I met up at one of Lance Bachmann's businesses, 1SEO Digital Agency, where we chatted about marketing and running a business. Lance started doing digital marketing over 20 years, and while he owns five other companies, his most favorite thing is marketing. Lance has purchased other businesses in the past and has sold some businesses but said he would never sell 1SEO Digital Agency.
We then spoke about his history in marketing, from his days working at YellowPages.com as the VP. Back then, the Yellow Pages online were insane and insane traffic. The early days of local search were super fun and we went back in time talking about these online yellow pages, City Search, and some of the other players from those early days.
Lance then said, "No one likes a winner," and added that "I am a winner." It was a good line.
1SEO Digital Agency is mostly locally focused and the rest is e-commerce focused. 1SEO Digital Agency does a ton of recruiting and they have two full-time recruiters hiring all the time. So the only way to scale, they know they need to continue to hire. Hiring is not cheap but it is the cost of doing business.
Lance and his sister started the company from nothing, and now are 150 or so people. When he was in a 15 or so-person agency, one of his employees asked him where can they go from there and where is the growth for that person’s job. It was at that point that Lance decided to grow.
And they grow by being efficient, and having systems in place is critical for growth. Lance actually stepped down as CEO a few years ago, focused on the marketing side, and let the new CEO grow the company.
This growth was not visionary, exactly. It was done to give the people who work for him more opportunities. There is no debt in the company and they only have four sales reps; all the sales leads are inbound.
It was good to talk business with Lance and we compared some notes.
Lance is so passionate about his staff, his team, and his employees, and it is really nice to see.
You can learn more about Lance Bachmann at Lance Bachmann Capital and 1SEO Digital Agency.
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