I wanted to give a little history of optimise-u so people understand me a bit better – I am always here to help a small business, contact me using this form and ask for help – advice is free.
I do a lot of free work and place my blogs where they can do… help both to build traffic and reputation but because also I believe small businesses are the way [forward]. Humans don’t need large corporations so I try to help particularly local cafes so that they can compete with starbucks and actually pay tax[for example].
David Arnold (optimise-u)
Optimise-u was my brainchild very early on working at a large marketing firm which at the time was $billions in debt. Morale was low at times and it felt like certain parts of senior management were looking down on us.
They were the bosses who had driven this company into the ground by being to slow to change and thinking they were to large to fall (maybe they still are).
That’s not to say it was a caustic workplace. I made a lot of friends and my managers were all very people centred, nice and good at their work.
I realised something. We had a direct sales team for each region of the UK with their flashy cars, and iphones.
We had telesales, again done on a regional and national level. All these regions had multiple managers, and a senior manager.
Customer services. Complaints for when things go wrong. Tech teams for when things go wrong. Collections for when people don’t pay, each with a four or five tiered management structure.
Let’s say this company had around 3,000 employees and probably 300 managers, 30 senior managers etc. of these 2000 were probably sales staff working for their commision.
It was a huge company, and that made giving your clients the best possible service very hard work.
When things went wrong sales blamed customer service, while customer service blamed tech and tech blamed sales. People who were paying thousands per month were getting passed in a circle and eventually ending up, livid, back at square one.
And I realised that when a company gets past a point; whether it is in debt or size or both, squeezing profit becomes more important than giving good service.
If you are working in a team in a marketing company you need to know your roles and you may need one manager, but you don’t need four.
Service is everything. Make promises and ideally over deliver (we were always warned about making promises so that was one thing I wanted to do differently with my own company).
I also learned the importance of ownership. If you are dealing with a client – that’s your client. Don’t palm them off on anybody else.
Most importantly I learned that if a company of ~3,000 could charge thousands to give a bad service I could charge hundreds and make damn sure I learned from their mistakes.
I may be slightly bitter because I made suggestions based on my training, which was stamped into the floor by senior management (I emailed the wrong senior manager and was chastised) before the idea was implemented 2 years later.
No credit was given but I think they just finally caught up with the times rather than steal my ideas – let people choose their own pay per click keywords with our guidance. Not rocket science.
But they looked after me. I had a medical issue that resulted in a lot of time off and they supported me. They also gave me better training than they could afford, so eternal thanks for that.
So a few lessons:
- As a business you need to put service before profit to get either.
- Advertising has to generate revenue otherwise it’s a burden.
- A manager should know their staff.
- Listen to your most junior member of staff – they have the freshest ideas.
- In business loyalty is everything – it means going the extra mile.
- No company needs a 5 layer management system. The better the managers the less you need of them.
- Never grow so big you lose site of the customers. Literally managers should be able to see employee customer interaction
So on 23.12.2014 (I think) Optimise-U in this form was born. Since that time I have done a lot of work with charities and if you are a charity please contact me (form below) and I will give you a free consultation.
SEO is about a lot more than building a few links. It needs to be well managed ideally by one person, so I take on limited numbers of clients and work long hours. But this is my passion – I like helping a small business thrive, taking customers from tescos and the like.
A large part of what I do is to teach my clients so that they don’t need my help forever and I can help other people. My blog aims to give easy to implement advice most of the time. I have now done several case studies – go check out the homepage and see what’s fresh.
More importantly I try and find out how or why things work well. How have we gained out knowledge, did a guru just proclaim it?
These sort of studies aren’t quite so easy to read but are interesting to the wider SEO community. Over time as answers are found to questions we have my goal is to simplify this information into actionable advice for increasing traffic.
My phone number isn’t visible because I can’t deal with an influx of clients. Please use the contact form below if you’d like to get in contact. Advice is free, beyond that all packages are bespoke.
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