Mike's disclaimer:
This is not a post about how awesome I am, or how there is only one way
to build an internet marketing agency. It's a combination of stories and
thoughts about what I have gone through building
Nifty Marketing.
When I started in 2009 there was very little information
online about starting, running, or growing an Internet Marketing Agency.
The ones that did exist were from
superstars that charged a billion dollars an hour. I am not a superstar. My company started in
Burley, Idaho. Here's a
rap about my town I wrote.
My hope with this post is that a few of you who are out
there hustling will benefit from doing some of the things that I did,
and most of the things that I didn't.
Start smart
I was in my final semester at
BYU-Idaho and had accepted a job to be the chief marketing officer of
Rove Pest Control
after spending my summers during college as a door-to-door salesman for
them. I thought my future was set. But, due to some changes at Rove
I knew that I was going to have to have to find a different career. My
wife was pregnant, we had just started building a house in Burley, and I
had a full load of credits. My two favorite classes were a basic HTML
class (that used
Don't Make Me Think
as the textbook) and a web business class for which we had to start an
online business and make/lose money. Naturally, as any true Idahoan
would do, I started
HugeIdahoPotato.com
and sold potatoes bigger than heads to people across the country. The
website sucks; I'm pretty sure I got it penalized within a year of
creating it. But I fell in love with internet marketing in the process
of building that site, and I keep it up as a remembrance of where I
started.
Lesson 1: Start with a reason that's more than money
After making around $100 on the site I knew that I had
found my career choice. I also knew that I was going to live in Burley,
Idaho, and that I wanted to bring non-agricultural jobs to the town.
I can't tell you how sad it is for many of my friends who grew up in a
town they knew they couldn't move back to if they wanted to make a
decent living. I wanted to change that. I still do. It's one of the main
driving points for me. Of course you need to make money, but if
that is the only thing you are looking for as a business owner then
eventually you will fail. You will make decisions that aren't for your
clients, or for your staff, or for the community; you will get
short-term gains and create a long term failure.
Lesson 2: Start by interning/working at an agency
This is possibly my biggest regret of my career. I
started Nifty Marketing with literally no experience at all. I had no
friends in the industry, I had no idea what I was doing, how SEO
companies were structured, or even how to do anything beyond what I had
learned in college. I dove into blogs, but at that time I didn't
know who to trust and read some really awful advice. I was not a good
SEO. I was not a good PPC advertiser. I could have saved myself at
least two years if I had worked for someone who could have pointed me in
the right direction first.
Lesson 3: Focus on something specific
Business wasn't going very well. I had a few clients, and I decided I needed some help, so I signed up for
SEOBook.
There was a feedback forum, so I posted my super-awful website for
Nifty Marketing. I didn't even own the domain at the time. (I had
TheNiftyWay.com, and it wasn't until later—by some good grace of the
heavens—that the person who owned NiftyMarketing.com let it go, and I
bought it for $7.99 with a GoDaddy code.) When I posted my site on
SEOBook, I got brutal feedback. People told me it sucked. But someone in
the forum said something that changed my life forever.
He said something like:
"You offer SEO, Web Design, and PPC. That is exactly the
same as 100,000s of companies around the world, who by the looks of
things are better than you at it. What can you be the best at? What
can you become known for?"
The comment hit me like a ton of bricks. The few clients I
had at the time were really small businesses in Idaho, and I had been
spending a lot of time in Google Maps. I realized that I enjoyed
that aspect of marketing, and was getting clients ranked. So, I
redesigned my site, changed my messaging, and decided to focus. I
became a
local SEO.
Lesson 4: Start with networking, not cold calls
I remember quite vividly trying to use my door-to-door
sales skills to try and cold call businesses to get work. I grabbed a
phone book and called people with big ads and no websites because I
figured that they had budget. What I found was that I was caller #5 for
that week offering the same thing as everyone else. Worst of all,
everyone "knew a guy who knows a guy who could do it" for them. So, I
put away the phonebook and started talking to my friends and asking if
they knew people who needed websites and marketing. That's when leads
started coming in. Then, I wrote an email to
David Mihm on August 7, 2009, and asked him how I could become an expert in the local search field. This was his response:
The best advice I can give you is to optimize the local
listings of a bunch of clients. The more you "play" in the space, the
better you'll get at teasing out the parts of the algorithm that
really matter.
Beyond that, subscribe to these blogs:
http://www.blumenthals.com/blog
http://www.localsearchnews.net [Editor's note: This site isn't around anymore.]
http://gesterling.wordpress.com
http://www.searchinfluence.com/blog
http://solaswebdesign.net/wordpress
http://www.smallbusinesssem.com
http://www.hyperlocalblogger.com
http://www.sixthmanmarketing.com/blog
http://www.expand2web.com/blog
http://www.devbasu.com
http://www.martijnbeijk.com
http://www.seoverflow.com/blog
I immediately dove into every one of these sites and
learned everything I possibly could about local search. I took notes,
and then I started testing and haven't ever stopped.
While doing that, I realized the most valuable networking
lesson I ever learned was to simply share. I started blogging, which led
to
guest posts on SEJ, and I attended a few small conferences, one of which was the first ever
LocalU.
I offered to help any way that I could. Fast forward to 2013, and I am a
LocalU Faculty Member and speak at conferences year-round. It isn't
because I am special. It's because I am passionate about the space and I
am willing to share information and help as much as I can. Almost
every client we have at Nifty Marketing comes as a referral from
clients, friends, blog posts, webinars, and conferences. Not one client
came from a cold call. I will forever be in debt to David Mihm and
the rest of the local search community for teaching me such a valuable
lesson.
Lesson 5: It's good to have funding, it's better to have partners, and it's best to bootstrap alone
From the first year of my business until now I have had
opportunities to get funding and take on partners. I have never done it.
I am not saying that it's bad to do either of these things, but if
you take a close look at our industry you will see that a lot of funded
companies and partnerships don't make it.
I remember very clearly going to dinner with some guys from
Blueglass
in my first year and thinking, "Man, I wish I could be part of that
company." And while I respect the founders a great deal they took a
massive risk and it didn't workout. Many of them had successful
businesses before then, and while the idea of a Mega Company that can
make tens or hundreds of millions is alluring, the chance of you
being successful and earning more on your own is better. Sure, extremely
fast growth and funding means you come to market quicker. But by
growing at the slow rate of 2x per year (which isn't that slow), I
have been able to continually innovate and offer better services without
taking do-or-die risks.
I am very glad I bootstrapped. I own 100% of my company. I
can make 100% of the decisions about its future. I don't have to pay a
silent partner a large chunk that makes cash flow an issue. I don't
have to make short-term decisions for a board that hurts the long-term
vision I have. And I make enough that I stopped caring about the
money around year three; slow and steady wins the prize.
I know that there are many successful companies that haven't gone the
way of solo bootstrapping. At the top of the partnership list for me is
Avalaunch Media. But in
order to do what they have done you have get big enough to support
multiple owners and find amazing partners that can all pull in the
same direction. With around 50% of marriages failing, how many
partnerships in business actually work out? They are definitely not
the norm, and I respect them immensely for it.
Grow smarter
Lesson 6: You are in the business of providing a service, not SEO
I remember becoming a good SEO. I also remember getting
amazing results for clients and still getting complaints from them. I
thought they were the problem. Then I realized I was. I thought back
to the days of pest control and remember the company training techs to
take their time at customers' houses. You see, you could service a house
in 15 minutes or even less if you hustled. But if you did that,
customers would complain that the work was sloppy and it shouldn't
cost so much. Instead, you should take your time, get down on your hands
and knees, and look around. Take notes and pace yourself. Then,
customers felt like the service was worth it. They weren't paying for
the product. They could buy the product at Home Depot. They were paying
for the service.
Comparing this to Internet marketing, I knew I had done a
great job gaining more traffic, but the clients had no idea what was
being done. They didn't understand what they were paying for and
subsequently thought that I was unnecessary. Most small businesses don't
care or understand what a title tag, meta description, an exact
match, a naked URL, duplicate content, etc is. So telling them you
changed/created these in a report without actually showing them
physical pictures is pointless.
We started creating custom reports with tons of arrows
and screenshots explaining the work that we were doing. We starting
giving them a complete list of the links and citations we were
building. We stopped sending over a raw list of traffic counts and
started providing analysis of the traffic that websites were
getting, and our clients stopped complaining that they didn't know what
we were doing. Clear communication is what the business of service is
all about.
I was doing everything myself. Everything. Then, I tried to have some people on
oDesk
help me. My wife even did some of the citation work. The only
problem was all the information was in my head. I had very little of the
processes and information organized, and I didn't have time to
focus on organization when I had so much client work, sales, and
bookkeeping to do. That is what
The E-myth is about. It talks
about the difference between being a technician and being a business
owner. It talks about the need to build your business like a franchise
with training manuals, easy to follow processes, and the need to not
burn yourself or your first few employees out.
When I read this book, I changed my business, and I have
never looked back. We were able to start hiring people locally instead
of having contractors on oDesk, and we centralized information and
grew. While we aren't perfect at systems and delegation, we could have
never grown without improvement in those areas. It's still the case.
Lesson 8: Raise your prices; raise your minimums
When I was the only employee in my company, doing
everything myself, I could still make good margins and be the lowest
price around. I took clients at $200-$500 per month, built some
websites, and put tons of hours in, and as long as I could get to where I
had $40-50k per year in revenue, I had a decent wage for Burley.
That was my first goal. I could be flexible with what I made and could
literally have no cost other than a couple of tools and my personal
time. Employees, though, cost more than time. Employees cost money. And
regardless of how much money you bring in, an employee's wage is
constant. If I wanted employees that were good, there way no way I could
maintain my pricing and minimums, providing the level of service
that was needed. We had to raise prices. We changed our minimum to
$1,500 and determined that we would do work for no less than $100 per
hour. The types of clients got better, and we had enough revenue to
bring in talented people who increased the quality of our work. I know
that many SEO firms/companies can charge a lot more than $100 per hour,
and we do as well, depending on the type of project—but for the average
small/medium business this is a price that they can afford and you can
do good work for.
Lesson 9: Learn when to pass on bad clients
When I was hungry I took whatever client walked through
the door. I took abuse. Emails that called me names, clients who would
not listen to my advice and would then blame me when things went wrong.
Clients that paid three or four months late but would complain when I
didn't answer my phone on the first ring.
I kept them because I felt like I had to have the
revenue. What I didn't realize is that if I had taken the time I was
putting into their project and put it elsewhere, I could have
replaced the revenue plus a lot more and had a much better quality of
life.
If you are not happy, then no amount of money will make
up for it, so fire your bad clients, pass on the red flags, and figure
something else out. Remember Lesson 1.
Retain
Lesson 10: Be trustworthy
The fastest way to lose clients and employees is to lie
to them. If you want both to stick with you through thick and thin, then
there has to be 100% trust. I personally think that the more
transparent you can be all around the more you will be trusted.
One of our core values at Nifty is to be "willingly
naked." Not literally, but figuratively. We have to be willing to share
what we learn, take feedback, tell our clients the brutal truth even
if we know they don't want to hear it. But you have to be willing to
take feedback yourself.
Lesson 11: Reward your team
I am not going to pretend to be good at this. I know I
should say "thank you" about a thousand times more than I do. Instead, I
find myself more apt to criticize when things go poorly. It's
something I am hoping to constantly get better at. The team at Nifty is
amazing and they take a ton of stress, responsibility, and problems
on themselves and do an awesome job.
Here's a few things that I have done at times:
- Thank-you gift cards
- Revenue sharing
- Company lunches
- Pop-Tarts (long story)
- Big Christmas parties
- The best office in Burley, Idaho (complete with a moose, a monster, bricks, and staked firewood)
Lesson 12: Auto-renew your contracts
When it comes to smaller businesses, I have found that
month-to-month contracts that auto-renew and are paid by automatic
credit card last longer than contracts that are 3, 6, or 12 months
with renegotiations required. Bottom line, people don't like re-signing
up for a committed amount of time. Especially small business owners
who believe the word "contract" is a cuss word.
Change
Lesson 13: Never stop learning new things
There are many search companies that fall behind. It's
because they don't change. They keep blasting away at the same spammy
links, the same old school designs, and the same tactics from 5-10
years ago, and they wonder why a massive amount of their client
portfolio drops in rankings.
I personally start every morning by reading blogs, and I
have for years. The staff spends the first part of every day doing the
same thing, and we pass around articles that make an impression. It
keeps us constantly thinking about innovation and learning from our
great community. Another way to keep up is to constantly pitch to speak
at conferences. You have deadlines around which you can build tests and
case studies, and you will do everything you possibly can to be up on
the latest news in the industry because you never know what questions
the attendees might ask you.
Lesson 14: Request feedback
The best way to find issues in your organization is to
request feedback from your staff and clients. The other day, we had a
client that paused his account. This is usually a soft way to end the
relationship. But, upon asking for his feedback, he said he loved
working with his project manager and the work we had done, saying he
would be back on track in 2 months. Then he mentioned he was hoping for
faster results on a side project we were doing for him. Whose fault
was it that he felt that way? It was ours. I took the opportunity to
clear up the miscommunication and he was very grateful for it. If we
hadn't asked for the feedback, we might not have ever heard from him
again and he definitely would have had the issue on his mind.
Lesson 15: Be pleased, but never satisfied
Nobody is perfect. Which means there is always room for
improvement. There is always more than can be done, and there is always a
better way. The day you stop growing and say that "it's good
enough" is the day that a competitor is going to come in and do more
that you are willing to.
We have redone our proposal process multiple times. We
haven't ever been bad at it, but every time we go back to the drawing
boards there is something more that we find that helps to bring in
better clients. Right now we are testing out a live walk-through of the
proposal, as compared to just sending over a PDF and asking for
questions.
SAVE
Lesson 16: Content isn't king, cash is
If you want to run a successful business of any type, then
ensure that you aren't running cash-poor. I have followed
Dave Ramsey's
personal financial guidelines for my business and find that it's very
conservative. While it might limit the speed at which we grow, it
eliminates a massive amount of risk.
Dave recommends having a personal emergency fund (and in this case
business fund) of 3-6 months of expenses on hand at all times. That
means that if you are going to pay yourself (your only start-up
expense) $3,000 per month, then you should have between $9,000-$18,000
in cash before starting up. At $65,000 per month of expenses, you
should have between $195,000-$390,000 in reserves. That's a lot of cash
on hand for a small business, but if clients unexpectedly drop, or
major industry changes necessitate a completely new model, you will have
the cash to make good decisions and not desperate ones. I started out
around the six-month reserve when I was smaller, and as time has gone by
and we have a more diversified revenue stream, I am comfortable between
3-4 months of cash on hand.
Lesson 17: Pay yourself modestly, and get out of personal debt
I pay myself $4,000 per month. The rest goes to growing
the business, savings, and other ventures. Now, you need to realize that
I live in Burley, Idaho, and it's literally hard to spend money
here. I could pay myself $2,000 if it wasn't for Amazon Prime. But, at a
very young age, my wife and I decided that we would have no
personal debt and worked
really hard to pay off our house and buy cars with cash.
I know many financial experts will tell you that leveraging
your home is the best financing you have but let me tell you that the
freedom of owning your house outright means that you can make better
business decisions over the course of your life. You wont have the
"what if I lose my family's home" question circling around in the back
of your mind and you can actually take bigger risks, and never make
business financial decisions based off of your personal financial needs.
Lesson 18: Don't sign up for every Internet marketing tool under the sun
Tool subscriptions are reoccurring costs. It's very easy
to spend thousands of dollars a month on different tools you don't have
the cash to do that when you start up. When I first started, I only used
Raven Tools, but quickly added a list of 10 to 15 tools like
Moz.
Occasionally, we have to go through the list of tools and find out what
we are actually using and get rid of the rest. I'm not going to
pretend there is one tool to rule them all, because everyone has very
different needs. The key is to quickly identify which tools work for
you and which don't, and to stop paying monthly for the ones that
don't.
Lesson 19: Diversify
If you get to where you own a successful guest-blogging
company, or a successful SEO company, or a successful content-marketing
company, or whatever niche you decide to work in, then realize the
problem with a niche is that you are putting all of your eggs in one
basket. If that basket disappears, you're screwed.
Try going after more than one niche. We opened a division
focused on SEO and website development for lawyers called
NiftyLaw.com. I also owned a
newspaper in my home town, and am working on some new projects so that I am not 100% reliant on Internet marketing revenue.
Lesson 20: Find a few things to help save yourself
Owning a business is hard work. It's mentally draining,
and it's very hard to shut down your mind after constantly thinking.
There will be times where you need to save yourself from burning
out, so ensure that you have hobbies that can get your mind completely
off of work. I golf, mountain bike, and travel with my family. I
also don't do any work on Sundays at all.
Overall
I have loved starting an Internet marketing company. It's been hard; I'm going gray and I'm only 29.
I know that you might not agree with certain things I
think are important, and that's fine. The best part about business is
that it's a "choose your own adventure" storybook with no "right"
answers.
Please add your own questions and advice in the comments.
I hope that this is a post that can have more insight in the comments
than the article itself, and I look forward to learning from all of
you!
Triggered
emails can be a great way to deliver the right content at the right
time to the right people. A sincere thank you, a courteous confirmation,
or a concerned abandoned cart message that automatically follows a
specific behavior someone took on your website can be the difference between a very happy customer and losing a contact altogether.
July 10, 2014 at 6:00 AM
I’m a huge proponent of professional listening as part of a business
communication strategy. Lots of people will sell you ways to speak.
They’ll give you lots of ways to get your message all over the place.
Me? I’m passionate about listening as much as I am speaking. You know:
two ears, one mouth, that stuff. 
Imagine
how quickly your life would improve if you opened 11 income streams
through your blogging efforts? If you are feeling pinched – or outright
disgusted – by your financial situation it is time for a change. You
know my story. I have fleshed it out. Broke joke to prospering online
business entrepreneur. Struggling, miserable, fired security officer to
swashbuckling, island-hopping, tiger-taming world traveler. I did it.
You can do it too.
To make us both feel better, please observe me, chilling by Monkey Temple in Kathmandu, with my Joe Cool shades. Thank You.
