Monday, December 17th 2012 was a crappy day for us, but I didn’t know it. Two days later, I realized our signups were down, traffic was down, our page rank tanked, we had basically vanished off the face of Google. On Thursday morning, I met with my web team and told them something was seriously off. We talked about it and reached the consensus that it was close to Christmas and that probably had something to do with it. But the suddenness of our drop kept nagging at me, enough so that on Saturday I did something I’d never done before or since: I emailed my lead marketing person on his personal email (I don’t allow employees to work on the weekends—personal time is important). Although I don’t remember what the email said, my level of concern was obvious to him since I was sending him emails steeped in fear and paranoia over the weekend. We tried to work on some things over the weekend, but we were off Monday and Tuesday (Christmas Eve and Christmas Day), and although he came in Wednesday ready to do everything he could, it was already too late. By Thursday morning our Google rankings had returned, as did all our signups and web traffic.
Before the holidays that year, we had been on a serious Google Run. We were outranking all competitors on all keywords, signups were flowing in, we had too much new business to handle. Basically, we had been killing it. But that Christmas with my wife’s family was extremely stressful. For like 6 months afterward, my wife thought I didn’t like her family because I was so distant (stressed). Over the course of the weekend and Christmas, I was starting to run in my head what things looked like for the future.
How many people will I have to lay off?
Who will I lay off?
Will I be forced to work out of a coffee house with a cell phone and laptop? How would that work if I’m on an important call? Do I go to the garage to make sure the call sounds professional? All kinds of crazy thoughts…
When you’re on a serious “Google run,” life is great. You can easily and quickly expand beyond your normal means. You can afford a bigger office, more equipment, and you start hiring more people than you should. You’re not thinking about saving away for a rainy day… You’re thinking about how the heck to handle all this new business you’re dealing with. All of a sudden $1300 hardware to block spam doesn’t even sound expensive. But the day after Christmas, after coming back to work with my employees and having a crazy day with my web team, I had resigned myself to thinking I could make it two to three months without firing people. Then I’d have to decide if I took out loans or if I just needed to accept being a smaller company. Quite a crappy thing to come to terms with the day after Christmas.
Then Thursday morning came and…Boom! Viola! We’re back! And by Monday the next week our rankings were higher than they had ever been! Why? We had no clue. But we moved on to more cool things, not digging into why we disappeared for 10 days.
Looking back in hindsight, I think the week before Christmas of 2012, Google was testing one of their most significant algorithm updates. If we were thinking more, we would have analyzed what stayed up, what changed, what Google still liked and re-focused the pages that tanked to be more like the ones that didn’t. We would have been digging like crazy to figure out what happened. But we didn’t. They launched that update for real, May 9th, 2013… and we were done for. Destroyed… or were we? I had learned a big lesson the week before Christmas of 2012 and you didn’t need to be a big-time CEO to figure it out:
I was freaking nuts if I thought I was going to build a great business and count on Google to help.
I realized something dramatic had to change in our business structure. After digging into our numbers I realized that Google was basically accounting for about 80% of our revenue. Sometimes more! OUCH! So I frantically spent as many hours as I could thinking up what I could sell that wouldn’t be so Google-reliant. I started working on creating relationships with people that I thought could “Google-proof” my business. This was a painful transition… but what I realized was I had something none of my competitors had. I had logistics. I could be the grunt man that they desperately needed. I was faster than anyone and I had better offices than any of my competitors on a Nation-wide basis. So like any smart business person attempting to go wholesale, I put my ego on the shelf and whored out my prices to become a solution to my competition.
How did it work out? When May 9th happened, it was August before we realized we had lost 45% of our website traffic from Google. So we were so busy working in a new direction, that it took us 3 months to realize we had taken a massive Google Hit. I was too focused on providing something to all the people I considered competitors before. This was hard. We had to re-code a lot of things to provide something better for our competitors to use. We had to re-think a lot of things: pricing, how we operate, we developed a stress-free way for our competitors to cancel services with us. We had to now start caring about our competitors, asking questions, like how can we make their business better and more efficient? We took months coding solutions for people I thought were competitors before so that I could make their businesses run better. It all needed a lot of work, let alone getting in front of people to tell them what I could do for them. It wasn’t just as simple as dropping my price. I needed to provide something that could solve a problem for them.
The anniversary of our May 2013 Google destruction was a few months ago… Google now accounts for 9% of our revenue. It has been slowly going down from, let’s be honest, about 85% of our revenue to current-day single digits. Today, the numbers are reversed. We’re like 80% wholesale, 10% current client referrals, and roughly 10% new clients from Google and other websites. Do we still suck in Google? Yes. Absolutely. Many of our ideas online have been copied and re-done in better, more organized ways and we are getting crushed… We are pathetic on Google. Would our business be stronger if we were still rocking Google? Yes. Would I love to rank well in Google? Absolutely. But I don’t and can’t think about it as much as I did 2 years ago. We’ve got new plans and what we’re going to launch this year has been a long hard couple years in the making, but it’s kind of the climax by way of a new philosophy we took up December 2012. We will now be providing solutions to take the wholesale side of our business to levels not even thought of yet by our competitors. What a weird thing to think about right? How can I make my competitors business awesome… and provide something for them before they even know they need or want it.
So what’s the take-away?
We as business people can’t count on a company like Google for our business. I decided to sell to my competition to diversify where our revenue came from. It’s the same story if you’re relying too heavily on anything like leads from one particular website, yellow pages, an association, a wholesaler or distributer, PPC ads, or telemarketing lead gen. I realized Christmas of 2012 that I couldn’t with a sane mind ask my employees to come dedicate their work week to me if I was providing something so fragile. I was asking them to hope it might work out. So our Google rankings have steadily sucked worse and worse over the last year and a half… but guess what? We’re hiring more than we’ve ever hired. We’re bigger and better at what we do than we have ever been. Why? We started working on building our relationships and taking care of clients instead of ranking on Google.
Anyone can think through their strengths and diversify how they get business. Maybe you have a strength connecting with plumbers, maybe it’s CPA’s, maybe it’s lawyers, maybe it’s direct mail, maybe you eat up those networking groups and that’s your baby. We all can’t sit back and rely on one source to get business from.
Google has always said not to count on them completely. So Google destroyed my business for 10 days. In those 10 days, I lost a lot of money. I’ve always wondered why the biggest registered agent in our Industry had 50-60% of the market share and had no web presence. The two biggest registered agents control 80% of the market share and they can’t be getting very many new clients online. You can barely find them even if you just Google their corporate names! Other competitors that obviously have armies dedicated to marketing online, according to state records, don’t even have 1/10th the new clients that the two biggest registered agents get. So, 1.5 years later, it’s finally starting to make more sense. Relationships (you know those things we focused on in business 15 years ago before the Internet?) are where it’s at… not Google. Sure Google should be a great part of your business plan, but it should only be a small part. I recently had the opportunity to meet another really smart veteran business owner, who at first impression would appear out of touch with the current market… but this guy is destroying his competition. Why? He has more relationships than anyone else in his industry. He was smarter than everyone else in his niche many years ago, and then he just plain worked it… taking care of people day in and day out. I love seeing old school business guys kicking butt the way it worked before there was internet and websites.
So thank you Google for destroying my business for 10 days in December 2012. Maybe you’ll love us again someday. Maybe we’ll have another “Google run”. I mean I sure hope so! It’s a blast when it happens. But you taught me to keep on doing it the real way. Maybe we’ll get back up to 20% of our revenue from Google, that would be a good healthy number, but it will never be 80-85% again.