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I opted out of writing a super long list of 2012 learnings, and instead decided to focus on one thing I always knew but could never articulate…the value of TRUST in all relationships. In 2012 I finally got to understand one thing that makes me tick…I’d rather be trusted than liked (obviously both is ideal, but if I had to choose one), but I can work on you liking me over time if you trust me, but if my word means nothing, then I have nothing.

Read this quote below, and DON’T read another thing.  Step away from your computer for 2 minutes and just think about it for a sec.

“The moment there is suspicion about someone’s motives everything becomes tainted…” -Gandhi

Now ask yourself…who are you suspicious of at work? When they make a mistake (and we all do), do you give them benefit of the doubt? Or do you spend time trying to hunt down the truth, thinking of their angle, assuming they are doing something bad to you? Think of a time where someone screwed something up and you spent hours trying to verify the “real story” or “creating a case”, whether what that person said was true or not, you have indicated that you have no trust in them.

Now flip it, take another mistake someone made whom you have high trust in, when they came to you and admitted their mistake – did you spend hours digging to verify the truth?  NOPE, you gave them benefit of the doubt, if they are someone you trust they probably approached you with a solution or how to avoid this again, and you all went back to work, working on the things that matter most.

In the first scenario (low trust) – you might invest hours or days (and tons of mental anguish) trying to figure out the truth, not working on your job for the day or spending time with your families.

In the second scenario (high trust) – you probably went back to work within minutes.

Which one is a better environment for you?  Now ask yourself are you building that kind of environment for your clients and co-workers?

Low trust companies are slower because too often people question each others motives, and as you scale this lack of trust can grind decisions to a halt, while everyone stops to think…what’s the catch, what’s her angle?

This thought process started on a beach in Honduras…Since SEER’s inception we’ve given people the opportunity to work from home for a couple of hours a day (I’ve been logging about 3 hours on average) between Christmas and New Years, that is 12 consecutive days off this year.

Every year, Crystal and I tell our teams, whether or not we do that next year is up to you, don’t slack (keep our trust) and not keep up to date on client work and we’ll do it next year, if trust is broken, we’ll do it again next year just those people will be gone. If you think about it, taking off for 12 days and not expecting anyone to check in, would be detrimental to our clients, as Google, Twitter, Bing are making changes over that time and our paid search teams are managing hundreds of thousands of dollars in that stretch, so completely off doesn’t build that “we’ve got your back” style trust.

 So back to the beach…most years because I have this downtime, Nora and I travel, last year it was Honduras, and man within the first day I could tell we were stuck, it was remote, when it rained we couldn’t get off the resort, and Nora and I are not resort people.  I frantically jumped on wifi looking for flights to Rio, Medellin, anywhere… the problem is that there were like some days where no flights came onto the island, and we were going to be stuck for 9 days.  So I read, a LOT, one book I read was Speed of Trust, and many of you are probably sick of hearing me say this, but that book summed up most of the things I learned this year.

Most of the lessons learned were around trust (duh), how to build it, and more importantly how we destroy it. If you do ONE thing in 2013, its to read that book.

This year I want to keep working on building trust with my team, my wife, and my clients, so when I make mistakes their first reaction is to give me benefit of the doubt, hopefully they in turn will do the same when I make mistakes, because I can guarantee that I will make mistakes, but I never have bad intentions when I do.

If I ask you how do you build integrity? How would you answer that?

My answer is simple…Make and keep commitments not just to your friends , coworkers, or boss, keep commitments to yourself. If you can’t keep commitments to yourself how do you build confidence you can do the same for others? If I see you from a distance committing to one thing and doing the opposite 2 weeks later, how do you think I’ll look at you when I need you?

As with most of my posts, I want to share some big mistakes made at SEER this year and how we used those mistakes to Illustrate trust in our team.

Tolerance for BIG mistakes w/ 3 examples…

On page 117 of the book there is a great example of how a manager at one of Warren Buffet’s companies made a 360 Million dollar mistake, Buffet kept him on board, the lesson there is if the company doesn’t tolerate mistakes, then you will build a culture where people don’t feel comfortable making decisions, grinding your company to a halt or building so many layers of management that you move slower.

The “Guest Post” Mistake

This year, we had someone reach out to SEOmoz for a guest post…(head smack)… OH NO!   This person had not made massive contribution to the company yet, as they had only been here for 2-3 months, this would have been easy to fire them (it was not a 360 Million Dollar mistake, but it felt like it to me) we kept this person on board and said, let’s show you how to do REAL outreach and they are committed to getting better everyday! Thats a win, that is a win that builds trust throughout SEER.  It builds trust with that person, but also tells the company, we are OK making mistakes…once…and learning from them.

The “oops I spent 15k of the client’s money in 2 weeks” mistake

We had someone spend 15k in PPC when they weren’t supposed to for a client we’ve had for about 6 years, Crystal who is my right hand man, woman, friend, you name it…hit me up, you know what she said…I want to give back all of the money out of SEER’s pocket. That hurt the wallet, but warmed the soul, as I look back at this year, hearing Crystal take that approach was HUGE, she wanted to take 15k of SEER’s money and give it back, ultimately we gave back a little over 50%, but I love that her FIRST reaction was to give it all, then after an analysis of the situation we realized we did get some conversions just at a high CPA, so she gave back half.

What you don’t know is that Crystal has been working tirelessly to work on our SEM team’s profitability (I wish she would blog about this), she knew this would set her back from the goals I set for the year. She also knew that this would show the client how much we cared, and it is how she would like to be treated, did that build trust… YOU BETCHA!  She chose relationships over money! NICE!

Now this client has been with us for 6 years and we never made a mistake like that EVER, so we could have chalked it up to “but we never make mistakes like this” and see what happens.  I have seen several people at other agencies get fired over offenses like this, again, the person at SEER approached Crystal with a solution (fixing it), immediately told her when they found it (not hiding it), and they were nervous after seeing other people fired at previous agencies for making that same mistake.  This person is still one of our rising stars and we can’t wait to see what they do in the future!

This mistake was a HUGE win for Crystal because

• She built trust with the client, while hurting her monthly profitability to do what she thought was right
• She built trust with her team members, by not firing them, and showing that SEER has tolerance for mistakes (as long as we learn from them)
• She built trust with ME, as when I look out at how Crystal makes decisions and as I ask her to do more to help this company and to help me run this company, I know she will do what’s right for the client and her team FIRST
• To me it was also a win for her teammate, who immediately admitted his mistake, developed a solution to fix it. Making mistakes is expected, so making mistakes doesn’t break trust, hiding your mistakes and making someone find them does.

I have to write a separate post about this, but I’ll give the TL:DR version here.

The “Another new account manager this year, Wil?” Mistake

One of our best clients ended up having two account managers this year as we either let them go, or they felt the pressure and left. I felt horrible, this client is GREAT to SEER…and I was embarrassed that I had staffed the project with the wrong people (mistakes are mirrors, victories are windows…see below).  The second account manager asked for an “opportunity” to show me and the team they could handle this…and I trusted that they would, unfortunately they didn’t handle it, and within 3 months of putting this person on one of my favorite accounts they quit, with no 2 weeks, and no initial offer to help transition.  I was stuck. 

Immediately I became an account manager, and I managed 5 projects as the day to day contact, on top of my other roles, which already gave me a full workload. I had to tell my wife that for the foreseeable future things would be tough, I would be coming home much later than usual, I would be cranky; I would sacrifice sleep so I could still spend a little time with my mom, wife, friends, etc.  See, this is the GLUE that holds a REAL team together…when people care about one another enough that they try to help.  So many people jumped in to help!

F being the “CEO”, our reputation was on the line with one client, and the best team members for these jobs were working at capacity. So the best person to move heaven and earth to get a project back on task was me, and I am still the point person for some of these projects, I’m on weekly calls, doing outreach, etc. its been HELL for me the past 4 months adding these to my workload but I felt that I had broken the client’s trust and had to be personally responsible for seeing this through.

When you succeed, do you see a window in front of you or a mirror?

I’ve already talked about why most people will never know if I am successful. However, when I look at my mistakes, I use the window and mirror metaphor, and I recommend all people do this…When things go well, you look through a window, look at everyone out there and give them credit for the success and the contributions they have made to create the success. When things don’t go well, look out at your team like there is a mirror in front of you instead of a window. Meaning, take the blame and don’t accuse others, and learn how to improve.

On Pg 119 – a part of the book that resonated with me was taking responsibility for your results BUILDS trust… (win or lose, own it)

There is a VAST chasm between:

• I called the customer vs I closed the sale
• I took a class vs I learned how to give an effective presentation
• Talking smack on your company vs quitting and finding a company you like working for
• I tried vs I did

Remember this… Beginners are many, finishers are few

Getting people to trust you is as much about how they feel as what you freaking deliver.  Creating a great plan for the client, builds trust as you manage the day to day of that plan, they will see that you are on time, and are knocking out tasks and moving things along. If that plan doesn’t ultimately drive the outcome this will chip away at their trust over time.  Trust is a combination of how you act, but also how you DELIVER. There are 2 dimensions of trust in the book, personal trust and expertise trust. Personal is the warmer & fuzzier part of trust / delivering is the concrete part.

When I took over one of the under-performing projects as the account manager it had 3 keywords on page 1, about 10 on page 2, today there are about 12 on page 1 and about 30 on page 2. In only 2 months after the first account manager worked on it for 6 months.  That is  STARTING to rebuild trust with that client, but we still have a LONG way to go.  This is what I call giving a scent…with every passing week we get closer and closer, and its my hope that the client feels that, and with each week we are re-building trust as the results are taking form.

Guys remember trust is fragile. 

This year I had to let someone go who was doing well because they did something to break my trust, it was a hard decision, but one I know was right. As I went through hours trying to see what happened when this client was ignored, I said, hold up!  If I am at the point where I am checking your hours, we’re done.  I don’t want that for YOU (to feel like someone is always watching you) and I REFUSE to have my job description become “hours checker”, as that is not fun for me. 

The trust was broken and it was time to part ways. We both learned and both moved on. The client was shocked, but their response was, we TRUST you and we TRUST SEER, so if you are telling me this was the right thing to do, we believe that these issues would have manifested themselves down the road in ways we don’t see now and you are protecting us from that happening.

So when I look back at 2012, here are some examples that broke and built trust with me, and one thing I am still kicking myself for.

The actions that Broke Down Trust in 2012

• This year many relationships were damaged (not always forever) that need repair, simply because of trust…
• The company who I respected that I found out had a massive link network, even though on stage they talk all RCS
• The company who I respected that charged a client almost to 10k remove links they built after that client got hit, we said F it and hired an intern on our dime to remove the links we felt so bad for this company. Ultimately the client took the project in house, as we couldn’t battle the penalty and their TRUST in agencies was damaged so much
• The contractors we used to help us with clients, that wrote “epic” blog posts while not responding to any of my emails asking for updates and constantly talked about how epic the posts were going to be. I had to watch you update twitter about your epic posts right after I had to call my client disappointing them once again that we wouldn’t deliver on our promises this month.  

Twitter can break trust! For the record, we as an industry, have to watch what the F we say on twitter!!  If you make promises and update twitter 30 times a day and come in late on a deliverable, do you think that BUILDS trust?  How would you feel if you @‘ed or emailed support for a company you use, and they never responded but sent 35 tweets out that day about epic content, their dog, and “you go boy”?? There is a person who prompted this post 5 years ago, they broke my trust then, and haven’t been sent a referral since, that one tweet coupled with his actions has impacted easily 200k-300k in referrals over 5 years. Yet he thinks we’re friends.

Now ask yourself, do you do that to your teammates, to your clients, to your family? I’m still struggling with how to use twitter, but I am cognizant of how that can look,so I watch when I tweet.

• The web design firm that won a big award by stuffing the ballot box with their employees and interns, does that build trust? Or does it say that you care so much about winning that you’ll stuff the ballot box?  Did your friends just check your name off or did they actually review all the entrants and make an honest vote?  This year SEER had a chance to win Philadelphia’s best places to work, I said SEER will never “coach” or “provide guidance” to people on how to answer how they feel about SEER, as a result we came in 3rd place.  The company that won…had layoffs and we get a ton of their people’s resumes.  Hopefully I showed my team that I don’t place awards or industry perceptions over HONESTY, ever.
• Watching their interns vote for a company they only worked at for 5 days, speaks to the company but also the person…how can you vote for a company to win something if you don’t know anything about them, that shows a major lack of integrity.  When someone asks you to vote for them for something, ask them “why” – ask them what they have done to deserve winning, if you just check off a check box, that is a lack of personal integrity.  I don’t RT stuff b/c people ask me, I RT stuff b/c I think people will get value. Don’t compromise YOUR integrity to do a favor for someone.
• The “friend” who talks smack on my real friends in the industry, focus your energy elsewhere.
• The person who sold their company to basically cover debt, but talks about their “exit” only showing the good side and not the full truth.
• The client who didn’t pay us after we made a strong ROI, but constantly updated Facebook with his trips to Vegas to see various DJs.

The actions that Built Up Trust in 2012

• The time Joe Hall, DM’ed me as I shouted out an RCS example where there was tons of spam they were doing I didn’t see, he could have taken that as an opportunity to blow up my spot.
• Or when Jen Lopez emailed me about the SUB PAR outreach we did to her
• When Tom Critchlow referred a client to us whom we already worked with another division of the company when Distilled had a conflict, that relationship has flourished so much since, by me trusting Tom enough to tell him who our clients are, he actually was able to help us, showed mad integrity on his part.
• When stuff hit the fan and John at Designbysoap.com pulled so many late nights to help us deliver for the client, I made a lot of mistakes and was under a lot of pressure after taking this client over, yet I have never seen a contractor take the mistakes that I made and say, I’m here for you and I will help you, like he did.
• Paul May of Buzzstream showed amazing patience with our team and a true desire to see us get the most out of their tools, he took the promises they made personally and did everything he could (along with his team) to help us well after the sale.
• A certain well known SEO who worked with SEER this year and gave us a lot of critical feedback that is helping me to make a better company, would link to you, but I don’t think you want that out there 😉
• Some of my all time favorites, Rand Fishkin, Will Critchlow, and Shawn Collins 
• Rand I love how you always tell me when you disagree with me, having friends who will tell you straight up is key to building trust, I need critics more than cheerleaders to improve

• I’m not going to mention team members b/c the list would get too long (remember if I don’t trust you, I’m recommending we part ways), but I have to shout out Crystal Anderson, the person who when she says she’ll do something never skips a beat…you’ve made growing this business fun, if I had to do it all w/o ya we’d be a LOT smaller.
• The friends who work at competing agencies who would let me know if a client of ours was shopping around, I dunno if I could even do that, but you’ve challenged me to with your openness.
• The vendors like Rackspace and Basecamp that are always there to help when we have issues

The thing I did to break trust last year that I’m kicking myself over:

The one thing I am still kicking myself over is showing up 5 minutes late for my panel at Distilled’s London conference, I know it was 5 minutes, but the stress I probably put on Will, Duncan, and Lyndsey made me feel horrible. Distilled has been so good to me and the SEER crew over the years, and I let them down, even if it was for 5 minutes. I hated that.

Ask yourself…

Tonight when you put your head on the pillow, think about how you treated people, your family, your clients, your team members, and ask yourself if they treated me that way would I trust them more or less? Remember trust is a lot like cheating on a spouse…the act of cheating can erase 10 years of faithfulness in 10 minutes.  If you are faithful for 5,259,480 minutes out of 5,259,490 over 10 years of marriage your significant other ain’t gonna be ok with the argument that you are trustworthy 99.9999% of the time, so lets treat trust that same way, its easy to break in minutes, but takes years to build. (yeah Google how many minutes are in a year, and see a nice surprise)

Lastly, on pg 215 there was a quote…

“When you make a commitment you build hope, when you keep it you build trust.”

If you want the book LMK, I’m willing to send out 50 copies on my dime (US only) that’s how much I believe this book and its core message have impacted me this year, maybe we can get @coveylink to match my 50??  Just leave a comment below with your thoughts (even if you think I’m an ass for writing this) but if you want it let me know. I’ll try to figure out a way to get you a copy – for now reading this might be a great start. 

TL;DR – help me fight homelessness! 

Hey guys, so its 2:00am, I’ll be back up by 7:30, maybe get in a run with my dog, I have to prepare for 3 interviews tomorrow, hoping they go well, we could hire all three tomorrow 🙂

I’m getting interviewed for some publications, I’ll chat with my PR team, my COO, business development people, clients, team members, you name it.  

I’ll chat with our culture club at SEER who will show me some budget in the thousands of dollars this quarter to help work on some out of office fun.

I’ll speak with Crystal and Larry about where we locate our next office and by when and how much that will cost.

Ill think about how we improve our bonus program this year, how we develop stock plans / profit sharing, etc.

I’ll have to prepare for travel thats been booked for me to NYC, Vegas, and London all next month.  My financial adviser will bug me about something I need to get life insurance completed for my family, and beneficiares.

Ill go to sleep in a very VERY comfortable bed, and wake up and do it all over again the next day, and the next day and the next. and I LOVE it!!

I realize that this patterm starts to insualte me from REAL problems.  My probems or things I’ll deal with above are freaking joke, but in my circle they are really problems, when I speak with my mentors, colleagues, my team, etc they are REAL problems b/c we are all going through them, but without trying to experience other’s problems, I have no balance.

OOOH I didn’t get upgraded on this flight, wahhhhhhh

But that is why I volunteer.  

I volunteer b/c I never want to get out of touch with what real problems are, and the more I spend time just with people in our industry usually the harder it becomes to not allow our problems to become “real” to us. This company was started b/c my old company didn’t give me time to volunteer, so I can never turn my back on that.

So I am asking for your support while I sleep outside on Nov 15th ( I don’t do well in the cold, so that is going to suck).  I’d love your encouragement, support, heckling, whatever, but mostly I’d love your help!

http://covhou.convio.net/site/TR/SleepOut/National?px=1558083&pg=personal&fr_id=1080

for more information about the event go here: http://www.covenanthouse.org/help-homeless-youth/executive-sleepout

So I dunno about you, maybe its the Philly in me, but I hate being referred to as “successful” or a “winner”, I hate it for 3 reasons:

1 – I strive on being the underdog

My motivations often are driven from being the best. In order to strive to be the best it means you have to not think you are the best.  How can you climb a mountain when you think you are at the peak already?

I need the perpetual finish line, every time I get close, it moves back even further.

I have to feel like I have never crossed the “success finish line” as I believe in trying to get a little bit better every day I wake up, meaning there is always something I should be striving for that I have not done.

If you think I’m successful, you should see me try to swim or ride my longboard, its a hot mess.

When people ask you how you became “successful” – if you answer that question you already think you are a “success”, which is fine. For me when I get asked that question I answer it the same way… we haven’t done shit yet. I can never allow 

That is what I believe, I believe the the future for SEER is so bright that any time I think about my “legacy” or “success” is less time I am spending working. On what matters most.

And guess what, congratulating one’s self has never created a successful company.  If anything while you spend time doing that, the underdogs are coming for you.

2 – You are ignoring all the people who help me every day on this journey  

Saying I am successful means you are ignoring the people who shaped me, like my mom, my first bosses, my wife who puts up with this, my mentors, and the team who I surround myself with.

Without them “I” wouldn’t have been successful, who won business person of the year me or SEER? My answer, SEER has won business person of the year, not me. If I am given a chance to speak at that award ceremony, I am bringing them up on stage with me, not literally but in my words, my ex-bosses, my wife, my dog, my team, they are all a part of the success here.

3 – My real successes happen in private

My yardstick for success is atypical for most CEOs, I guess. Its mostly time, where do I spend my time, and do I make adequate time for my loved ones. But no one can truly know if I am being successful because the things that make me feel successful most people can not be there to witness since they happen in private.

Success is watching my team members grow, watching my leadership team run parts of this business in ways I never could, writing thank you cards and always being a thankful person, spending time volunteering, I could go on and on, but its never my bank account.

Growth at SEER is important for me to feel like I am on a successful path, I LOVE growing, but its not the finish line for me.

“50 told me go ‘head and switch the style up” – Kanye West

I think speaking at conferences is a constant opportunity to revise, get better, tweak over and over again, and just when you start feeling good, TWEAK AGAIN!

Thats why getting your hands on video of yourself is so critical. Studying yourself and your flaws is one of the only ways to improve. People are not going to tell you “you suck” 99% of the time.

Something I have been wanting to write about for a LONG time, is advanced SEO for the sake of advanced SEO and how that trend at times appears to overtake actually adding VALUE for the conference participants.

No matter what anyone says, most people who consider themselves “advanced” SEOs suffer from the same problem as thinking you are ugly or that you are in the top 10 percent of your workforce (something like 50% of people think they are in the top 10% of their workforce).  Could you imagine if todays teachers taught to only the super gifted students in their classes thus leaving the remaining 80-90 percent behind?  

Remember, I went to college to teach economics (a complicated concept) to high school kids (who don’t always want to be there).  The challenge I have devoted myself to is taking something complex, with an audience who may not be interested, and turning them into enagaged, motivated, learners.  If I never got that job at NetMarketing doing SEO in 1999, I’d be using this same style to teach kids about how AVC/ATC curves or laws of diminishing returns impact the cost of their sneakers.

People often compliment me on my presentation style, and I am finally comfortable saying “yup, I am pretty good on stage” – but in spite of the fact that I am consistently given high reviews at most places I am invited to speak, I am never content, I want to get better, and I want to add value to as many attendees as possible – not just my SEO pals who are truly the gifted students (as well as the teachers).

I would say that over the last 18 months, I have been “tweaking” my style trying to take even the advanced mashup stuff and breaking it down (hopefully) in a way that the advanced guys and gals say wow, and even the noobies and intermediate folks walk away feeling like…this is something I can do.

What is most important to me is and always has been adding value to as many people as possible when given the opportunity to speak.  While my style is high energy, rah-rah, cheerleader – the CORE has always been here are things you can do tomorrow, heck today to improve.

In the future you will see more and more presentations where I find things sitting right underneath your nose, things you see everyday and are not using to your advantage to grow your business and build your links.  I don’t want to take you through 10 different tools you have to mash up in order to produce results, you know why?  Its simple, you’ll be wowed but deep down I know 1 in every 60 might actually do it, and it is not because you don’t want to.  It’s because you don’t have the time, resources or dollars to do it, I’ve been in house I know what that feels like.  

I think the biggest change I will be making is in challenging myself to develop concepts that people can do in hours instead of weeks and in days instead of months, with Excel instead of PHP, this actually is going to mean I am going to have to spend more time on my presentations not less.

I truly want to see you all learn things from me you can go do TOMORROW!

Now does that mean everything will be like that…NOPE.  But expect my presentations to have a sharper focus on … hey this stuff is sitting right here for the taking and I know you can do it in 2 hours.

I’m going to challenge you, the people out there, to go do these things.I’m going to ask you to skip 2 lunch breaks and knock this stuff out in 2 hours.

I was much more purposeful in the second half of my last presentation at search exchange in Charlotte, NC this week the first half is a bit philosophical (not typically my style, but was necessary).

The last half is like…do you have 10 minutes? Here are things you can DO in 10, 60, 120 minutes.

Again I think this is a minor tweak, if it doesn’t work for you please tell me, its my intent to load as much of my presentation up with concepts that can be implemented manually by intermediate folks, and the more advanced people can use all the APIs and advanced stuff.

Think about it, Richard Baxter and the SEOgadget team does this great…instead of trying to teach you all the advanced VBA scripting you need, they just build the tool and make it free for anyone to use.  I have also always thought that Rand Fishkin does this well. People walk away from his presentations feeling empowered, feeling like – yeah I can do this vs overwhelmed like, whats a Vlookup, IMPORTXML, and how the heck do I use Javascript –  I know I do.  The REAL technical stuff is powerful in a room of people who already know how to use all those functions.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen someone present something that is VERY smart, but I don’t know 75% of what they did, and I am a pretty “advanced”  SEO chap.

Luckily when I see those advanced items I have a team of people who know those things or I can send for a training to learn them.  But that is ATYPICAL, most of us doing SEO can’t just tell the boss, hey take programmer X and take her of of project Y so she can learn some new technology that may or may not help us.

Hit me up after any of the following conferences, and let me know what you think…you might not even notice the difference as I’ve been doing this more and more in the last 18 months.

I’m going to the following conferences soon:

• SearchLove London – Oct 24 – http://www.distilled.net/events/searchlove-london/
• SearchLove NYC – Nov 1 – http://www.distilled.net/events/searchlove-new-york/
• Pubcon Vegas – Nov 8th – http://www.pubcon.com/pubcon-vegas-2011
• Soical Media Plus – Philly – Nov 16th – http://socialmediaplus.com/

 

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.