Small Business & Local

Twenty years in SEO taught me the difference between owning a business and owning a job — but Brad Poulos gave me the language for it. On the Barbados test, delegating outcomes, the SaaS expansion trap I watched from the inside, and why local service businesses now need two skill stacks.

Joel Miller of The SkyFloor on why human judgment still beats AI for sales analysis, what AI Overviews are doing to organic clicks, and how to build an audience Google can’t take away.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of business owners and consultants across my podcast network, and Paul Pape’s approach to consulting is genuinely unlike anything I’ve come across. Paul is the barkeep and game master at Gamify Business — he converts business problems into role-playing game mechanics so that clients who can’t engage with traditional frameworks can actually learn and make progress.

Your website is a shadow of your real-world company. A bigger, more active real-world company casts a bigger, more credible shadow. Here’s why that framework has become more important, not less, as AI has taken over more of the search experience.

I’ve been doing SEO for nearly 20 years. I’ve sat across from hundreds of small business owners and walked them through keyword strategies, link building, technical audits — the full playbook. And I’ll be honest: for most of that time, I thought marketing clarity was someone else’s department. Then I had Bruce Ashford on the