Some people ask me how I got started with SEO and what made me learn it. So if you don’t mind, I’ll tell you a brief story.
Before I started the company, I was a project manager in construction. I know… very tech-related, right?
I was managing teams of people building commercial projects like schools, hospitals and shopping centers. And so I had a lot of experience managing people when I started the company in 2005. We grew very quickly because we had a novel concept of doing preventative maintenance for computers instead of break fix, which is what everyone else in the industry was doing. We were really one of the first, if not the actual first, to implement that. And we grew really fast and it wasn’t very long after that, that our customers needed help with their websites.
I started hiring teams of people to help me. And we grew very quickly. I think in the first two years we grew to 28 people and we had six different offices. But you know, I didn’t create the company to have a lot of people working for me. I created the company to serve and help business owners. But the thing is that at that point, who I really was helping wasn’t who I had expected. It seemed that I was actually working for my employees and as a small business owner, it can get very frustrating when the goal and the mission of the company is to help other business owners. But you end up really getting caught up in this maze of helping the people that you hired to help you.
It really came to a head with this one project we had. We’d built this amazing application for a customer to replace newspaper ads and we ended up partnering with them and it went so far that Time Warner was actually negotiating to buy the product from us for $2 billion. But here’s the thing, there was this one Friday when most of our work on the project was actually due. We were building a proof of concept at the time. And the people that worked for me had taken off cause it was Friday and I don’t really know what they were thinking. You know, one guy was off working on his boat and the others couldn’t even be found. I didn’t know where we were at in the project, what needed to be done or what could be finished to get it out the door.
I didn’t know what to do.
So I really had to double down and figure out how to finish the project myself. And when I figured out how to finish it myself, that was an incredible moment for me. That’s when I realized that small business owners don’t really have what they need and the fact that they have to rely on other experts, people who don’t care as much as they do, well that’s a real problem.
What I learned is what’s important to you isn’t important to them.
That was a very transformative moment for me and really put me on my path of pursuing and learning the things that I didn’t know.
Well, there it is. That’s really what got me on this road and this journey.
So my driving mission here is to help other small business owners to learn what they don’t know and help them get the freedom from those fake experts.
Stay with me and we’ll take back our companies.