didn’t work, and then you tried to market your way to success, the order of operations is off.

Kelly Gordon (00:50:02)

It’s working against you at that point. That’s just not how it works. There are two real types of companies: those stepping in front of existing demand for a service or product, and the disruptors who are generating their own categorical interest. Very few companies are disruptors—that’s a golden unicorn. If there is demand for whatever you do and you can get in front of it, there’s your fire. Most people want to jump from pre-validation to scale, but it doesn’t work that way. That’s how you waste a lot of money.

John SmallMtn (00:51:04)

I’m going to break my own formatting for a minute because we’ve talked about the four buckets you put businesses in: pre-validation, validation, leverage, and scale. What are the milestones between those levels? How does someone know they’re at the validation stage, or ready to move into the leverage stage? Are there universal milestones, or is it specific to individual goals?

Kelly Gordon (00:51:32)

If I get on the phone with a company and there’s no fire—nothing repeatable happening in how they get clients or fulfill services—that is pre-validation. That’s the hustle state.

Validation is where it starts coming together. You’re still generally the only one or running a very small team. There’s some repeatability—maybe you get one or two clients a month—but it’s still heavily reliant on you. You do all the delivery and organization.

Leverage is when you have repeatability in the marketing and sales cycle. You can’t walk away yet, but you know that if you do X, Y happens. At that point, you’ve probably hired—maybe not well yet—and you’re still figuring it out. As you move toward late leverage, you’ve gotten delivery down with a small team.

If you’re in leverage, read Dr. Benjamin Hardy’s book The Science of Scaling. The idea is: what happens when you set an unreasonable outcome goal with an unreasonably short timeline? If you give yourself 10 years to do something, you’ll fill the time and find 80 different paths to get there. But if the goal and timeline are unreasonable, it eliminates everything except the one or two options that will actually get you there.

Leverage is leveraging everything from validation to make it repeatable. For home service companies we work with, leverage is generally when they hit 3 to 5 locations because they’ve hit a human bandwidth wall. Setting an unreasonable next step eliminates all other distractions.

John SmallMtn (00:54:55)

The only book of his I read was 10x Is Easier Than 2x. That was a game-changer because thinking at that tier forces you to tear everything down and rebuild it.

Kelly Gordon (00:55:23)

He talks about how that book was a stepping stone to The Science of Scaling. It’s very good.

John SmallMtn (00:55:30)

When you think about agency sales specifically, what is a tip or piece of advice for someone starting an agency?

Kelly Gordon (00:55:59)

Listen to them and solve their problem, even if just theoretically. If it’s something you can solve, tell them—not through a rehearsed PowerPoint. If you can’t solve it, tell them, or introduce them to someone in your network who can.

John SmallMtn (00:56:30)

Slow things down. Don’t think a polished proposal will win everyone over—talk to people in human language.

Kelly Gordon (00:56:37)

Founder-led sales can do that easily, but rep sales require a process. The premise remains: nobody wants to be forced through a pitch that didn’t work for them before. You need a pattern interrupt.

Ryan Serhant says in his book Sell It Like Serhant that people don’t like to be sold, but they like to go shopping with friends. You need to build trust quickly.

On sales calls, I don’t want to hear about failed solutions or your thought process for a solution yet—just tell me the problem that brought you here today so I can figure out the solution. Then we determine if I can solve it or not. We regularly schedule 60 to 90 minutes for initial sales calls to understand the problem before even explaining a solution.

John SmallMtn (00:58:46)

My pipeline is always better when we focus on the problem first. A lot of people don’t know if they have a sales problem or a marketing problem. I don’t solve marketing problems, but I can help clarify if that’s what it is and connect you with someone who can. Let’s vet the problem state first.

Kelly Gordon (00:59:27)

I really don’t care to hear how a prospect thinks they want to solve it, because if they knew how to solve it, they wouldn’t need help. Just state the problem.

In the agency space, you have to decide: are you a vendor, a hand-holder, or a strategist? We are never the hand-holder. We are a vendor or a strategic partner. Smaller businesses often can’t pay for strategy, which is why they get burned buying outside their stage. The sales strategies for scale don’t apply to a 4-page website.

John SmallMtn (01:02:18)

Last question, Kelly: What is your word of warning for someone starting a business today, whether it’s unsexy and old school or an AI startup?

Kelly Gordon (01:03:10)

It goes back to starting your own fire. You have to be able to stand on your own feet. Audit your life: the things we say we want versus what we are willing to do to get them are often different.

Whether you’re a real estate agent, agency owner, spa owner, or lawyer, the initial path is the same: get a basic website up, set up your Google Business Profile, get on social media, and start putting out content to build your fire.

Don’t jump out of your silo. Even if you own another successful business in scale, any new venture starts in pre-validation and must be treated as such. You cannot just throw money at it to make it work.

John SmallMtn (01:04:50)

If people want to learn more about what you’re doing or connect with you, where is the best place to find you?

Kelly Gordon (01:04:57)

Find me on Facebook or LinkedIn at The Kelly Gordon. For agency work, go to dappercodes.com.

John SmallMtn (01:05:05)

Awesome. Kelly, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate you being so open and honest about your path.

Kelly Gordon (01:05:20)

I loved having this conversation. It’s always great. Thanks, John.