The SMB Founder’s Growth Blueprint: Turning Marketing Into Revenue.
Prepared by Daniel Zaitz, principal consultant and co-founder at Zaitz Marketing.
Stop Surviving Growth. Start Scaling It.
"The business runs well — but only when I’m running it."
You’ve built a business the hard way: through referrals, reputation, and relentless delivery. But at some point, word-of-mouth stops scaling. You’re still the one driving sales, running operations, and holding it all together. Growth isn’t the problem, time is.
You don’t need more hustle; you need systems that let your business grow without depending on you.
Ready to move from guessing to growing?
The successful SMB owner lifecycle.
1
The Humble Beginnings: Your Bootstrapped Start
You launched with a fire in your belly, a brilliant idea, and relentless hustle. Your network was your marketing, word-of-mouth your sales engine. First customers? Hard-won victories.
2
The First Ascent: Early Momentum
Referrals start flowing. The phone rings more often. You’re busy, revenue is growing, and things feel good. But deep down, you know it’s all riding on founder-driven sales and relationships.
3
The Inevitable Plateau: Where Growth Stalls
Then it hits. Growth slows. Your initial tactics, once golden, no longer deliver because your day has only 24 hours. You’re working harder than ever, burning out. The path forward vanishes behind a thick fog of frustration.
4
The Breakthrough: Systematic Scaling
This is where a growth oriented marketing strategy steps in. With the right systems, you can transform frustration into fuel. You'll build systematic growth engines that scale far beyond founder dependence, specifically targeting the untapped market not actively buying today. You’ll move from reactive struggle to proactive results.
Why Growth Strategies Fail, and why Ignoring Growth Is Even Riskier?
Most brands chase buyers who aren’t ready to buy.
Most companies overestimate how many customers are “in the market” at any given time. In reality, research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science shows that only 5% of potential buyers are actively shopping in your category right now. The other 95% are out-of-market — they’ll buy later, but only from brands they remember.
Focusing all your effort and marketing dollars on the 5% is a mistake. It limits reach, weakens mental availability, and erodes future sales.
Real growth comes from maximizing your present actions so that when buyers are ready to buy, they think of you first.
"Advertising works mainly by refreshing memory structures — not by closing sales."
Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow
Our approach applies this principle across every channel — combining reach, consistency, and practical execution to help brands grow not just faster, but scientifically better.
We’ve worked alongside growth-stage founders of businesses of various sizes across industries, translating proven marketing science into systems that scale. It’s not theory — it’s a disciplined process built from real business challenges and measurable outcomes.
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science is the world’s leading research center on evidence-based marketing, best known for proving that brand growth comes from reaching all category buyers and building mental and physical availability, not just targeting short-term buyers.
How Growth Becomes Predictable?
Growth doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when you turn scattered tactics into a system that’s grounded in evidence, not intuition. We deploy a process that uncovers where your demand is hiding, structures how you attract it, and builds a roadmap you can scale with clarity and control, based on your sales and marketing available resources.
"Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things." - Peter Drucker
Ready to transform confusion into clarity, and potential into systematic scaling?
Step 1: Unmask Your Market Identity
We rigorously assess how your brand truly resonates, not just how you think it does, and we pinpoint critical gaps between ambition and current perception, revealing where you're leaving impact (and revenue) on the table.
Step 2: Decode Your Customer's Mind
We conduct in-depth audience research to uncover the 'why' behind every purchase. Who are your ideal buyers? Why did they choose you? What hidden barriers are turning away the rest? This clarity makes every campaign more targeted, every dollar more effective.
Step 3: Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
We identify your highest-value segments and build precise buyer definitions that guide every marketing action — from creative to sales messaging.; it's a strategic blueprint that will guide every sales and marketing decision for maximum ROI.
Step 4: Chart Your Growth Conquest
We analyze channels, partnerships, and content performance to reveal your highest ROI growth levers — and a roadmap to scale them predictably.
Step 5: Outmaneuver the Competition
We benchmark your competitors’ positioning and uncover the white space they’ve missed — then help you claim it with confidence.
Step 6: Optimize for Peak Performance
A deep dive into your current marketing operations, tools, and workflows reveals hidden inefficiencies and untapped potential. We streamline everything, identifying quick wins that immediately boost performance and set the stage for sustained success.
Step 7: Your Personalized Growth Roadmap
The result is not a report, but a working system: a clear, prioritized roadmap that connects insight to execution, so growth becomes predictable and consistent.
What Does a Growth Roadmap Include?
A Growth Road Map provides you tactical clarity to create actionable plans and estimate the resources needed to achieve your specific business goals and optimize ROI.
Ignite Momentum: Foundational & Quick Wins
Every roadmap starts with clarity. This phase identifies low-effort, high-impact actions to stabilize your digital foundation and eliminate friction across your marketing ecosystem. These are fixes and optimizations you can implement immediately to unlock efficiency before scaling.
Typical recommendations include:
- Technical and UX audits to resolve tracking, conversion, or performance gaps.
- Streamlining of existing assets (landing pages, forms, CTAs, analytics).
- Workflow and process improvements that improve lead capture or attribution.
Accelerate Growth: Short-Term Revenue Initiatives
This phase highlights tactical actions designed to generate visible traction within 30–90 days. Recommendations focus on activating demand through paid, outbound, or promotional channels while ensuring proper data tracking and ROI visibility.
Typical recommendations include:
- Paid media and remarketing strategies aligned with your ICP and goals.
- Campaign setup improvements: targeting, creative structure, and tracking.
- B2B outreach systems, referral campaigns, or partnership activations.
Sustain Growth: Organic & Long-Term Initiatives
Foundations and activation are only the start. This phase maps your long-term growth levers — the initiatives that compound over time by building awareness, trust, and authority in your market.
Typical recommendations include:
- SEO, content, and audience strategies that build discoverability and credibility.
- Email nurture and automation flows that sustain engagement.
- B2B thought leadership and community positioning to drive inbound demand.
Engagement Models
Every business is unique. We meet you where you are, offering tailored engagement models designed to align with your specific needs, capabilities, and growth timelines.
Fractional CMO: Your Growth Partner
We lead the execution.
Following the roadmap, we take ownership of implementation — from strategic planning to day-to-day execution — leveraging both your internal resources and our network of specialized experts. Acting as your Fractional CMO, we ensure strategy turns into measurable progress, keeping every initiative aligned, prioritized, and accountable.
Tired of strategy without traction? Experience what happens when leadership meets execution.
Ideal for: Founders or executive teams ready to delegate marketing leadership and accelerate results with a trusted partner who owns the process end to end.
Hybrid Model: Amplify Your Team
We engineer, you excel.
In this model, we design your growth infrastructure: workflows, automations, and reporting frameworks. Then we train your internal team to operate them with confidence. You gain scalable processes, improved execution consistency, and clarity on where to focus next — without dependency on external management.
Unleash your team’s potential through structure and simplicity.
Ideal for: Growing companies with internal marketing resources that need better systems, clearer priorities, and expert training to achieve consistent results.
Advisory: Strategic Ignition
You lead, we advise.
We deliver the Growth Roadmap and remain available for strategic counsel as you execute. This includes periodic check-ins, workflow reviews, or support for whoever leads implementation on your side. The partnership can continue through ongoing advisory sessions — or conclude once the roadmap is delivered, if you prefer full independence.
Clarity first. Guidance when you need it.
Ideal for: Leaders or teams who want expert validation, structured recommendations, and objective perspective to strengthen internal decision-making without long-term commitment.
How Do We Know This Works? Because We’ve Built It, Tested It, And Seen It Scale.
Ready to move beyond wishing for growth to systematically scaling your business? We partner with ambitious companies to transform potential into undeniable results. Imagine achieving significant revenue growth within 6-18 months with a system that works for you. What could that mean for your business? You'll gain a smarter, more profitable operation, increasing market share and revenue.
The results below show the year-over-year impact of this approach in a SaaS telecom company, transforming its customer acquisition into a predictable growth engine.
2.1x
Organic Visibility Increase
32%
Customer Growth
14%
Revenue Growth*
* Attributed to new customers in a 3-year period
Why can you trust us? Zaitz Marketing is led by Daniel Zaitz, a marketing and data strategy leader with over a decade of experience in marketing intelligence, digital growth, and demand generation. Daniel has contributed to global and high-growth brands such as VoIP.ms, AB InBev (Budweiser, Stella Artois), Restaurant Brands International (Tim Hortons, Burger King), Coty (Burberry, Wella), and Liberty Mutual. Holding an undergraduate degree in Economics and an MBA from the Schulich School of Business, Daniel combines analytical rigor with hands-on experience to help businesses scale efficiently and achieve predictable, sustainable growth.
Ready to move beyond wondering and start growing? Let's talk.
Daniel Zaitz - Principal & Co-Founder
(647) 987-1410
daniel@zaitzmarketing.com