At a ten-person shop, the person listed on the contact page is usually the person who signs the invoices. There is no applicant tracking system. There is no recruiter gatekeeping the calendar. There is one busy human whose core business is keeping the lights on.
When you pitch a small business, you are not writing to a resume parser. You are writing to someone who is eating lunch at a keyboard while a delivery truck idles outside. Your message has to survive that reality.
The mechanics of reaching a small team are different from enterprise job boards. You do not need a twenty-paragraph portfolio. You need to name their immediate operational bottleneck in the first sentence. If they are an agency struggling with a client backlog, your opening line should address that exact crunch.
If you hear nothing back, do not assume rejection. At this scale, silence almost always means swamped rather than disinterested. The owner meant to reply on Tuesday night, but an invoice dispute or a server outage took the evening. Sending the pitch twice, with a gap of several days and a slightly tighter angle, is often the difference between being ignored and being hired. Treat the follow-up as a normal part of operations, not an awkward intrusion.
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