I brought Tom Malesic back on the Unscripted SEO Podcast because the first conversation stuck with me. This one rearranged some furniture in my head, which is a different and less comfortable thing.
Tom runs EZMarketing and is in his thirtieth year in digital marketing, twenty-ninth running his own shop, with roughly twenty-six hundred small businesses served along the way. I am a consultant. My “team” is me, a stack of tooling, and whoever I pull in. On paper we have nothing in common operationally. In practice he described my problems more accurately than I would have.
Your own worst boss
I was talking about how hard it is to be an SEO consultant — how many retainers I need, and how many I can afford to lose — and Tom cut through it:
“it’s definitely hard being a solopreneur, right? Because you have all the distractions. because you’re generally you’re your worst boss, right?”
Then he described the fix in a way I had never considered a fix at all: “You start to hire a couple employees, now they’re kind of holding you accountable because you have to be ahead of them to give that they have enough work.” I have always framed hiring as cost and risk. He framed it as an accountability structure that happens to also do work. I have been sitting with that since we hung up.
He also named the thing I have been quietly living in: “the smaller your businesses, the more it’s a lifestyle business. Like that it doesn’t really run without you.” That is not an insult, it is a description — but one I would rather choose deliberately than drift into.
The tail wags harder when you are the dog
Tom’s strategic plan runs on a phrase an old boss gave him back when he sold vacuum cleaners door to door: “Tom, the tail can’t wag the dog.” His version of safety is “a large volume of small customers,” to the point where “my top five customers could leave tomorrow and I wouldn’t have to fire anyone.”
Here is what I did not quite admit on air. At agency scale, one client at forty percent of revenue is a red flag. At consultant scale, one client at forty percent of revenue is Tuesday. I have run that way. And Tom’s real objection to concentration is not the revenue cliff, it is what it does to you before the cliff: “You’re gonna bend over backwards, you’re gonna do things that you shouldn’t do.” When the whole company is one person, the detriment lands on that person’s judgment, calendar and self-respect.
Core values, even when the wall is yours
Tom used to think core values were nonsense — “I thought core values are just a BS kind of thing” — until he realized “core values are your culture.” The story he tells it through is a project manager saying “Boy, Tom, I gotta cover my ass” against a stated value of being easy to work with and happy to help. One sentence, whole answer.
My instinct was that this is an employer’s problem. I don’t think that anymore. A consultancy of one still has values; they are just implicit, which means unenforced. The client-facing version is Tom’s caller-ID test: if a name comes up and your whole team groans, that client has to go. I don’t have a team to groan. I have a stomach that drops, and I have been overriding it for years because the invoice cleared.
The other half is what I want to be better at. When a client yelled at one of Tom’s employees, he called the man back and told him to hang up, call her and apologize — and he did. “customer coaching is just as important as employee coaching.” Solo, I have no one to defend, so I absorb it. Absorbing it is not the same as it not costing anything.
Be open to being lucky
The origin story is worth hearing in full: his boss refused to build a Pride Jewelry site for a paying customer, Tom quit on the spot, walked down the street and told her “the good news is I just started my business 35 seconds ago and I’d love you to be my first customer.” She asked if the price was the same, said “Pfft, done,” and twenty-nine years happened. He is clear-eyed about the contingency of it — “had he not done that, I might still be working for him.”
His closing advice was to try a lot of things and “be open to being lucky,” because “the more stuff I did, the luckier I became.” Then the one that hit hardest for someone who has spent a career trying to be the person with the answer: “I never want to be the smartest person in the room. Like if in my company I’m the smartest person, we have a big problem.”
He built his own first websites and now cheerfully says “I can’t even log into WordPress.” I am not there, and part of me doesn’t want to be. But the reason he can say it is that he hired around it on purpose — and the reason I still do everything is that I never decided not to.
The full episode recap, including the eleven-thousand-square-foot office that now holds three or four people while he rents the conference rooms out, is over at unscriptedseo.com.