MichaelCottam
New Contributor
I'd had a number of small business ventures during/after college, but my first big one, with major investors (otherwise known as DILUTION! LOL) was a honeymoon travel company I started called TheBigDay, in 2000. Grew that up to nice little revenues, and in summer of 2008, sold it to a much larger travel wholesale company out of California. I went to work for the parent company (remotely, from Oregon, although I flew down there every couple of weeks). In September of 2008, while camping at Crater Lake, my wife of 4 years got very sick. Long story short, she died of ovarian cancer at age 37 that December, leaving me with a 2 1/4 year old boy.
Gets worse.
3 months later, in March 2009, the company that bought my company went bankrupt. And they hadn't actually made any of the scheduled payments to buy my company. So I'm out of a job, out 8 years worth of my time, money, and investor money from building that company, and grieving the loss of my new bride and mother of our 2 1/2 year old child.
I gave a talk at MozCon a year or two later about this whole experience, and the message from the talk was that even in a startup, you shouldn't sacrifice all your family time. You can read this story by Jeremy Cabral, a CEO of an Australian company, who was there, and left mid-conference to return home after hearing my talk.
I kind of fell into SEO consulting at that point--I'd learned SEO to grow the travel company, and got to know Rand Fishkin right around when he started Moz. Rand and others knew I had those skills and not enough to keep my mind occupied, and so projects started to pile in. 14 years and 1100+ clients later, I seem to have a career in that field
.
But really, being an SEO consultant isn't very entrepreneurial in its nature. You go around telling people their baby is ugly, and (hopefully!) showing them how to make it pretty and better. So, in parallel with all that, I started a consumer travel planning company (Visual Itineraries) and a travel agent tools company (Bright Yonder), which are fun businesses--but neither generates a lot of income.
More recently, I started Realty Remotely, which is a SaaS tools company that serves realtors and mortgage brokers. I'm having a lot more fun building the pieces of these products and services than doing the SEO stuff. Hoping to transition to purely the Realty Remotely business in a year or so.
Gets worse.
3 months later, in March 2009, the company that bought my company went bankrupt. And they hadn't actually made any of the scheduled payments to buy my company. So I'm out of a job, out 8 years worth of my time, money, and investor money from building that company, and grieving the loss of my new bride and mother of our 2 1/2 year old child.
I gave a talk at MozCon a year or two later about this whole experience, and the message from the talk was that even in a startup, you shouldn't sacrifice all your family time. You can read this story by Jeremy Cabral, a CEO of an Australian company, who was there, and left mid-conference to return home after hearing my talk.
I kind of fell into SEO consulting at that point--I'd learned SEO to grow the travel company, and got to know Rand Fishkin right around when he started Moz. Rand and others knew I had those skills and not enough to keep my mind occupied, and so projects started to pile in. 14 years and 1100+ clients later, I seem to have a career in that field
.But really, being an SEO consultant isn't very entrepreneurial in its nature. You go around telling people their baby is ugly, and (hopefully!) showing them how to make it pretty and better. So, in parallel with all that, I started a consumer travel planning company (Visual Itineraries) and a travel agent tools company (Bright Yonder), which are fun businesses--but neither generates a lot of income.
More recently, I started Realty Remotely, which is a SaaS tools company that serves realtors and mortgage brokers. I'm having a lot more fun building the pieces of these products and services than doing the SEO stuff. Hoping to transition to purely the Realty Remotely business in a year or so.
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