Who SageRock Is Today

Today, October 2010, has given me the perspective of time.

I have now lived through two recessions in this business.

We virtually started our company in a recession.

We started at the end of 1999. And then that dot com bubble burst around 2000-2001.

And of course we had that pesky Great Recession of 2009 and we’re still feeling the effects of that.

Each recession teaches me something significant.

As you might expect with a “Great” recession, the lessons this time around have probably been most extreme.

Looking back at the first decade of running my company I believe I was running more of a social experiment than a company.

My primary goal for most of that time was to create a great place to work.

My belief was that if I created the greatest place to work then great work would naturally follow.

I should say that I have had incredibly great employees over the years. I’ve had very dedicated hard working people.

But I also found that my primary focus of creating a great place to work also, at times, created a place of entitlement.

Have you ever been on vacation (maybe a cruise) where there is endless, great food day in and day out? Eventually you’re like, “What are you going to have to eat tonight, honey? Oh I don’t know. I guess the lobster tail.”

Normally lobster tail would be the most amazing thing. But if you can get it every single meal for a week, it loses its luster.

I think that might have happened at SageRock.

I’m not saying I was running some sort of panacea. But I did try to make it as great as I possibly could, with no connection to performance.

Not only did it cause some complacency, I think it also caused some resentment in the harder workers.

I’ve changed my focus today. Today I’m running a company. In fact, I’m running a company based in the world economy of the 21st century business world.

We are all about experimentation. We are all about efficiency models to lower our costs and enable us to lower our fees.

We are all about creating a world-class Internet marketing company that is focused on generating traffic and increasing conversions.

We have also changed our hiring strategies.

We used to solely hire entry level people and train them. Training them on the Internet marketing skills was not particularly difficult. But training them on agency protocols and customer-focused communication was often incredibly difficult.

We are carefully hiring experienced agency professionals.

At this point in the game we would rather slow our growth because we can’t find the ideal person than just hire anyone and hope they work out.

We want to be a better Internet marketing solution. We have a clear understanding of what that looks like. It includes things like:

• Constant learning and experimentation in this lightening fast industry.
• Providing aggressive communication and resources for our clients.
• Continually honing our skills to be the most effective Internet marketers in the industry.
• Being industry leaders through being speakers, authors at leading resource magazines and Web sites.

We just want to be better than the other Internet marketing agencies.

We just want to be better.

Oh. And we still definitely want to be a great place to work. That hasn’t stopped. We just want to be a great place to work for great people.

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