Unscripted Small Business

In this episode, Brandon Moon from TD Pine Advisors shares practical strategies for small business owners to plan their exit, grow intentionally, and create lasting company culture. Whether you're thinking about scaling, partnership dynamics, or succession planning, this discussion provides valuable frameworks to navigate your business journey with purpose.

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

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.

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.

Marc Pitts is the founder and CEO of DiscountVapePen.com, a New Jersey online vape store that grew out of small eBay listings in 2014. When paid ads were shut off for his whole category, organic search became the only channel left, so he and his partner taught themselves SEO the hard way. The biggest lesson, in Marc's words: content written for SEO is "not written for people to actually read."

Read the full write-up on the Unscripted Small Business recap of this episode.

Marc's early posts read like a conversation in a smoke shop. That worked in 2014, when almost anything new about vaping ranked. Once the niche got crowded, his partner restructured the content with headers and pro tips, and rankings followed. Jeremy frames it as a human-to-bot-to-human chain: a person asks a search engine or an LLM, and that bot decides what the next person sees. Web copy for a Nevada dispensary reads nothing like how you would describe it to a friend, and that gap is where SEO lives.

With paid ads off the table, Marc's team tracks state-by-state and zip-code-level rules every day, keeps E-E-A-T signals clean. He watched other sellers profit from black hat tactics and passed. As he puts it, it's like "standing on your toes for everywhere that you walk," and "once you get jammed up, it could be it. That could be over."

Marc's soapbox: "The customer is always right was one of the biggest lies of our lifetime." Friendly fraud in e-commerce makes it hard to believe anyone, and a small store can't refund like Amazon. He's one of four founders in our roundup, Is the Customer Always Right? 4 Founders Push Back. For another founder building in a restricted category, hear Mark Gilliland of Kyoto Botanicals.

"How do you pivot in an industry under fire?" A domain like DiscountVapePen.com carries real authority, but it is tied to one product. Jeremy shares his Cheeseburger.space experiment on whether a domain name really matters, and Marc's question goes to future guests.

Connect with Marc at discountvapepen.com or on Facebook.

Bruce Ashford helps the people telling good stories steal the microphone. His firm works with nonprofit and small business chief executives on two problems: the message does not land, or the moving parts do not fit together. Most of the messages that arrive on his desk carry two or three of the seven components a story actually needs.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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/

Christopher C. Papin runs a CPA firm and a law firm at the same time, and almost every conversation he has with a small business owner starts somewhere financial. A tax bill. Cash flow. Buying a partner in or out. Chris tells Zaneta Chuniq Inpower that it almost never stays there. It resolves to overwhelm, and to time.

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.

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.

Thiago Cordeiro is a 27-year-old Brazilian marketer who did more than $10 million in revenue in twelve months selling supplements on cold traffic. He posts as @thiagobcord and runs OG Group. He walks Jeremy Rivera through the whole machine on Unscripted Small Business.

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

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

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.

Mark Gilliland spent about twenty years in corporate brand management before founding Kyoto Botanicals. Six years in, he sells THC-free hemp extract and a new functional mushroom blend, and he taught himself search from nothing in six months because no agency was going to do it for him in a restricted category.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I deliberately keep everything very slow and methodical and simple.

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.

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.

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

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

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

David Pourquery came out of private equity, started experimenting with ecommerce advertising late at night, and built Groas. It manages Google Ads campaigns end to end with no human in the loop, and it grew to thirty-five million dollars a month in managed spend without a marketing budget.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Groas is the platform, and he is on LinkedIn.

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

Justin Froeber and Jordan Egbert run Elite Travel Hackers, a concierge service that turns money business owners are already spending into business-class seats and five-star hotel stays. Justin runs it from Medellin, Colombia. Jordan has been to 141 countries and documents the trip as counting.countries.

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

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

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.

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.

Join host Jeremy Rivera as he sits down with spa industry veteran Denise Dubois, who has been transforming lives through beauty and wellness since 1983. In this revealing conversation, Denise shares her 38-year journey from paper appointment books to a thriving multi-location spa empire with a clean beauty product line.

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.

[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

"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."

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.

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

Complexions Spa Locations: