Episode from the Unscripted Small Business Podcast

Host: Jeremy Rivera — SEO Arcade Founder & Freelance SEO Consultant

Guest: Dave Gulas — President & Co-Founder of EZDC 3PL

Sponsored by: Cookeville Sunroom Company

Dave Gulas is the president and co-founder of EZDC 3PL, providing warehousing, fulfillment, and transportation services for manufacturers and e-commerce brands. With 20 years in medical/pharmaceutical sales and over three years in logistics, Dave brings a customer-first approach to the 3PL industry.

Dave also hosts the Beyond Fulfillment Podcast, featuring real stories from entrepreneurs — available on the EZDC Blog and all major podcast platforms.

In this conversation, Dave shares how he and his partner identified a gap in the 3PL market — legacy providers weren't delivering the customer service that growing e-commerce brands needed. Three years later, EZDC has built a reputation for responsiveness and genuine care.

Key Topics Covered:

• Why e-commerce brands reach a "graduation point" where outsourcing fulfillment makes sense
• The importance of warehouse management systems (WMS) and automated integrations
• Common mistakes when scaling a business — saying yes to the wrong customers
• Bootstrap vs. funded startups: which succeed more often?
• The unglamorous reality of entrepreneurship
• Why personal branding matters more than ever in 2026

• EZDC 3PL Homepage
• About EZDC
• Packaging and Kitting Services
• Retail Logistics and Warehousing Services
• The Kentucky Advantage: Why a Central Hub is Key for Nationwide 3PL
• EZDC Blog & Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• Dave Gulas on LinkedIn

From SEO Arcade:

• SEO Forecasting 101: Methods, Metrics, Tools, and Challenges
• The Revenue-First SEO Strategy That's Actually Working
• Opportunity Sizing in SEO
• How a Podcast Generates Links, Content, Audience, Citations & Authority
• White Label Podcast Service

From Jeremy Rivera SEO:

• SEO Basics for Small Business
• Simple, Effective Link Building

Guest: Bill Kasko, Founder & CEO of Frontline Source Group
Host: Jeremy Rivera
Podcast: Unscripted Small Business

In this episode, Bill Kasko shares how he built a successful recruiting and staffing agency by doing the exact opposite of industry standards. From inverting the traditional sales model to being the first company to publish pricing online, Bill's "Costanza Theory" has disrupted an entire industry for over two decades.

We dive deep into the evolution of customer service technology, the fragmentation of the search landscape, and how AI is creating both opportunities and challenges for businesses. Bill also shares his insights on the current job market and why honest communication wins more business than overselling.

• How inverting the traditional sales-to-recruiter ratio created competitive advantage
• Why being the only company with a pricing page became their #1 traffic driver
• The importance of customer convenience over business convenience

• Early adoption of online chat 21 years ago
• The rise and fall of chatbot effectiveness
• 24/7 scheduling and weekend service calls
• Why AI agents still aren't quite ready

• Why presence across multiple platforms is now essential
• How TikTok became the #2 search engine for young users
• The challenge of getting indexed across different search engines
• Reddit dominating 60% of search queries

• The rise of fake candidates using AI tools

Guest: Tianna Mamalick, SMB Marketing School

Tianna Mamalick brings 12 years of SEO expertise focused exclusively on small businesses. In this conversation, she reveals why working with SMBs is more rewarding than enterprise clients, how to honestly manage expectations while delivering real results, and why she went back to human-written content after testing AI extensively. If you're a small business owner wondering what actually works in SEO right now, this episode cuts through the hype with practical, proven strategies.

Running a small business means every marketing dollar counts. Tianna specializes in helping businesses with limited budgets compete effectively by focusing on what drives actual revenue—not just traffic or rankings. She shares her formula for pairing SEO and paid ads that works specifically for service-based businesses, and explains why your service pages matter more than blog posts right now.

The Small Business Advantage Unlike enterprise clients where a 20% conversion increase gets a polite "that's nice," small business owners email about life-changing results: hiring their first employee, taking their first vacation, or investing in business growth. For Tianna, this feedback makes the work meaningful.

Honest Expectations Setting

• Three-month minimum commitment required
• Clients must have budget they can afford to lose completely
• Not every market works the same (example: Pilates in Las Vegas vs. other cities)
• Regular check-ins at three months to evaluate if the strategy is working

The SEO + Ads Formula While ads don't directly boost SEO, they strategically help prime new pages through engagement. When expanding to multiple locations, running targeted ads on new service pages helps get Google Business Profiles moving faster and improves location-specific performance.

What's Actually Working in Content

• Service pages are the priority: Every service needs its own detailed page
• Blog posts are secondary: Focus on key blog content, not volume
• Collaboration posts: Feature complementary businesses (example: makeup company writing about top lotions that pair well with their products)
• Opinion-based content: Take hard stands on your values and approach

The AI Content Experiment Tianna's agency tested AI-generated content extensively—and none of those articles ranked well. They've gone 100% back to human-written content, using AI only for creating outlines based on top-ranking competitors. The reality: people want authentic mistakes and real human voice.

AI Search Reality Check Less than 10% of traffic comes from ChatGPT for most small businesses. While you should prepare by enriching About pages with certifications and expertise, this isn't the urgent crisis some marketers claim. Most people aren't using ChatGPT for business searches yet—we're still in early adoption.

Mining Your Best Content Stop using SEMrush as your starting point. Instead:

• Record sales calls and note what converts prospects
• Review customer support emails for common questions
• Ask front-line staff to keep notebooks of daily questions
• Use this real language in your content—it converts better than corporate marketing speak

Platform-Agnostic SEO SEO principles work across all platforms, not jus...