Good Businesses Losing to Worse Ones: Jake Tlapek on Why Sequence Beats Substance in Marketing

Jeffro (00:01.655)
Here’s something that should bother you. Plenty of businesses with an inferior product or service are out competing better businesses every single day. Not because they’re smarter, not because they work harder, because they’ve got the sequence of their marketing message right and their competitor doesn’t. So today’s guest has seen that pattern play out across nearly every industry he’s touched, and he’s built an entire framework around fixing it. Jake Talapek, known as Jake the Wizard, didn’t learn marketing in a classroom. He learned it in the trenches, making expensive mistakes.

The fun way, right? And figuring out what actually drives revenue. But he’s had two successful exits, and along the way, he’s generated over a hundred million dollars in measurable revenue for clients ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies on three different continents. So that pattern he kept seeing, you know, good businesses losing to worse ones because their messaging sequence was wrong. That became his book, Eight Dominoes. So today we’re going to dig a little bit into that framework. We’re going to talk about ethical AI use in marketing and get into something that he calls marketing mindset.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (00:32.876)
Ha ha ha.

Jeffro (01:00.288)
So if you’ve ever felt like you have a great product or service, but you’re still losing to competitors who seem, frankly, worse than you, this conversation’s gonna be maybe uncomfortable in the best way. So Jake, welcome to Digital Dominance.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (01:12.718)
Dude, I am so excited to be here. I feel like this conversation has been years in the making, actually.

Jeffro (01:21.799)
Yeah, no, I’m I’m I’m stoked. I even have my cool Star Wars shirt. You’ve got your Star Wars shirt, Star Wars posters in the background. I think we are ready for an awesome conversation. So you didn’t learn marketing in a classroom, obviously, making expensive mistakes. We’re joking about it, but that’s that’s what happens, right? So can you share one of those early mistakes that ended up teaching you the most?

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (01:31.694)
Let’s do it.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (01:40.998)
man.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (01:44.719)
yeah. Let me give you two because I I one is just funny and it’s a good story. My first marketing job, I worked for a print mail marketing company. And our biggest client placed an order, and I will never forget because I got to take the check to the bank. the check said $680,000 on it because he had, you know almost a thousand locations that he was sending this mail out from. And we made a mistake. Well, we didn’t make a mistake. They made a mistake on the URL that was printed on the cards ended up actually being okay because, you know, like we do, we we pivot, we make things work. I just went and bought the messed up domain name and redirected it for 15 bucks instead of reprinting, you know, $400,000 worth of mail. But when it comes to messaging in specific, the the story that I like to tell is is really my own when I first go started with my own agency, I was doing what everyone else was doing. I’ll make your website, I’ll do your SEO, I’ll help you with your branding, I’ll do your Facebook ads, whatever it is. And I really wasn’t thinking about what is what is the benefit for them to hire me. It’s not getting this stuff done. I mean, on the surface level, it is, but really.

They want to grow their business so that they can make payroll and then have leftover and live a comfortable life and create freedom for themselves and their employees. And so I realized that my message of let me just take care of the problem really wasn’t an effective message. And that I had to actually start speaking to let me help you reach your dreams and your goals. by the way.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (03:52.875)
my way to do that is that I do your websites and your SEO and blah blah blah blah blah. but when I learned that I needed to meet the people where they’re at and not the business problems where they’re at, that was my first big lesson and it really changed the game for me early on.

Jeffro (04:10.695)
Yeah, and I I wanna ask you a little bit about that too, ’cause I feel like when some people hear that and maybe they’ve been told that before, like, you gotta talk to the dream outcome, not just the features of what you’re providing. we’ve seen a lot of bad examples of people doing this, right? And so there’s a knee-jerk reaction like, Yeah, but I don’t wanna be that guy who’s doing that like marketing sleaze talk of like, I’ll make all your dreams come true, but you’re telling me that’s what I gotta do.

You know, so I mean there’s some tension there, right?

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (04:44.206)
Absolutely. And I and we don’t want to downplay the quality of the product or the service that we’re delivering. I think it’s very important to understand that when we’re talking about meeting people in their decision-making process, no decision gets made without some level of emotion involved and this might be a very ham-fisted way of doing this, but it gets you in the right mindset for how we need to create better marketing messaging. Because if we go too far, right? And there are brands that make advantages of going too far. I think Nike’s a great example. When was the last time Nike advertised an actual shoe? Never. It was, you know, LeBron James dripping sweat, scoring a dunk in the finals, but that’s what.

Jeffro (05:26.779)
Never.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (05:34.115)
They’re they’re doing is they’re creating this feeling and they’re saying you can have a piece of this feeling too. That’s emotional, that’s desire. by the way, he did it with these shoes. And yeah, the shoes are fantastic and they’re, you know, patent leather, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. But when it comes down to it, part of my purchase is a feeling. And so if I can get business owners to go too far, it’s a lot easier to kind of back the truck up a little bit.

And get it in the sweet spot rather than not having enough of that emotional impact.

Jeffro (06:09.019)
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. So you’ve had two exits. w what role did messaging specifically play in building those businesses to the point of a successful exit?

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (06:19.244)
Yeah, I would say that at the end of the day, I wasn’t doing anything other agencies weren’t from an execution perspective. I built websites on WordPress. Yeeha. I did SEO with writing blogs and updating meta titles and descriptions. Yeeha. but people had bought into this feeling that I built when we worked together that we weren’t across the table, we were on the same side.

That there was magic in what I did. You know, my my big exit was wizard marketing. And so playing into this feeling of like your experience is going to be magical. This isn’t going to be like other agencies where you have maybe a once-a-month phone call and they tell you, yeah, the results are on their way.

Instead, let’s let’s focus on the people and make them have a great time and feel involved, but also bring our expertise to the table. So I hadn’t sold just SEO services. I had sold an experience, and that’s what enabled me to make my exit, not just the fact that I did good SEO or websites or whatever.

Jeffro (07:34.379)
And the fact that you’re making good websites and SEO that works is a requirement, right? It’s essentially table stakes because otherwise the messaging is gonna fall flat or you’re just gonna get a bad reputation for making claims you can’t support.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (07:39.584)
Absolutely.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (07:50.435)
Retention, retention, retention. When it comes to business, I I talk with lots of young entrepreneurs are starting their business out there so focused on their product. I’m like, I love that you’re focused on your product and I’m sure it’s super cool and well thought out. I don’t give a shit really. Can you sell it and can you keep people on it? Because if you can’t do those two things, you don’t have a business, you have a hobby.

Jeffro (08:18.85)
Yeah, people don’t like to hear that, but

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (08:20.222)
Ha ha ha.

Jeffro (08:24.181)
It’s true though, at the end of the day. So I do want to mention your book though. I know you got it sitting there on your desk. It’s a nice cover. you notice this pattern, good businesses losing to worse ones, but you it for you, you figured out that it’s because of message sequence. So can you walk us through what that actually looks like in a real example?

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (08:24.398)
Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (08:44.582)
perfect. Yeah. So what this book is, is this is actually a distillation of many years of tricks. So I started developing these little frameworks, these little micro tricks of okay, here’s how I’m gonna write this this paragraph about something, or here’s how I’m gonna display this to a specific type of client. And I would go into this huge 50 plus page Word document and scroll through all my tricks.

And pick one and then deploy it. And over time, what I found out was that there was relationships between them. If I did this one and then this one, it ended up being a better outcome than if I switched them or if I used a different sequence. And so as I was piecing that together, I actually there was a wave one of this that was a PDF handout I did for a couple years, and then I refined it even more and it ended up becoming the book.

We have to start with the consumer. We have to start with what do they want. Not what do they need. Need doesn’t really matter at this point. What do they want? And then build on top of that want. Because if we can meet them at the coreest, most deep level of who they are as a consumer and understand where they want to go, what their trajectory is, then we start stacking all of the little tricks.

Hey, let’s get their attention. Hey, let’s show them the value proposition. Hey, let’s give them the core attraction. Hey, let’s show them the impact chain. And we start stacking these in a specific order where each one compounds on the interest of the last until eventually we get to a point where it’s like, do you want all your dreams to come true? Great. The easiest way to do that is to buy this product, this service. And I’m I’m, you know, making it pedantic a little bit, but that’s effectively what the process is.

Jeffro (10:42.388)
It makes sense. And and I like the Domino’s metaphor ’cause it kinda captures that. You do one thing and then the next one happens. I am curious though why eight. So can you tell us, you know, a little bit about the sequence and how you narrowed it down to those eight?

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (10:55.838)
Absolutely. So again, 50 pages of tricks. There are eight of those that made it into this book. Some of them merged into very interesting little combinations, but effectively, each domino is going to build on the last at the thing, the question, the core need of that moment for the consumer. So like I said, the first step is understanding where they want to go and why they want to go there.

The next step is how do we get their attention utilizing that first step? Okay. The third step is now that we have their attention, how do we keep it? And so we want to re you know, keep that attention. Then we’re gonna go into what is our kind of proposition for the future or the impact chain? What does it look like if you leave? What does it look like if you stay? Then we go into well, well, why you in specific? Let’s answer that question.

That’s going to your mechanism that’s unique to you. Then we need to do two different types of problem handling or issue handling. One is issues from the consumer side, make understanding their past and their history and where they’ve been and alleviating those fears. And then we need to be transparent about our own shortcomings, which builds a heck of a ton of trust. And then the last step is.

Isolating it to the point where we are the only choice for them because we’ve understood all of this journey. And so each one of those is using the previous steps as leverage to get more trust, more value, more feeling, more emotion, more logic into the sale until eventually it’s like, why would you walk away?

Jeffro (12:47.461)
Yeah. So is are these designed to be applied all at once, like in a long form sales page, or spread out across, you know, an an email newsletter sequence? does it matter or does it work the same way?

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (13:00.384)
It’s structured very much like a funnel. if you start at the first domino, that’s the very top layer of the funnel, right? And as you kind of go down that funnel, each domino is gonna apply. But I actually include, and I’m probably not gonna be able to flip to it quickly here, but I include a breakdown of like where each domino can be used. So domino three is really, really good in your social media or your email marketing.

Whereas Domino Five is really, really good on the front page of your website and other places. So it it gives you an idea of like, hey, these are good positionings for these, but there’s no right or wrong way to eat Aresas.

Jeffro (13:43.481)
Are there any difference between how this framework would apply for a s a local service owner, business owner, or like a fi Fortune five hundred company?

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (13:53.319)
Yes, but no. I I I think when I wrote the book, my core concept was that no business is gonna use all eight. Because they’re probably gonna have two or three already pretty well established. and so it was more to kind of expand the thinking and say, Okay, where are you missing your opportunities? the way that I pitched this book is if you’re getting leads.

But you’re not converting those, this is the book because it’s a messaging failure. You’re either not getting the right people in or you’re getting the right people in and they’re not getting the feels. So it’s it’s really a use it at your best discretion type book. And if you only use one chapter, I still won.

Jeffro (14:43.348)
Nice. Well i are is there a a common domino that businesses get wrong or skip a lot?

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (14:43.682)
Yeah.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (14:50.306)
I think the very first one, we do not, as businesses, you know, having seen hundreds of businesses from the inside, messaging is so phoned in. We spend all this time on our brand with our colors and our fonts, and here’s our logo. Yeah, website design. And then we go, okay, now we need to do ads and we need a picture of a person on a skateboard eating an ice cream cone, because that’s gonna communicate to our.

And it’s like, okay, we do all of that, and then what do what’s the next thing that we do, especially the last two years? We go over to Chat GPT and we say, write me 15 Facebook ad headlines for this type of ad. And we outsource the entire emotional impact of our messaging to AI, who let’s face it, is probably better than picking someone off the street, but

Jeffro (15:32.023)
Yeah.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (15:47.937)
It’s it’s not gonna understand the people that you’re focusing on, the why of your business, the how all of those connect, and the future that that person is trying to achieve. We have to weave all of that together and that becomes our messaging framework.

Jeffro (16:03.405)
How do you help a business owner find their real message when they are kind of too close to their own business to see it clearly?

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (16:10.062)
And there’s the million dollar question. I’m hoping this book helps. but but what I found, and this is I’ll I’ll die on this hill, and I’m probably gonna get skewered for saying this.

Jeffro (16:14.883)
Okay.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (16:27.938)
Some business owners can’t be helped. and and it’s not that I don’t want to. It’s that there are a lot of business owners who create their products out of I know best.

And when you create your product or your service out of I know best, your way of consuming the product is the only way of consuming the product. And that’s the vision you’re going to have for it. And the reality is that people are going to look at it and go completely differently. I mean, look at what are they? The Sketchers High Tops shoes. What were they created for? All right. They were created to be kind of this like all purpose.

athletic shoe. Well, then all of a sudden, all of these diva girls start wearing them as some kind of style icon. And now the or the converse, converse high top is now this cultural phenomenon that means different things to different people. And so it’s we need to step that back and go, hey, there’s different ways of interacting and consuming our products and services. We need to try and meet those people.

where they’re at and and show them not only do we understand, but we want to help you get where you’re going.

Jeffro (17:49.272)
And the the phrase that came to mind when you said business owners can’t be helped sometimes is you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink, right? So you can educate him all day till you’re blue in the face, but if he’s got something different in mind and he doesn’t believe you, like it it’s not gonna matter.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (17:59.043)
Ha ha

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (18:05.514)
I have fired many, many clients. It’s something I became very comfortable with early on. And my rule was you can override me two times on what to do.

But the third time we’re done. Because at the end of the day, if I do it the way that you want it done, the way that you’ve been doing it all along, and you think that just by me doing it, it’s gonna be different, we’ve got just a disconnect there. Or two, I’m not gonna have a fun time, so I’m gonna do a shitty job, and I don’t want to do that. So either way, it just makes more sense. And and unfortunately, that happens to I would say a

fifth of the businesses I work with.

Jeffro (18:51.913)
That’s a that’s a lot. It’s unfortunate.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (18:53.782)
It’s it’s a lot. Also, nine out of ten businesses fail before the five year mark. So Yeah, I I’m not riding the sinking ship down.

Jeffro (19:01.033)
Might as well get ahead of that.

Jeffro (19:06.022)
Okay. All right. Well w you did mention AI. So I want to talk about that a little bit, especially ethical use of AI in marketing. So what does ethical mean to you in this context? Like is there a line between using AI well and using it in a way that maybe crosses that line?

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (19:23.534)
Absolutely. So the first fact I like to lay on the table when talking about ethics and AI is that the genie is out of the bottle, Pandora’s box is open. You’re not sticking AI back in. So if you’re anti-AI, I’m just letting you know up front you’re on the losing side of this battle. It’s not going back in the box. Okay? So

If you want to be a non-user of AI, that’s fine. But being anti-AI is going to really frustrate you in the next five years of business. That being said, when it comes to AI, AI to me is simply a tool in the toolkit. before we had Photoshop, you had to draw things out and scan them. Or maybe there was a pad you could draw into a computer. Before that, it was pencils. It was

You know, you look back at when Apple created the first Apple logo, and there’s these grid papers with pencil sketch. Like, does the fact that somebody used Photoshop diminish the creative aspect? No, it doesn’t. It’s just a different tool. And AI is a very powerful tool that enables people to manifest their version of the art, of the reality, of the output. But.

Jeffro (20:26.864)
Yeah.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (20:49.758)
Very easy to be lazy with. And this is where I draw my ethical line: I say, whatever you output, whatever you send to the world, and you say, my stamp of approval is on this, it has to come from you. It has to be truly something you envisioned and produced. And with AI, right now, you know, I go back a year ago, if you wanted to produce some art.

Jeffro (20:52.828)
Yes.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (21:18.722)
You might spend two, three, five hours working on something. Now it might get it close to your vision in five minutes. It’s getting better as a tool. But we have to be the tastemakers. We have to own the vision entirely and understand that AI is nothing more than a glorified intern with an insane skill set.

That we need to crack the whip over until we produce what our vision is.

Jeffro (21:49.689)
Yeah. ‘Cause they can run in any direction you tell them, but you have to give the framework and guidelines and the map to where they need to end up.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (21:58.229)
And refinement. I think that’s the most important piece is that I can give input and accept whatever the output is. And that that to me is the definition of lazy AI and a failure of the ethics of humanity because it’s not the true vision. You you handed that over, and now we’ve failed.

Jeffro (22:19.898)
Yeah. Yeah, it’s actually you know, in school you write an essay or something and you turn it in, but then at some teachers will make you write drafts and turn those in. And I remember feeling frustrated with that sometimes, like, why do I have to do so many drafts? But it’s because i you know, getting to that best final product is an iterative process. You can’t do it all at once and it’s not just a one shot thing. And if you treat AI like it’s gonna get it right the first time, no, of course it’s not. You’ve gotta

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (22:30.04)
Mm-hmm.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (22:40.258)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffro (22:49.099)
Sit with it, work with it, tweak it until you get it there.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (22:52.534)
It’s a faster Fiverr. You’re still gonna beat the Fiverr guy up because they delivered it in a format you can’t use or the it no, that doesn’t go there. It goes like that. Like you’re gonna do that. Do it the same way.

Jeffro (22:55.02)
Yeah.

Jeffro (23:07.19)
Yeah. Okay. Another topic, moving on from AI specifically, but marketing mindset. you’ve mentioned that before. What does that mean to you? How is it different from like marketing tactics or strategy?

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (23:20.798)
Absolutely. So for me, and this is something everybody has to kind of define for themselves: marketing is the effort we put in to connect humans with products and services that have the opportunity to better them. That’s how I define marketing. It’s not about sales, okay? It’s not about how many leads that I generate.

It’s about the value we create in the world because if your product is truly as good as you believe it is, it’s going to help people. And that help might be in the form of entertainment, right? If you’re doing a video game or a movie or whatever, or a t shirt, or it might be an educational piece, or it might be a workflow thing, or fix your car, whatever. We’re trying to make people’s lives better.

Period, full stop. And marketing is just the effort we put behind that. And so when we start to step back from, in my opinion, the over involvement of analytics and cost in marketing and start looking at how do we impact the world? How do we impact the the right people? How do we show this to the people that win when they buy it?

You’re going to look at your marketing really differently. You’re going to do things that you wouldn’t have done before. You’re going to trust the product and the brand to deliver on their promises and allow it to become a member of the community rather than this like storefront that I have to open the door and walk through. and can every business do that? I don’t.

I don’t think it’s possible that every business can do that merely from the fact that you have to think about the product differently in order for that to happen. But to sum it all up, it’s a braver mindset than what most most people have today because it gives more power to the consumers over you.

Jeffro (25:39.687)
Mm-hmm. That’s a vulnerable position, right?

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (25:42.755)
very vulnerable position. And I really am excited for this next era of marketing because analytics is getting worse. And I’m so excited for that because we can actually go back to putting in effort and not, you know, reps.

Jeffro (25:52.643)
Yeah.

Jeffro (26:02.809)
Yeah, no, I I think that’s true because authenticity is going to shine through that, right? Because of privacy we can’t track everything, therefore we can lean more on the art side of marketing rather than strictly the science and metrics. So makes sense. All right, one last question for you before we wrap up. What is one question that every business owner should be able to answer about their own messaging, but most can’t?

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (26:17.196)
Absolutely.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (26:30.934)
Mm.

The 101 answer is who is your client? Who is your target? Who who benefits from your product? I and I think most businesses will have an answer to that, but it’s gonna be thin. It’s gonna be poorly defined. if I got to ask a harder question, someone I walked in and they’re like, hey, we’ve been successful, but we’re looking to go to the next level.

I think my question would be

Who are you alienating with your product and why is that a good thing?

Jeffro (27:13.427)
I like that.

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (27:15.618)
Because if you are genuinely alienating a group of people, if if there is a portion of the market that’s like, I would never buy that. Typically, I say typically, it means that there’s a portion of the market that is going to be ravenously in favor of your product as well. And so we’re so hell-bent on.

We want to go after a hundred percent of the total available market. And so you get these weenie gray area campaigns and ideas that are just, you know, tapioca level interesting, and we it impacts nobody. And so I would say if you have people who hate you, that means you’re probably winning.

Jeffro (28:07.601)
Probably doing something right. I like that reframing of the question though. I’m gonna remember that. But Jake, this has been a really great kind of breakdown, maybe even a wake up call for some of our listeners. But really the idea that worse businesses are outcompeting better ones just because of messaging or or messaging sequence, really, should I I think it’s gonna make some people a little uncomfortable, which in a productive way, take that knowledge, sit with it, figure out what you can do differently, right? and your eight dominoes framework is gonna give them something to

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (28:33.014)
Absolutely.

Jeffro (28:36.495)
something concrete to actually go back and use to audit their own marketing instead of just guessing at what to say and hoping it lands. So for people who want to grab a copy of eight dominoes or learn more about working with you, where should they go, Jake?

Jake “The Wizard” Tlapek (28:48.596)
Absolutely. Eight dominoes on Amazon. So easy to get. It’s everywhere. And if you want to learn more about me, what I’m doing, my mastermind, some of my side projects, find me at jakethewizard.com.

Jeffro (29:03.853)
Awesome. And everybody else listening, you know, after this episode ends, go look at your own marketing message, your website headline, add copy to whatever’s front and center, and ask yourself, is this in the right sequence or am I leading with the wrong domino? But that’s it for today. Make sure to subscribe to Digital Dominance, leave us a review, and we’ll see you next time. Thanks again.