At least. Which is a pretty good piece of pocket money. I suspect even Warren Buffet would slow down to pick that up.

I attribute this to SEO because even thought it was a change in business process coupled with good SEO that made it happen it could not have happened without SEO.

Fair warning to people looking for "advanced" techniques - they ain't here. But what I'm going to talk about is a LOT more valuable than a trick that may or may not work with Google next week or next year.

Best Ever YouMoz Article

Let's look at the real money quote that J Kelly Garrett put in his amazingly excellent SEO article at YouMoz. This piece of advice will serve you while you climb up the value chain from a specialist to a trusted business advisor:

I took the pile [of papers, documentation, etc], pushed it aside, and asked him [the business owner] to tell me about himself. This is a common technique of mine, whether it is a small business owner, or the Chairman of the Board for Burlington Northern Railroad.

He wasn't asking to hear about the guy's soccer team, he wanted to get the gestalt around the company. What is important about the environment, goals, challenges, employees, culture, customers, etc, etc, etc.

It's Not About the Technology

Really, it's not. Not even in SEO. I wasn't about the technology in OO programming. It wasn't about the technology in robotics. It wasn't about the technology during the dang moon shots either.

It's about how the technology serves the business and makes it more successful. Sometimes 'success' means one or more of:

• Improved profit
• Increased revenue
• Decreased risk
• Stronger resilience
• Faster new product introduction
• and on and on...

But if the technology isn't in service to the goals of the business then it will eventually fail.

The $2M Piece of Advice

I know exactly when I finally understood this. No kidding.

I left one job as a consultant making $55/hour doing NeXTStep programming (hey, that was LOT of money back then) and got another one making $75/hour. The had two slots to fill - lead programmer ($50/hour) and technology business advocate ($75/hour).

For some reason, don't know why, during the interview I was homing in on the business objectives of the billing audit system they were building. I kept asking about change management (people, not source!), about deployment, about disruption, etc, etc.

Next thing I knew I was walking about into the freezing flipping cold in Chicago holding onto a 50% raise. Bubba, you don't get too many of those.

If you work that out - 48 weeks a year, 40 hours a week, 40 work years in a lifetime - you find out that that change in focus gets you a $1,920,000 raise.

Actually, it's even more than that because you keep the advantage while you march up the food chain.

Back to The SEO Example

What really struck me about Garrett's example was that the business took the fairly traditional and predictable approach of getting some SEO guys to graft web and SEO onto a traditional "ring and pitch" business.

The SEO guys put together a campaign that generates 2,500 leads and it kills the guy because:

• ROI goes from "signup" to 2 years.
  
• "He is looking at ROIs that should apply to heavy machinery and commercial aircraft."
• Growth rate drops from 19% to 3% because of process issues:
• "growth rate has plummeted from 19% per year to 3% per year because he is in the office answering the phone all the time with close rates of 12% [down from 97%]"
  

Actually, there were a lot of issues, but those are the two killers. Look at what happened - his profits got pushed out a year from acquisition AND instead of looking at an yearly "takehome" increase of $67,032 he was seeing an increase of $10,584. That is an opportunity cost of over $55K!

You can go broke quickly making money that way.

Do the math

I'm just going to quote Garrett's point in toto because it sums up the whole problem so neatly:

SEO Firm Declares “Success.” The PPC campaign is bringing in over 2500 hits per month. Closing the sales is not really their job. They just need to work with the business owner to further tweak everything to bring in more hits. “Obviously” the copywriting needs work to further capture the ones that do get there, or there is something wrong with the business, or whatever...but we are getting people to the site. Just wait till the site starts to rank higher with the search engines!

Remember, the owner is now going broke pretty quickly, has sunk a fair bit of capital into the new venture AND is probably pretty much apoplectic. In fact, if he's like any dial-and-smile salesguy I know, physical and financial threats are probably in the offing.

What's the Solution?

I won't repeat the meat of the article but basically Garrett becomes and advisor and helps the owner re-engineer his business so that he goes back to ROI on close. But most importantly the business growth goes back up to the previous 19% and then all the way up to 28%.

So, back to the math - previous to the first campaign the owner was looking at a yearly "raise" of $67K based on growth. The slap-on-SEO campaign took him down to a $10K raise. The SEO+BPR campaign took him to a $98K yearly raise. Thus the title of this post because the SEO catalyzed a $31,752 additional raise.

I'd like to read a lot more articles like this, and I hope he keeps writing.

I enjoyed Don's article on firefighting and it reminded me of something so true we forget it all the time: be careful what you ask for. Or, put differently, people will do what they're incented to do.

Y2K

Back in the days when Cobol breathing dinosaurs roamed the earth there was this problem we were trying to fix and verify all the issues. I had a fat juicy consulting contract to ensure that not only was everything inside a company remediated but that they had failover plans.

One day I was in a plant and I was going through their operations manuals when the plant manager bragged that they'd thought of everything, written it down (early ISO-itis, clearly) and that there was nothing I or an "act of god" could do to shut down the plant.

As I was gazing at this pompous combed over windbag I could see the emergency cutoff swtich for the computer room power. So I walked over, opened the cover, and pushed it.

The entire plant shut down, idling 200+ workers for hours. But in all our planning we'd never thought to test that particular item. I went to eight more factories to test their failover - by the second one they'd all tested and it worked.

I got in exactly no trouble whatsoever because I was being paid to find problems that'd been over looked.

Sales

Sales people may fail to make sales no matter how you try to pay them, but they'll always focus on the shortest line between them and a paycheck.

You want to pay a guy more on new customers? Perpare to lose sales nto your install base.

Pay them to have face-to-face meetings? Watch out for those expense reports because your guys will stack up so-called qualified prospects from morning until night.

You want deals closed? Be sure to specify margin.

So when you tell a sales guy he'll get paid for X, make sure you really want X because you'll get a lot of it.