I have this policy of not covering topics here if (1) there are not communities talking about it in forum like settings and (2) if that community is not open, I won't talk about it. I only cover public threads and content that is available to anyone to see.
Over the pass few weeks, I was invited into a private Facebook community talking about What Happened to BlueGlass - that is the title of the Facebook group. That group was set to "open" status a few days ago by former BlueGlass executive, Greg Boser.
To make a long story short, it seems like BlueGlass ran into some serious financial debt and cannot easily dig themselves out of it. Some history is that BlueGlass was formed by several well-known SEO companies and personalities in the industry. It was a merger of these "giant" names in the SEO community to form the ultimate SEO company.
BlueGlass was/is very respected in the industry for their SEO services and for the conference they run throughout the year. So the news that BlueGlass shut their offices and cannot meet their financial obligations was shocking.
Chris Winfield, one of the founders and the CMO, wrote publicly some thoughts on the situation but has been very quiet for the most part. Patrick C. Price, the managing director of BlueGlass EU, posted a video on YouTube with some more details. But the most vocal person has been Greg Boser, former President of BlueGlass, in the Facebook thread.
He posted int he past twenty-four hours the latest news for all to see:
I mentioned earlier that my requests for someone at BG to initiate the legal proceedings (that a majority of voting shareholders had agreed needed to be done) were met with a response of "we're working on a plan".Tonight I received Kevin Gibbons plan. Or, I should say I received his demands. The short version is Kevin has demanded that we turn over control of BG to him for a period of 3 months so he can do due diligence and try to save the company from bankruptcy. And if we don't comply, he is going to sue us.
He also demanded that I make him admin of this group so he could moderate (ie prevent anyone from posting anything negative) the comments.
I am not going to comply with any of his demands. Instead, I am going to focus on initiating legal action to force the proper closure of the company.
My final advice to all of you is to call your credit card companies and initiate charge backs on the tickets you purchased. The chances of any conference happening in 3 weeks given the can of legal #$$ Kevin has just opened is as about as close to zero as you can get.
Now, what will happen with BlueGlass is still undetermined.
There are a lot of employees out of a job, a lot of clients without SEO work and lost money on that, and there is a conference with paid attendees that is coming up in a a few weeks without a conference.
I hope things can be mended but it seems pretty bad.
I am sure the executive team is going through a lot now and it cannot be easy. But knowing them, I am confident they will learn from this and only grow stronger.
Forum discussion at Facebook.
Update: Patrick from BlueGlass EMEA and UK asked me to clarify, this financial issue only impacts BlueGlass USA not BlueGlass EMEA and UK.
