I first delved in SEO in 2010. At that time, I had just been hired to be a part of the marketing team at a startup called Nerds On Call. The company had a strong offline presence at the time but had no search strategy. Along with my (now) close friend and former business partner, Aaron Patterson, we brought Nerds On Call into the 21st century. From 2010-2011 Nerds On Call went from a 2MM/year company to a 4/MM a year company and one of the key drivers to that grow was the work we did with SEO. In 2011 I won a competition that Distilled ran for the best "startup SEO strategy" and attended my first Search Love conference gratis as a result.
In 2012 I left Nerds On Call to venture out on my own. From that time, I started and stopped a few small consulting and creative companies. The first was BrewSEO and the second, Noble Creative. They were each a critical milestone in my inbound marketing career. From those companies I learned a lot about marketing and I was able to work with amazing companies and clients, most notably the Billionaire entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner, Mark Cuban.
Now a-days I split my time between a small record label that is changing the music industry (more about that later) and a small farm that my family and I are learning how to take care of. I live in a tension between the high-tech world of marketing, analytics, software etc... and the quite slow-paced 3 acre orchard/farm that I go home to every night. It's the best of both worlds.
Now, a little more about Bethel Music. This small record label in the middle of nowhere (google Redding, CA) is changing the music world. In any normal week an exec from one of the major labels will call us and ask us how we are doing what we do, mainly because we are doing things completely differently than everyone else. They don't understand how a small christian music label can chart as the #2 album across all of iTunes or how we manage all of our tours, publishing, management and distribution in-house. Usually, all of those things are run by separate competing companies. Coincidentally, we are growing faster, and are more profitable than anyone thought possible. In an industry that usually struggles just to stay afloat, Bethel Music is thriving. It is fun being a part of something revolutionary.
