Dave Valentine has started or bought 11 companies and sold nine of them. The smallest went for six figures, the biggest for eight. He runs Finch, a performance marketing agency, and he has been in digital advertising since Friendster. So when he tells you that starting a business has never been easier and scaling one has never been harder, he is not theorizing. He has done both, repeatedly, and this 44-minute conversation is his account of what changed and what to do about it.
We recorded in January 2025, during the NFL playoffs, which matters because his best line uses a holding call as the example. If you run an agency, sell SEO, or own a business that depends on channels you do not control, there is a lot here you will want to quote back at someone.
🎧 Listen to this episode
This one is audio only. Listen first, then read on for the parts worth stealing.
Listen on Castos: https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/dave-valentine-sold-9-of-11-companies-why-scaling-is-the-hard-part
Easy to start, hard to scale
The episode opens with the thing everyone says now: a generation ago you needed capital, a storefront and a Yellow Pages listing. Today you can go from an idea to a live site to a paying client in a day. You have probably done it. Dave agreed, and then made the point that the second half of that sentence is the trap.
“I think it’s easier to start a business now than it’s ever been in the course of human history. It’s so, so easy.”
The hard part is what comes after. Twenty-five years ago nobody walked into a dealership carrying the TV they saw the ad on. Now every owner wants to attribute every dollar spent to a dollar earned, across a dozen channels that change every week. “What worked last week may not work this week. What worked last month certainly may not work this month.” You can fail fast, which is the upside. You cannot pick a channel and sit on it, which is the downside. That is the whole scaling problem in two sentences, and it is why the rest of the conversation keeps circling back to what you own versus what you rent.
SEO is a 401k, and the pro knows when to break the rules
Every SEO consultant knows the push and pull: clients want a quarterly forecast for content that will not pay off for a year, and you have shipped ten articles certain one would take off, watched a different one take off instead, and then watched an algorithm update crown a third. How do you plan around that?
His answer starts with a sports analogy and ends with a retirement account.
“The amateur plays by the rules all the time. The pro knows when to break them.”
“SEO is the way to go. It’s a foundational element to every marketing plan you can ever put out there. However, it’s like investing in a 401k plan. This is not something that we’re going to see immediate returns on.”
If you need revenue this month, he says, go cold on LinkedIn, run ads, put flyers on cars. Those channels snap. SEO does not, and pretending otherwise is the amateur move. The morning we recorded he had turned down an ads engagement: a SaaS with three customers wanted paid campaigns aimed at CIOs, and he told them their positioning was not ready and to spend the year on LinkedIn outreach and SEO instead. That is an ads agency telling a prospect not to buy ads. It is also the reason to estimate what SEO can return before a client commits: rough the number out by hand, set the horizon at a year, and pair it with something faster.
Own the property, or watch it evaporate
You have heard “don’t build on rented land.” The version in this episode comes with bodies. I worked with a real estate client around 2009 whose network of regional Facebook pages was printing money. Three years later Facebook groups were dead, the pages were dead, and every bit of that organic traffic was gone unless they paid for it. Dave’s example is a friend with well over 150,000 TikTok followers, monetized and doing great, whose account disappeared for a day. It came back. The reach did not.
“You have to own your own property. Website’s a great place, like the one place you can really do that outside of a physical location. And SEO is the bedrock of what drives people to the site.”
Picture an octopus. The website is the beak. Social, Slack, forums, Quora, LinkedIn are the arms, and their only job is to bring food back to the beak. His version is a storefront with a counter. Most websites, he says, are “a lot of pamphlets about coffee, but there’s nothing there”: all information, no place to transact, no clear next step. Same with the email list. He knows companies sitting on lists of 20,000 to 100,000 people who send a newsletter about Jim Bob’s work anniversary and then wonder why a re-engagement campaign falls flat. “They don’t expect to get good content from you. Like, that’s it.”
The part worth pushing on is the side of the funnel nobody draws. SEOs obsess over unbranded search volume and treat branded queries as a given. But people add your name to a search when they already know you, and the cheapest customer you will ever acquire is one you already have. Give the people who have paid you something to come back for, and they bring the next customer with them.
Goodwill beats a referral fee
Dave calls word of mouth the most powerful marketing channel there is, period, full stop. The experiment behind it is the useful part. Every firm he has owned ran a paid referral program at some point: send us a client, we send you money. Then they tried the opposite, just referring people to partners and asking for nothing back.
“The volume difference, you would think that if I pay someone, I’m gonna get more? No.”
The unpaid version won. “How can I help you out, Dave?” turns into three warm introductions in a way a commission never does, because the currency is goodwill and everyone can feel the difference. Be wary of anything that smells like buying your way into someone’s good graces. Your customers are, and it is the line MLMs live on. Brandon Barnum has the numbers on this from the small business side in 84% of B2B sales start with a referral.
Kill the form, and maybe the funnel with it
Here is a stat from the episode: something like 80% of valid form submissions on small business websites never get a reply. Fill out a few yourself and you will see it. Reply in depth to your own inbound and you will get ghosted just as often. So what about replacing the form with a calendar, or a community?
He does not put forms on websites at all. If someone is going to give you their details, give them a 15 or 30 minute slot on your calendar instead. On the community route, his advice is that it works, with two conditions:
- Every ad, email and post has to say “join the community.” Booking a meeting is adjacent to filling out a form. Joining a community is a different behavior, and people do not have a box for it in their heads unless you build one.
- Accept a longer sales cycle and the work of running it. You are building trust on the front end and you now own a community, which is a job.
His own model is neither. It is “I’ll just talk to you and tell you if I can help you or not,” and telling a lot of people they are not ready for him yet. “My stance is always to give, give, give, give, give.” He has twenty years of emails that start with “Dave, I saved your email from three years ago.”
AI augments, automation saves more time
Neither of us had a satisfying chatbot story. One was a newsletter tool whose support chat announced, five minutes in, that support was not available on the free plan it had just told the user to contact. Dave’s read is that AI is the shiny object, it is not close to self-serve for a business customer, and the useful version is smaller than the hype: he feeds it his clients and his voice, bounces campaign ideas off it, and gets email drafts that are 80% there.
“It does save me some time, but it doesn’t replace people. And I really think that we are further away from replacing people with AI than anyone would like to admit.”
The line to keep from this section: Zapier and Make save him more hours today than any AI tool he has tried. “Happiness is expectations minus reality.” Go in expecting four hours a week back per person, not a replaced headcount, and you will be happy with what you get.
Layoffs, and the 20% raise you should give before they ask
This is where the episode turns from marketing to management, and it is the part to send to any founder. Johnny Camacho was a hosting company support rep who could close emails, work a ticket and hold a conversation at the same time, cut because he was the most expensive line on the support budget. Four hires covered half his job. Six months later his favorite customers noticed he was gone and left with him. Nobody in that room suggested touching executive pay.
Dave’s rule is blunt. Layoffs should only happen when the existence of the company is in danger. Otherwise the executives cut themselves first. He took no salary for two years at his first firm and paid himself thirty grand when he finally did. Then the flip side:
“Your A players would leave your organization for a 20% raise. So just give them the 20%.”
He has paid for those raises out of his own paycheck and told the person so. The loyalty that buys has followed him from company to company. If you want the agency-sized version of the same instinct, Lorraine Ball’s cap the team, raise the price is the companion episode. And if you are building a company to sell, as Dave has nine times, the founders in this exit-planning roundup have done it too.
The one thing to do after you listen
The show always closes on one tactical action item. His is the reason this show exists.
“One of my favorite ways to go get backlinks is being on podcasts, just like this.”
The mechanics, as he runs them at Finch:
- One person on his team spends one hour a week on it.
- She pitches eight to ten hosts through PodMatch (which is how he got booked on this show) and Matchmaker.fm.
- That lands four to six bookings, each of which is a backlink, a pile of social content, and, in his words, an absurd number of leads.
“The bang for the buck is so high for your SEO and lead generation, I can’t recommend it strongly enough.” The tactic is written up as a card in the SEO Arcade tactic library, and Cahill Camden built an entire product around the same idea, which he explains in his episode. Dave also makes listeners a paid-ads offer on tape at 43:06. Listen for it.
Where to find Dave
- Agency: Finch, performance marketing for e-commerce and lead generation
- LinkedIn: Dave Valentine
- X, Instagram, TikTok: @realdval
Listen: https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/dave-valentine-sold-9-of-11-companies-why-scaling-is-the-hard-part · Subscribe to the Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have sold a company, or are trying to, drop me a line on any platform. You will probably end up as a guest.
