More Leads Won’t Fix It. An Inchworm Could Have Told You Why.

In The Mental Game of Trading, Jared Tendler uses a simple image to explain why traders stall: an inchworm.

An inchworm doesn't move by stretching its head forward and hoping. The tail has to move first. The middle bulges up and contracts, building energy, and only then can the head reach further. If the tail stays anchored, the head stretches out, finds nothing behind it, and snaps back to where it started.

It's a trading idea. It is also, as far as I can tell, true of almost everything.

The weakest link sets the ceiling

Whatever part of you or your business is anchored decides how far the rest can safely stretch. Push past it, and the result isn't a bigger win. It's a bigger failure, because nothing underneath can hold the new weight.

The anchor is usually one of two things. Either you don't prioritize it, or you don't know it's a weakness. The second one is more dangerous, because you keep stretching the head and blame the stretch when it snaps back.

I learned this the hard way running marathons. More mileage and better shoes were never going to keep me healthy while I skipped proper rest and strength work. The tail was anchored. Every increase in training just raised the odds of getting hurt.

Marketing makes this mistake constantly

Take a business with excellent outreach and a mediocre back end. Better ads won't fix that. More leads simply means more people experience the weak part, and the failure rate climbs. The marketing didn't fail. What came after it did.

It shows up in a few places:

Quote response and follow-up. A buyer submits a request at 9 a.m. and hears back two days later. They've already called someone else.

Inventory and delivery. All the marketing in the world won't fix a back order when a customer needs the product now. You paid to attract a buyer and then handed them to a competitor with stock.

Website, checkout, and onboarding. If the path from click to purchase is clumsy, more traffic only means more people hitting the same wall.

Service after the sale. A first order that goes badly is a customer you paid to acquire and will never see again.

Why channels get blamed for problems they didn't cause

I talk to businesses that have tried Google Ads, email, and organic search and walked away saying none of it worked. Sometimes the channel really was the issue. More often, the channel did its job. It delivered an interested person to a business that couldn't convert, serve, or keep them.

Dropping the channel feels like a fix. It's really cutting the head off the inchworm because the tail wouldn't move.

Three plays for right now

Audit the path after the click before you add budget. Cost per click keeps rising because more competitors are bidding on the same searches, which means every lead costs more than it did a year ago. Paying more for each lead only makes sense if you convert more of them. Time your quote responses, walk your own checkout, and fix the slowest step first.

Make your real availability visible. Tariffs are reshuffling who buyers call and how fast they need product. If demand shifts your way and your stock or lead times can't keep up, you've paid to disappoint people. Show accurate availability and delivery times on your site, and check that your inventory can actually back the offers you promote.

Fix what AI assistants send buyers to. More buyers are asking AI tools who to call, and those visitors arrive with high intent. If they land on a thin page with an unclear next step, you've earned the visit and wasted it. Make sure the pages that answer those questions are accurate and make the next step obvious.

Growth works the way the inchworm does. The tail moves, the middle builds, and then the head can go further without snapping back.

If your marketing doubled tomorrow, which part of your business would break first?

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