Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog

I Feel Lucky and have big Dreams, and we’re up to 40 now.

Ok, I’m at the office after midnight again, but I’m taking a break and posting a nostalgic "I’m feeling lucky rant" – hope ya enjoy my happy rant. …

At times like these (when I’m at the office late at night working alone – only time I can get things like non-emergencies and emails done) I sit here in amazement… I feel lucky…I do. We’ve grown to 40 employees working in house here (not to mention the writers, and other outside projected people we help feed). Yea 40 in house here now…wow!

Jim steps into his time machine… I can remember it was over 9 years ago (Feb 1999) I got online for the first time. (I’d been traveling the year before.) Two weeks after getting online, I bought the domain webuildpages.com – two weeks later, I had the first version of webuildpages.com online. Two weeks later than that, I had my first web design client from 1000 miles away who had found webuildpages.com via a search engine. (AltaVista, searching "Build Web Pages.")

In 2001 and 2002, I went to work for a couple of local web design firms as their first "Internet Marketing Specialist."

In August of 2002 I attended my first SEO conference, and met Matt Cutts, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and many of my "SEO Heroes".
In September of 2002, Aimster/Madster had the same fate as Napster and I was out of a job.

I remember thinking, "Do I want to work for a web design company again? NO….SEO has to be #1, no more designers, programmers, managers, clients to stand in the way of SEO. I felt that Rule #1 should be SEO, and everything else should fall around or behind that.

So in September of 2002, I decided to see what I could do with We Build Pages on my own. My chosen phrase was "Internet Marketing." A few months later in Dec 2002, WeBuildPages.com went to #4 in both Google and Yahoo for the phrase "internet marketing." That same month, I hired my first person to help me out.

I don’t think I ever envisioned growing to the size of 40 back then…or even as of a few years ago….but grow we have….and I like it.

In the last few years alone, we’ve gone from 12 employees at the start of 2007 to 25 at the start of 2008, to 40 as of July of 2008, and there’s a lot more I want to do….I’ve got big dreams.

I’ll tell you, it’s a whole different business at 25 than it was at 12. And growing from 25 to 40 so far this year brings its own little problems, as well is it opens up many, many opportunities.

When you grow, changes are going to happen…and not all changes are always going to work as you thought; mistakes help us find what doesn’t work 😉 

But you learn, and you grow, and you get better….

The We Build Pages team members have been troopers through our growth and changes, mistakes and regrets, yea, I’ve made a few (but yet again, too few to metion), but I feel that everyone on my/our team knows that we’re taking ALL the right steps to make our company the best we can. I feel really good, not only for what we have, but for where we’re going.

The future….well….I can say that I have lots of dreams….Some of those dreams, unfortunately, I can’t publish here….But I can say that we’re exploring all different types of dreams, and so many look so good….But in any event, I’m completely thrilled with where I am and with what I’ve got, and with what we’re doing, as well as where we may be going.

I’ve got lots of dreams, and I don’t mind exploring dreams. We explore amazing business dreams here all the time…there are a few dreams we’re exploring right now even…who knows…. The lucky thing is, is where I’m at I often feel like it’s a dream. I feel so thankful that I love what I do, through good times and in the changes, I love it. I truly do.

I’ve been lucky, it’s been a dream come true since the start, the dreams just keep getting bigger with time.

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3 Responses

  1. “When you grow, changes are going to happen…and not all changes are always going to work as you thought;”

    That’s for damn sure that shit can stress you out. BIG TIME, but I guess that’s what makes anyone good at what they do well speaking they can stick with it.

    The thing is everything in business or life in general might not work the way you planned, but if you work at it hard enough it starts to plug in one way or another then you start to see other things that are working excellent.

    So in other words it’s all out there, it’s just a matter or not if someone can take advantage of it and stay with it. That’s what I think anyways.

  2. Sweet! It’s amazing to me that our careers with internet marketing didn’t exist until just a few years ago. Who would have thought? You never know where life is going to take you.

    Keep up the good work Jim. You can’t achieve that kind of success without providing a good value.

    The harder you work, the “Luckier” you get.

  3. Don’t get too big now, you don’t need to paint a bullseye on your back 😉 Just stay under the radar whatever you do! 🙂

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