Five Roadblocks You Need to Avoid in Your Business

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A conversation with Adam Sinkus on The Winning Tactics podcast, revisited and rebuilt: the five obstacles that stop small businesses before the market ever gets the chance to.

Interview  |  Growth Strategies  |  The Winning Tactics, March 4, 2021

Five Roadblocks You Need to Avoid in Your Business

Every business owner believes the bruise is theirs alone. That is the first and most forgivable superstition of ownership, the small private conviction that the wound is unprecedented, that no one has ever bled quite this way before. The optician believes it. The Italian restaurant believes it. The accountant, the attorney, the contractor, the corner cafe with the crooked awning and the coffee that tastes like childhood: each of them stands alone in the dark, certain that the shape of their struggle has never been seen.

It has. It has been seen a thousand times, and it will be seen a thousand more, and the mercy hidden inside that hard fact is that a problem shared by everyone is a problem that has already been solved by someone.

That was the ground we walked when Adam Sinkus invited me onto The Winning Tactics podcast in the spring of 2021, a season when storefronts were still shuttered and the future felt like a held breath. Adam wanted five roadblocks. Not vague ones. Not the greeting-card variety that fits on a poster in a break room. He wanted the specific stones in the specific road, the ones that stop good people with good intentions from ever getting where they meant to go.

I gave him five. Years later, with the agency doors long closed behind me and a different kind of writing filling my days, I have not changed my mind about a single one of them.

The Emotional Wall Comes First

Before any of the five, there is a wall, and the wall is not made of code or copy or keywords. It is made of fear, and fatigue, and the perfectly reasonable suspicion of anyone who has spent a season being sold to by strangers.

I never expected a plumber to know pay-per-click. I have never once expected a dentist to explain a canonical tag or a contractor to hold forth on user interface design. They are experts in the exacting work of their hands and their years, and I am not going to perform my own root canal to prove a point.

“You have to kind of get through the emotional wall that’s often there before you can help a business owner, because in a lot of cases they’re hurting, and they don’t know you. They’ve never met you. How can they trust you, versus some other magical guru online saying I can make a million dollars overnight with no money? How do they know who to believe, and where do they even begin?”

— David Somerfleck

Adam named the noise precisely. He described scrolling through the endless carnival of business advice online, where the promises are gaudy and the arithmetic is fiction, and where the overwhelming majority of what glitters is simply glitter. Somewhere beneath that noise are the things that have always worked, quietly, unglamorously, for decades. The five roadblocks are the five places where owners reliably stop short of finding them.

Roadblock One: Building Without a Marketing Plan

The most common failure I have ever witnessed, across every category of enterprise I have ever advised, is entering the arena with no plan for how anyone will ever find you. It does not matter whether you are a nonprofit or a for-profit, a service provider or a solo freelancer working from a kitchen table at midnight. The absence of a plan is the absence of a plan, and the market does not grade on intention.

The nonprofit distinction deserves a moment, because it is so persistently misunderstood. A nonprofit organization absolutely makes profits. It must. Profits pay the mortgage and put food on the table and keep the lights burning through winter. What defines the nonprofit legally is that those profits are reinvested into infrastructure rather than routed into a luxury sedan, which is precisely why the IRS will come knocking to confirm it. I ran one, briefly, and was audited every single year I did.

What I encountered most often, in workshop rooms and consultations and long weary emails, was a variation of the same lament. The owner had a free do-it-yourself template website. The phone was not ringing. The inbox stayed empty. And the question, always, was some version of what is going on.

“What is it about a free DIY tool that would make you think this would be an appropriate fit for a business meant to support a family? They call it a free DIY tool for a reason. If somebody is promising you a beautiful, responsive, modern website for no money at all, there are going to be some catches with that, as you might expect.”

— David Somerfleck

A real plan begins with search engine optimization, because search is still the single most reliable mechanism by which a stranger with money and a problem finds someone with a solution, and because the overwhelming majority of businesses either have none, have it wrong, or have decided they do not care. It continues into content marketing, which is not a synonym for blogging but a discipline of speaking directly to the interests and anxieties of the people you most want to serve. The restaurant should talk about fresh ingredients and the hands that prepare them. The service provider should talk about the clients who came in bleeding and walked out whole. Everyone should talk about where their market is going and why.

From there the plan must account for responsive design, meaning the site behaves gracefully on a phone in a parking lot, on a tablet at a kitchen counter, and on a widescreen display in a conference room. And it must account for e-commerce, which is the roadblock inside the roadblock, because I have never understood the stubbornness with which businesses that desperately need money refuse to build any mechanism for accepting it. The dentist needs money. The lawyer needs money. The realtor moves enormous sums and still asks people to drive across town to sign a paper. Digital marketing exists to remove obstacles between a person and the thing they want to give you, and every friction you leave in place is a door you have quietly closed.

Adam pushed on a point I have carried ever since. He observed how many owners fill their sites and their feeds with their own story, their own origin, their own founding mythology, and never once answer the only question the visitor actually came to ask, which is what problem do you solve for me. I have seen it in its purest form. I once interviewed a woman for a podcast episode, and she was warm and generous and wonderful, and when I went back to her website afterward to tell her the episode was live, I found no contact form, no email address, no link of any kind. She had a common name. There was, quite literally, no way to reach her. She had built a beautiful room with no door.

Roadblock Two: A Plan That Forgets the Machine

The second roadblock is the subtler sibling of the first. Plenty of owners write a business plan. Far fewer write a marketing plan, and fewer still write a marketing plan that reckons honestly with what marketing has actually become.

Online first, offline second. That is the order now, and the order matters. The plan must name your ideal consumer with enough specificity that a stranger could recognize them in a crowd, and this is precisely the point at which I have watched more small business owners disengage than any other. The phrase “customer avatar” lands like a foreign language. Eyes glaze. Shoulders drop. And a distressing number of otherwise capable, courageous people simply decide the whole enterprise is too much and walk away from their own growth.

The plan must also answer how content will be repurposed, which is, in my vocabulary, most of what social media marketing actually is. It must answer how paid advertising will be used, and where, and toward what measurable end. Without these, it is not a plan. It is a wish with margins.

What sits underneath the resistance is generational, and I say this without contempt, because the feeling is honest. A great many owners of a certain vintage did not ask for the internet. It was not there in the eighties, and it was barely there in the early nineties, and it arrived uninvited and rearranged the furniture of their working lives. Some of them resent it. Most of them simply do not want to touch it. And so they keep spending, sometimes tens of thousands and occasionally hundreds of thousands each year, on billboards passed by drivers who are looking at their phones, and on newspaper advertisements in a country where I can walk my entire neighborhood and count three papers in three driveways.

“I bought a newspaper. Not to read it. Not to do anything more than stuff it under a couple of logs and start a fire in my fireplace.”

— Adam Sinkus

He was laughing when he said it, and so was I, but the laugh had a cold center. When I taught, we kept phone books in the classrooms so the younger children could stand on them and reach the pantry shelves. That was the last honest use anyone found for them. Meanwhile the legacy business, the one that has run on court referrals and word of mouth and the comfortable inertia of decades, keeps pouring revenue into channels that drain it, revenue that could have been invested where the eyes actually are.

Roadblock Three: Budgeting for Growth

Nobody wants to talk about money, which is remarkable, given that money is the entire point.

The question arrives twenty or thirty times a day on every forum where marketers gather, and it always arrives in the same shape. How much is a website? It is a question that begs its own question, because it quietly assumes that any website, any website at all, will attract customers and generate sales, and that the only remaining variable is price. You are not shopping for kumquats. You cannot always have it your way, and you certainly cannot have it your way immediately and cheaply and well.

Here is the arithmetic I offered Adam, and it still holds. An advertisement in a local newspaper, running perhaps ninety days, would not have earned a serious conversation with the advertising department for less than two or three thousand dollars. The local tabloid cost more. Local radio, reaching more people, roughly doubled that. Television doubled or tripled it again. Nobody blinked. Nobody demanded a discount. Those were simply the prices of being seen.

Then the same owner will approach a digital marketer and expect a website that outranks entrenched competitors in search results for five hundred dollars, and will feel cheated when told the honest floor is closer to three thousand. Agencies, carrying rent and payroll and benefits and taxes and the tools everyone depends on, frequently could not take a client seriously below ten thousand. That is not greed. That is overhead, and overhead is not optional.

“According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, if a business wants to grow, they should invest roughly ten percent of their gross annual revenue back into marketing. If they just want to survive, it’s around eight or nine percent. Not what you want to spend. What you make.”

— David Somerfleck

A note added in the rebuild. The SBA’s most frequently cited benchmark is seven to eight percent of gross revenue for businesses under five million dollars in annual revenue, assuming net margins in the ten to twelve percent range. Businesses pursuing aggressive growth commonly push that figure to ten or twelve percent and beyond, which is where my ten percent lands. The spirit of the number has not changed. The precise decimal has been sharpened.

The law beneath all of it is the law of cause and effect, and you may call it a spiritual principle if you like, because it behaves like one. You get out what you put in. Fiverr and Upwork and their kin have manufactured a comfortable fiction that a serious business presence can be had for a few hundred dollars, and I want to be careful here, because there are genuinely gifted and genuinely kind people working on those platforms. They are not wealthy. The rent is due for them too. That is exactly why they must move thirty or forty clients through the pipeline as fast as human hands allow, and speed at that scale has a cost, and the cost is you.

Roadblock Four: Buying the Price Instead of the Value

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. The distance between those two sentences is where most small businesses quietly die.

I have met hundreds of owners with free template websites and hundred-dollar builds. I taught workshops for years, sometimes fifty and a hundred people in a room, and I met them constantly. I cannot name one, not a single one, who is still standing and still profitable today. They faded like watercolors left out in the rain, hundreds of them, businesses begun with real courage and real hope that simply could not carry their own overhead long enough to be found.

Adam added the piece I think owners forget most reliably, and it is the piece that turns the whole equation. The cost of doing it yourself is never only the cash. It is the hours, and the hours have a price, and every hour you spend fumbling with a plugin is an hour stolen from the work that only you can do. That is the true value of outsourcing to someone experienced. You are not merely buying labor. You are buying back your own attention, and you are buying an advocate who goes to bat for your growth as though it were their own.

“There’s an old infographic I’ve seen a hundred times. If you think hiring a digital marketing expert is expensive, wait until you hire a cheap one.”

— David Somerfleck

Let me tell you the story that taught me this, because I did not learn it from a book.

In the middle nineties, broke and buried in coursework and an internship, I built my portfolio on a free do-it-yourself platform. Weeks of work went into it. I wrote and rewrote the copy. I uploaded my samples and my reference letters and every scrap of proof I had that I was worth hiring. Then I carried my laptop into an interview at a marketing agency, connected to their wifi, and opened the site in front of the person who held my future in her hands.

Nothing loaded. The website had been deleted.

I wrote to the company afterward, livid, and two months later I received a reply that has never entirely left me. They were under no legal obligation to explain anything. They could remove a site if a competitor complained, or if anyone at all was offended, or if an image resembled another image, or if the writing resembled other writing. They did not verify the complaint. They did not ask anyone to justify it. They simply acted, because a single complaint was not worth their trouble.

Had I not walked into that room that day, I might never have known it was gone. I did not get the job. I went home that night, and I decided, and the deciding was the whole of it. I spent a couple of hundred dollars on a real hosting plan. I built a real website on ground I owned. I filed as an LLC with the Secretary of State. Come hell or high water, I was going to make it work. And within a few months I was on the first page of Google, and I was attracting clients who did not blink at three thousand dollars because they understood it might return thirty.

That was not a shift in strategy. That was a shift in thinking, and every shift in strategy I have made since flowed downhill from it.

Roadblock Five: Treating a Process as an Item

The last roadblock is the quietest and the most fatal. Digital marketing is not an item. It is not a line on a to-do list, waiting to be crossed off with a satisfying stroke. It is not something you order at a window and collect in a paper bag. It is a process, and a service, and a machine of interlocking parts, and if you run the parts in the wrong order the machine does not run at all.

Launch a website with no content and you have told Google there is nothing here to index. Launch with no search optimization, or with the wrong optimization, and you have told Google your business is named Home. Nobody types a company name into a search bar. They type dentist. They type plumber. They type pediatrician near me at eleven at night with a feverish child on their hip, and if you have not built the road that leads to your door, they will walk to someone else’s.

Traction takes time. Three months at the very earliest, six months more honestly, and years in genuinely competitive terrain. That is not a failure of the method. That is the method.

“When should you do it yourself? When should you put your business on the line for a free DIY tool? When the results don’t matter. That is the definition of a hobby. If the outcomes don’t matter to you, it’s a hobby.”

— David Somerfleck

There is a story I told Adam that illustrates the whole machine better than any diagram could. Years ago, at the height of my active practice, a local competitor called me out of the blue and opened with a string of profanity so specific I knew who it was before he identified himself. He wanted to know how I had gotten to number one in Google. I had to think about it, because I had never checked. Watching rankings every day is a way of making yourself miserable.

Then I remembered. I was running two websites with complementary local optimization, and I was changing something on the front page every single day. A word. A link. A new post. A local event. To a search engine, which is nothing more than an enormous and tireless indexing program, my site was a place where things were happening. It was awake. It was alive. And for several weeks I had three properties on the first page of search results and a new call or email every fifteen minutes. When I eased off, because I was drowning in the clients I already had, the rankings slid to the third and fourth pages and the phone went quiet.

The lesson is unglamorous and it is free. If you maintain local optimization, and you claim your business listing, and you keep a matching video on your front page, and you blog with genuine regularity about the community you actually live in, you will beat most of your local competitors, including the larger and more profitable ones. Not because you are cleverer. Because they will not do it, and they will not know to do it, and they will not be able to innovate their way into doing it.

What I Would Tell You Now

A modern, responsive, agency-caliber website that reaches the first page of local search results is not a fantasy. It is available to most businesses in most markets, provided the competition is not brutal and the person you hire is genuinely savvy. You may need to invest in paid search alongside it. You will certainly need to invest something.

If you are willing to spend what you would once have spent on a newspaper advertisement or a radio spot, you would be astonished what can be built. Look for experience. Look for credentials. Look for someone who cares enough about their work to screen you as carefully as you are screening them, because the ones who care will not take just anyone, and the ones who will take anyone should tell you something.

Five roadblocks. No plan, a plan that ignores the machine, a budget built on hope, a purchase made on price, and a process mistaken for an item. Move those stones and the road ahead is longer than you think and clearer than you fear.

Listen to the Episode

The episode is titled 5 Roadblocks You Need to Avoid in Your Business with Marketing Expert David Somerfleck. It aired on The Winning Tactics podcast with host Adam Sinkus on March 4, 2021, and runs a little over an hour.

Elsewhere on the Same Five Roadblocks

These five stones have rolled through several conversations, and each host approached them from a different angle. The roadblocks themselves originate in my book, The Road to Digital Marketing Profits, a workbook built around avoiding exactly these detours, and they appear again in visual form in The Illustrated Guide to Digital Marketing, which trades paragraphs for infographics and is, I suspect, the more enjoyable of the two.

About the Host

Adam Sinkus hosts The Winning Tactics, a podcast built for small and medium businesses and shaped around a single stubborn conviction, which is that the tools and the tactics that actually work can be learned by anyone willing to listen. Over more than a decade he built teams in the business process outsourcing industry on a foundation of culture-driven leadership, and he brings that same people-first instinct to the microphone. He describes himself, accurately, as a person who spends more time thinking about user experience than is reasonable and who maintains an unhealthy obsession with analytics. He can be found at thewinningtactics.com and on LinkedIn.

About the Guest

David M. Somerfleck spent roughly twenty-five years working for marketing and advertising agencies across North America as a project manager, developer, and copywriter, and served on and off for a decade as a certified small business mentor through the U.S. Small Business Administration, advising hundreds of owners, founders, and nonprofit administrators. He has spoken at Microsoft, written for AOL and Time Warner, taught workshops at Johnson and Wales University and the Open Media Foundation, and headlined the City of Denver’s Create Expo. He is the author of The Road to Digital Marketing Profits and The Illustrated Guide to Digital Marketing. He now writes dystopian science fiction and horror-adjacent speculative fiction from the windswept wetlands of Chesapeake, Virginia, and can be found at boldly.blue.

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