95% of Entrepreneurs Make the Same Two Mistakes, Says Founder Who Worked With 131,201 of Them

By Amara Osei

A founder who says she has worked with 131,201 entrepreneurs estimates that roughly 95% of the small business owners she deals with make the same two mistakes: underfunding marketing and chasing hacks instead of fundamentals. Writing for Entrepreneur, Joy Gendusa, who built PostcardMania from scratch starting in 1998 without investors or outside funding, laid out the numbers behind both claims.

Her credentials are concrete. Nearly 30 years in small-business consulting, across dental practices, restaurants, home services companies and ecommerce businesses. And one near-death experience of her own that she says taught her the lesson the hard way.

What happened when she cut marketing in 2009?

During the 2008-09 housing crash and financial crisis, 46% of PostcardMania's clientele was tied to real estate and mortgages. When those industries collapsed, the company lost thousands of customers. Revenue dropped far enough that Gendusa began wondering whether the company could make payroll.

She refused to lay people off, so advisers suggested cutting the postcard marketing budget. She reluctantly agreed. It backfired. Fewer postcards meant fewer leads, and fewer leads meant even less revenue. In 2009, revenue fell 15%.

Gendusa eventually restored the marketing budget to its previous level, and the business recovered. "That experience changed how I think about marketing forever," she wrote.

She applied the opposite playbook when Covid hit in 2020. Weekly revenue plunged more than 40%, but she kept marketing steady. Within five weeks, weekly revenue had fully recovered and was back above $1 million. Leads rose 9.24% over the next six months without increasing budget. Since then, she says, annual revenue has nearly doubled from $60 million to nearly $120 million.

Her framing: "Marketing is the engine that brings customers into your business," not an expense to control. That doesn't mean spending recklessly — it means knowing three numbers: what it costs to acquire a customer, what that customer is worth over time, and which campaigns consistently generate profitable business.

She points to Kraft Heinz as corroboration from the big-company side. In August, Kraft Heinz announced an additional $100 million investment in its turnaround plan, with most of the funds going toward marketing, and said it was already seeing stronger performance where those investments were being made.

Her advice is blunt: "If you need more revenue, you need more marketing. Growth requires feeding what works." Identify top tactics by measuring revenue and ROI, then ask, "How much more can I responsibly put behind this?"

Why the second mistake is chasing trends?

The second recurring mistake: letting shortcuts become the strategy. A new platform appears, an algorithm changes, AI explodes, a hack goes viral — and business owners feel they're falling behind if they don't jump on the bandwagon.

Chili's is her case study. The chain rolled out robot servers that quickly expanded to 61 locations. Results disappointed, and just a few months later Chili's pulled the plug on the robot initiative. It pivoted instead to fundamentals: over the past two years, parent-company investments went into stronger Wi-Fi, updated payment systems and ordering technology for restaurant staff. Chili's CIO has said every technology initiative now has to contribute to better food service and guest experience.

The payoff, per Gendusa: Chili's stock rose more than 500% between June 2022 and July 2026, with 20 consecutive quarters of same-store sales growth. She concedes the turnaround wasn't just "ditch the robots," but the philosophy holds: fix the fundamentals before betting big on flashy tech.

What do her own lead numbers show?

PostcardMania followed the same logic. Direct mail essentially built the $120 million company and remains core, while newer tools — digital advertising, tracking, automation and programmatic technology — were layered around what already worked.

The 2025 numbers validate that, she says. The company analyzed 117,857 leads, every direct mail and digital lead generated that year. Result: $416.04 in revenue per direct mail lead versus $38.59 per digital lead — a 978% difference. That's not an argument against digital, which the company invests in heavily. "It means you shouldn't confuse 'new' with 'better,'" Gendusa wrote, and it means figuring out how new technology can strengthen proven tactics.

Her closing prescription for the 95%: track your marketing, invest in what produces profitable customers, keep improving it, and test new ideas without abandoning proven ones. Not flashy, she says — but the bedrock of success.