I went up to Eric Enge’s (@stonetemple) office in Boston to talk to the former US Search Personality of the Year, and prolific writer, author, research and speaker in our industry. He started his firm, Stone Temple Consulting in 1997 as a business development shop, and told us how his business development firm transitioned into an SEO firm in early 2000s.
I then asked him what it was like to sell his company, his baby, to another company - Perficient Digital. He said he is good with life changes, especially when it is inevitable and the right thing to do. In fact, his wife co-owns the company with him - so it really is their baby. I then asked the question about how it is to work with your spouse. His wife made everything work, the true COO type.
Back on to the sale, he said the first time he told the employees about the sale the first reaction was shock. He had to keep this very quiet and hidden from the employees and his personality of transparency made that hard, but he had no choice.
We then talked about Eric’s passion on machine learning and maybe that would be the next thing to work on, maybe not. His passion for the SEO community and how much he has given to the community. I asked him, was there an ROI with all those contributions and he said there was. He then talked about the other benefits outside of ROI for contributing so much.
This is part one - this is more about running a business, being part of the community and the challenges and accomplishments over the years. Part two, we get more into core SEO topics, so stay tuned...
Here is the video:
You can subscribe to our YouTube channel by clicking here so you don't miss the next vlog where I interviews. I do have a nice lineup of interviews scheduled with SEOs and SEMS, many of which you don't want to miss - and I promise to continue to make these vlogs better over time. If you want to be interviewed, please fill out this form with your details.
Forum discussion at YouTube.
