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So, as I reminisce on the fact that this time last year Nora and I were on our honeymoon for 3 weeks, the one thing I keep being so thankful for is how the team here at SEER enabled me to get away for 3 weeks and enjoy time with Nora without worrying about the business.  That was the best wedding gift we got…time to spend with each other and the ability to be in the moment without worry.

As I prepare a service/vacation trip to Nicaragua in 3 weeks to work with Water for Waslala w/o Internet for most of the trip, I’m not worried one bit.

If your company doesn’t run without you…you are not giving people the opportunity to run, spread their wings, and make decisions w/o worry of failure.  I feel like a hypocrite saying that b/c I struggle with letting go – but each time I do I learn that our people step up in all new ways, that if I didn’t leave they might never grow into.  

We’ve all been there…It’s the end of the week, you feel stressed, no matter how long the days have been you didn’t get your tasks completed…it sucks.  

The question is do you have a system in place to help you look back at how you spent you time last week so you can look to improve and plan for how to improve your situation?  If the answer is NO, then you’ll never fix the cause of your stress – and you deserve it.

Keep in mind that you can not improve what you do not measure, that quote has always stuck with me and as was part of the inspiration for this post…

As data driven marketers it should be in our blood to analyze data over and over and over again.  Finding opportunities and optimizing to a goal. Its what we are born to do, but we don’t do that with our time.

So let me tell you a personal goal I have been tracking since Feb 2008 – my time spent on new business. 

I have said it over and over again, I never wanted to be a “CEO” – I wanted to do something I loved every day, I didn’t start SEER to be a boss and manage people, I just wanted to something I loved everyday, plain and simple.

So it was critical for me as SEER grew to make sure I kept in check to my #1 work goal, spend time doing SEO every day.

So here is my journey on how I used time tracking & how you can use it to make sure you are working on what you love.

1 – Get a time tracking system – I use harvest, I prefer time trackers that run WHILE I work (harvest does this) my recommendation is to NOT wait till the end of the day or god forbid the end of the week to put your time in.  You will MISS time and render any work useless.

Yes I track my time writing blog posts too, its important and I have goals on how often I want to spend writing.

2 – Ask yourself how you think you spend your time across your responsibilities.

3 – Pick one task that you spend a lot of time on that you want to track and change at some point.

For me that task was new business – I love doing SEO, so I decided that I had to track my time to make sure I was not spending more than 25% of my time on new business in a given month – I picked 25% arbitrarily, it sounded right.

Remember SEER does NO sales solicitations, so all this time is spent on chatting with referrals & writing proposals ONLY.

I had my asisstant send me a report every month with 2 graphs (one is above):

• my raw # of hours spent on new business
• the % of my time spent on new business vs all other tasks

This means that every month, I was going to see the graph and have that stare me in the face reminding me that every month where I am spending over 25% of my time on new business, I am not doing what I started this business for and where my biggest value lies.

And the data rolled in, you can see it yourself, several weeks I was over again and again and again.  But every month I got notification staring me in the face, so I had to do something about it.  There was no random spike for a few weeks, there was a sustained overage month after month, ugh.

So, the great problem with being a referral based business is that as people at our clients move on to new companies they bring us along, existing clients re-up (and don’t leave), and most clients refer us to others at some point – this is a snowball rolling down a hill – the more business we do (and do well) the more new business we get – I had to make sure I spent all my time making sure we did our jobs well.

So you might be thinking, Wil – how did you chose to give up Sales? 

I had given up everything else, banking, books, payroll, HR, Tech, you name it – if it wasn’t SEO or client related I got rid of it, there was only one thing left, business development or day to day SEO.

Are you thinking, Wil, how can you give up sales, you seem to be good at it?

It was tough, it was a massive leap of faith, but here’s how I made the decision…I asked myself this question…

What has driven SEER’s “success” so far? Is it:

That we are good at selling

or

That we are good at search, have a great team, and amazing client service?

I knew the answer, no matter how hard it was to admit…it was time to hire someone to come in and help so I could focus on what got us here so far.

We hired Clare Block, our business development lead, in October and I’m proud to say that my time on new business has plummeted in the last few months to all time lows, even though our raw # of monthly leads is at an all time high (2x over last year this time).

I’ll never lose sight of the fact that our success is based on our doing well for our existing clients, not going looking for new ones.

Having the new business hours drop as drastically as they have has resulted in one thing…more time to work on driving client success, ahhh where I should be and where I belong.

Ya know nothing is better than when you are being interviewed and someone asks you a question and you answer it and think back and say….damn I nailed it.  Well I had one of those strokes of genius recently when I was being interviewed by a Drexel law student who asked me about what I liked about being in Philly as a business owner.

For some background this debate is hashed over, and over, and over again. Philly has no community for startups, I couldn’t grow by business in philly with the taxes, I couldn’t find innovative companies in philly, stop your whining.  Especially if business taxes are really your issue you relocate to Nevada, Texas, Florida – you know the states with NO INCOME tax.

Then in the other camp you have the Philly’s awesome for every one and every company should be here cheerleaders who need to chill too. It’s OK, Philly is NOT for everyone, try convincing Google they should have opened their NYC office in Philly, or Bluefly, or a slew of other companies, including ex-philly company orpheus media research – sometimes it just doesn’t make sense, and that is OK. Other times, people might just want to change scenery, in the same way I don’t take it as a knock on my neighborhood of Northern Liberties when someone decides to move to Queen Village, we all know people change.

The truth is fighting over if a company should be located in NYC over Philly is a bad fight to pick.  But first, lets realize who matters and who doesn’t in this conversation (let me start ducking now) – then we can talk how to make things happen here.

Philly isn’t hurting because one person decided to leave, EVER.  So when individuals decide to leave, why is that even news? If your argument is that Google, facebook etc were one/two person companies that grew into what they are – point taken, but for every google/facebook there are millions of other small businesses that have no shot of ever becoming that & fizzle out.

Next if your tech company is 1-5 people and you decide to pick up and leave, big whoop.  Usually, and I say USUALLY, companies of that size are not what causes a our city pain – as there is churn there.

I think the companies we need to try to retain are the tech companies who are typically 10+ employees or that have a growth trajectory that shows them as a “mover”. Under 10 people / certain revenue growth you’ll always have some shops leaving and some shops emerging here, but its the ones who have the BRIGHT futures and leave, they are the ones that really hurt. I tend to think of the Venmo / Ticketleap types.

I don’t know how many of Marchex Voice’s employees stayed here but they are a philly company got bought for 28 Million by a Seattle parent. Look at invite media, who got bought by Google for 80 Million (I think) – lets talk to them.  I think our focus should be on these types of companies…instead of worrying about the 1-2-3 person shops who leave…lets make sure we as a community stay in touch with people who don’t need to be convinced of Philly’s greatness, but already believe in it. That should be focus #1.

Area #2

Focus on those Philadelphia companies who have been bought by or are heavily invested in by companies in other cities.  Examine their track record, do the parents let companies typically stay where they are, or do they usually within a year or two fold them into the next regional office.  Knowing if this is an issue will help us stay on top of our “big players” locally. Remember 80 Million is a LOT of money, I think you could take almost every tech/internet startup in Philly under 20 people and their combined value would likely not be valued at 80 Million.  That is the other big thing here people, SCALE!  If 100 startups (who will probably fail, I’m not being pessimistic, its the truth) leave the city that may not equal he impact of 1 BIG player leaving.  Our time is not limitless, so lets focus it on the people who are movers.

Area #3

Many tech companies are funded by some angel / VC, as such the city should stay on top of VC activity outside of the area, which companies are attracting funds by organization who can have influence over them. That influence could be also on where they are located. Not that the city can stop someone, but a focus on helping articulate the values of being in Philly would be helpful.

That is what our local government should be doing…take a part of our high tax burden and spend it on analyzing the fastest growing companies actually in Philly. Bring them to the mayors office.  Have the Mayor talk about his plan to these people – turn them into local cheerleaders for why we are in Philly…see the idea below.

Area #4

If someone relocates to SF, guess what? They were going to go anyway…its the companies located in wilmington, king of prussia and conshohocken that I think are targets for this strategy.

Tech companies that are located outside the city but within a 20-30 mile radius…this is where my road show concept comes into play.  Personally it is good networking to meet other successful growing companies but also to have our small growing tech companies talking to other companies about the values of being in the city is worth while. 

Turn these companies into an army!  Put on a road show, get them out in the greater Philadelphia area, South Jersey, Wilmington, etc – get them in front of other tech companies that are 5-100 people (I dream small sorry) and have the people who have built companies here talking to the people who should hear their story.  I am sick of this “we’re a region” approach I know the mayor has to say it to be PC. I’d go after them first.

The hard part about turning these people into an army is that they are insanely busy growing their companies.  But I bet many would be willing to listen if you said anyone who gets selected into this group must commit to 3 road shows a year and if they fulfill that promise they get their wage taxes cut 25-50-75 percent.  I might be willing to jump on a few trains, or drive around regionally to get a break – but at least I am getting that break to help bring more companies here – which expands the tax base.

Lastly I’ll say our wage tax sucks, and our business taxes suck. This year our wage taxes alone could have paid for an employee!  GRRRRR!

But I will say that there are some intangibles about being in the city that won’t show up on our P&L but have an impact. I never thought about them until that interview when they just kind of “came out”…here they are:

1 – Frustration – traffic getting into a major city is always frustrating, I know a ton more people who hate their commute than those who enjoy having 30-40 minute drives to and from work. I walk/skateboard about 5 minutes to work everyday…this maxes out my productivity, if I had to drive in my productivity would take a hit.

2 – Employee Productivity – texting or answering emails while driving is dangerous.  taking a train or bus into work allows your commuting workforce to get some time to do work.  Even if it is only 1 hour of work a week.  If you have 20 employees who commute into work you end up with 20 hours a week that are productive vs unproductive drive times – multiply that by 52 weeks a year and you have about 1000 wasted hours that are now productive. While you can take public trans to the suburbs, the hard part is once you get off public trans, how do you get to your office?  

3 – Travel costs – god forbid you have people who travel a decent amount…the costs of parking cars at the airport or taking a shuttle vs a taxi or train add up. 

4 – Creativity – I don’t know about you but it I get some of my best ideas based on the day to day of my life, just passing by store owners, watching people get tattoos, and what not.  If you need creative people, you know a lot of them may be in/around cities meaning they typically love working for companies where their commutes are not crazy. I have seen that for most of the creative tech companies, more and more of their employees live in the city.

5 – Its just cooler – lets be honest, our restaurants are better, our cultural options are better, and again with a creative class they see being close to these things as a value add in their personal lives.

Ok, I know this post is all OVER the place, but I can’t spend any more time to clean it up. 🙂

Go philly!

How did you start your business. How and when did you transition from employee to entrepreneur?

Holy smokes that is a pretty broad question, gimme a few weeks and I’ll post it. Thanks!

As we have grown from the company that started in my apartment, I always wanted to follow 4 principles – here they are:

Share in the success of the company with the people who create it, yes thats 8 of us:

Its SEER Bonus time!!  For some reason, I love this day more than most.  Every time I take substantial parts of the SEER profits and turn them over to the people who create them, it reminds me that I am keeping true to one of my core beliefs. The core belief is in sharing in the success of the company with the people who create it.

There are a ton of things I could have done with the $$ over the last few years, I could stockpile it and buy out a 2-3 person social media firm, since I want to build a social practice here.  I could have done the same with a conversion optimization firm, but didn’t.  I could have leased my dream car (all in due time):

Keep in mind that most people at SEER get substantial raises as well, so this bonus is not given because we cheap out & gave out 2-4 percent raises this year – so naysayers take that!

Another one of my goals is to make SEER a conduit to help people achieve what they want in life. Our bonuses can make it easy for people to make BIG steps in life, like buy cars, put down down payments on homes, pay off student loans, get out of debt, pay medical bills, give it to charity, whatever they want – that is ofcourse assuming they are GREAT!

Volunteerism – Helping people other than your (frikin) self:

SEER has always been big on volunteering (in a few weeks 10 of us will going to be cooking a meal for families at the ronald mcdonald house – you should sign your company up).  After looking at our budget last year I realized we spent less on our charitable giving than we wanted to.  So this year Crystal created a volunteer plan, one that allows members of our team who are volunteering regularly to select any one of their charities to give $700 to, a different team member will be picked every month.  We have a ton of other things we give to, but we want to put this in the budget & create a program to make sure it gets spent.

Being a Good Dad:

All I want in life is to be a good parent, right now all I got is this dog, coltrane 🙂

But there will come a time in my life where I have a family, and when my 7 year old has a tea party at 12:00 on a Tuesday, I wanna be there. I don’t want some boss telling me I am out of vacation days!  I want the ultimate responsibility and control over whether or not I end up being a good dad, and if I look back and don’t go to events, I want to be able to just look at myself and shoulder all the blame.  For the record, YES I pay this same courtesy to every single person who comes to work with me – Family first, ALWAYS!

Oh and the obligatory – continue to work with GREAT clients and provide amazing service to them with a smart and talented team.  Which leads me to my last point.

Don’t be GREEDY:

Today as I addressed a team of about 24 people, I realized that wow, this company got big.  Not too big, but BIG!  And now I have to spend some time slowing it down.  As such SEER is likely going to hire another 1-2 SEO people and maybe another 1 SEM person and will stop hiring, unless someone leaves (which really doesn’t happen often).  Then we’re going to take a little break to re-examine our direction and make sure we are on a path that stays true to our beliefs.  Its hard for me as a hyper-competitive soul to slow down, but I think its a wise investment – I gotta see what it is like to turn away projects we want because we don’t want to add tons more headcount – I could see that being VERY difficult – if it hurts bad enough, we can change and continue some kind of growth – if it doesn’t then I’m content where we are growing more at a steady pace, then this rocketship pace we’ve been on – cause I am not missing that tea party when the time comes.

Let’s make this year the year of the losers. I’m kind of sick of celebrating “winning”. I’m getting sick of the stories of zuckerburg (who lives a bit like a loser) inspiring throngs if 19-22 year olds to go build the next Facebook because the reality is that most people trying to create something big will fail, they will lose, but because these people get no air time, no followings at conferences, no recognition at universities none of our budding entrepreneurs hear the pain.

When I spoke on the panel about winning, I had to write my thoughts on why I was NOT a winner and maybe now I am just understanding why.

But most small business fail, leaving those who started them with broken relationships, debt that may take years to get out of, and disappointment.

Where are those stories on techcrunch or in your inspirational blog tags in your reader, huh? The other thing I notice is that most entrepreneurs are the best exaggerators and liars out there.  You think they are successful, but they aren’t.  Closing a round of funding is not success, its a lifeline. Selling the business and taking care of yourself and the people who helped build it is, not ruining your family to win in business is success, along with a slew of other things, I mention in the above post on why I am not a winner.

Ask the average guy or gal how their new venture is coming, and typically you’ll hear things like “doing well”, “turning the corner”, etc… You assume things are going well, when for many of us they are not.  When I ask a business owner how things are going and they are secure enough to say “tough” I respect the hell out of that.

So budding entrepreneurs, I implore you to go talk to failures, there are many more of them out there than successes but I guarantee that you’ll have a much harder time funding them for two reasons:

1 – no one likes talking about their failures anymore, as if its personally admitting you are a failure.

2 – these people are hard to find b/c they get no visibility, yet you will probably learn more from them than from others who are “successful”. If we keep only showing people the bright side of entrepreneurship we are not giving budding entrepreneurs the real truth.

Let me tell you why I am writing this…the first company I worked for (and was the first employee at) went under, and it was painful for me – I left a relationship in ruin and my heart was empty..I poured so much of myself into being a great worker there.  I have never talked to my old bosses about that company going under, but I was close enough to get a feeling for the pain they felt, cause I remember getting the call that it was over. I remember Ettore Rossetti, my direct boss telling em he’d do anything to help me get another job, I lost the reference letter, but he wrote the most personal reference letter ever.

So with that said, failures, come out of the closet, so many people will thank you for sharing your failures, your mis steps, and how you rebounded than just some stories about how awesome your products were, how to get investors, etc. That shit is old.

One of the things I love about the SEER reputation is that I truly believe that the word on the street is that we’re a good group of people, which I think we back up every single day. I kinda feel that we’re striving to be a bit like the Troy Polamalu of SEO. Reading about him is interesting, he’s a peaceful soul who likes to surf, grow flowers, he’s soft spoken, hangs with his wife and kids, nothing like we’d expect from the hard hitting safety – watch the video.

Today I was interviewed by a partner agency and they asked me, what impression do you want your competitors to walk away with when they visit your site, my response started with “this is going to sound harsh but” then I went on to answer the question (what do you want your competitors to think) with this answer

“I hope my client never picks up the phone and calls these guys.”

Their reply…

“Wow, that IS harsh”

And I agreed, it is a hard stance, but one that I don’t back off of. I will never apologize for trying to be the best and to create the best experience and ROI for our clients.  If that means that I want other firms to visit our site and say…lets hope that the client doesn’t know about SEER, so be it.  

I think they were even more shocked by the fact that when they asked me about SEER, I mentioned that we don’t have “target clients”, that we try really hard to take great care of our team, that we strongly encourage volunteerism in our community, etc.  Which I think people take as

“wow, that is a really nice guy who runs a nice company.”

Then when we talk about SEO, I go into KILL mode:

“KILL my competitors, KILL my clients competitors” which I think shocks people. I like that balance though…I’ve always said I love people who can turn on that anger when they need to but not bring that into the “locker room”.

So the lesson here, anger is good, but knowing how to turn that anger on full blast when needed, and then turn it off is GREAT!