Tom Malesic came back on the Unscripted SEO Podcast for a second round, and I walked out with a to-do list rather than a highlight reel. Tom is founder and president of EZMarketing, and as he put it, “this is my thirtieth year, which sounds insane to say, in digital marketing, and my twenty ninth year with easy marketing.” Over that stretch the shop has helped “probably twenty six hundred small businesses.”
Twenty-six hundred clients is a different operating problem than twenty-six. Almost nothing Tom said was tactical SEO — it was agency physics. Here’s what an operator should change after listening. The full narrative version, including the origin story where his boss refused a Pride jewelry client and Tom quit on the spot, lives in the main episode recap on unscriptedseo.com.
1. Run your client concentration math this week
Tom got the framing from a boss he had in college, back when he sold vacuum cleaners door to door: “Tom, the tail can’t wag the dog.”
“My business is built on a large volume of small customers. My top five customers could leave tomorrow and I wouldn’t have to fire anyone.”
That’s a testable claim, and it’s the best diagnostic in the episode. Open your revenue sheet, sort descending, delete the top five rows, and see whether payroll still clears. Tom’s read on our industry is blunt: “agencies are notorious for it.”
I lived the other side of that. An agency I was at won an enormous content contract, staffed up for it, then watched the client cut region after region until all that infrastructure had nothing to do. Take on too much for one client and you become a vestige of their org chart. And note that Tom’s objection isn’t the revenue cliff, it’s decision quality before the cliff: “You’re gonna bend over backwards, you’re gonna do things that you shouldn’t do.”
2. Write core values you’d actually fire someone over
Tom was honest that he used to think this was nonsense: “I thought core values are just a BS kind of thing. Great. I just write down. Who gives a crap?” What changed his mind was realizing “core values are your culture” — not a poster, but the filter for who succeeds in the building.
The example is perfect because it’s so small. A project manager they hired said, “Boy, Tom, I gotta cover my ass.” Against a stated value of “Easy to work with, happy to help,” that one sentence was the whole answer: “you’re not happy to help. You’re just trying to cover. Like, you gotta go.”
Values only work if they’re load-bearing in both directions. EZMarketing does a weekly core value shout-out where the nominator gets an Amazon gift card, and bonuses are tied to values. Reward on them, hire on them, exit on them — otherwise you have decoration. And culture isn’t permanent: Tom’s cautionary tale is Southwest, which he loved and now can’t distinguish from any other airline, because “leadership changed the culture.”
3. Coach the customer, not just the team
Here’s the test I’m stealing: “if the phone rings and you see their name come up on caller ID and your whole team goes, Ugh, like that customer’s gotta go.”
“Who’s more important? The customer or your team member? Your team member’s more important. Every day of the week the team is more important than that customer.”
Firing isn’t always the first move, though. When a client yelled at one of his employees until she was in tears, Tom called him back: “Look, you can’t yell at her. If you have a problem, yell at me. I go, and now we’re gonna hang up and you’re gonna call and you’re gonna apologize to her.” The man apologized. “customer coaching is just as important as employee coaching.” The second-order benefit is the one operators miss: “she knows and the rest of the team knows that I’m gonna stand up for them.”
4. Treat a toxic hire as a Glassdoor liability
Tom’s math: “I think it takes like ten great people to one person who’s negative and toxic to destroy the culture.” And the reputational tail is long — “sometimes keeping the wrong people for too long screws up your glass door,” referencing three people fifteen years ago who “said horrible things on Glassdoor.”
Your Glassdoor page is a recruiting landing page whose copy you don’t control. The fix is upstream — “hire slow, fire fast” — and Tom flagged that people “interview differently than they show up,” which is why EZMarketing gives candidates actual work to do in the process.
5. Harvest the first 90 days
This is a free audit most agencies throw away. Tom tells every new team member: “in the first ninety days, you’re gonna be more valuable to us than you can possibly imagine because you see all the stuff that we do that you’re like, Why do you do that?” His image for the blind spot — “you don’t see that mustard stain on your shirt anymore” — applies to clients too, since “the hardest business to market is your own business.” Build a structured 90-day capture for every new hire.
6. Audit the leads before you sell more leads
Tom on local businesses that don’t follow up: “that is so common in small business.” He described a manufacturer who refused a phone number in the navigation — “I don’t really want people to call me” — and noted “those consumer services are notorious for never calling you back.” A contractor I helped had twelve unanswered Facebook messages sitting in an inbox, one of which warmed up into a hundred-thousand-dollar renovation job. Audit what the client already ignored before selling them more.
7. Two things for the roadmap
One trained agent per client. EZMarketing runs a platform called Hats.ai with access to “like seventy different AI models,” and “we’ve created agents for each one of our customers” — trained on “what’s their voice, how do they talk, what do they never say, what do they always say,” with every round of client feedback fed back in. The reasoning is ops, not hype: “it’s hard to keep all that in your head, but the AI agent can keep that in its head.”
Compliance demand letters. New as of the week before we recorded. Tom asked whether I was seeing clients get “demand letters that their sites aren’t California something compliant” — CIPA, alongside ongoing ADA accessibility exposure. His answer was productized: a software tool for accessibility, a consent banner with no decline button so the analytics stay usable, a one-time fix plus a monthly monitoring fee, and new builds shipped compliant by default. A campaign was already going out to his whole client base: “you should be aware of this. Here’s what’s going to cost you to solve it.” That’s the move I’d copy fastest — a law-firm demand letter landing in your client’s inbox is a retention event whether you participate or not.
Asked what he’d tell someone starting out, Tom said to try lots of things and “be open to being lucky.” And on staffing: “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.” Read the full conversation in the Unscripted SEO recap.