Quantum Theory and its Relevance to Marketing with Kevin Roy

3. So it kind of boils down to experience that I had about 12 years ago. I’ve been in the web world for a long time, and we used to exclusively just do websites and web projects, and we still do web development. But we kind of shied away from the big monster projects. We did things for like SAP and, you know, HP and those things that take, you know, a year and a half to do. But one of our larger clients that we had been working on with websites had asked us to do search engine optimization. And I always wanted to do it. This was, like, 12 years ago. So I spent months just digging into what we need to do for, you know, to help these people get ranked and make their site optimized. We did all the work. I built this giant report, you know, it had it bound and brought it into the team and pulled an all-nighter putting this thing together. Put it around in the conference room, and not one person looked at that document that I put together.

And one of the executives looks at me, and she said, “So what are we paying you for?” I’m like, “You got to be kidding me, right?” Like, I’m like, “This, that, all this stuff.” Right? Then I realized that I’m in a room with all these super intelligent people, and none of them have any idea what I’m talking about. And even if I go through and explain it all, they just don’t care. Half of the words, like, you know, LSI and schema and, you know, keyword density and metadata, they don’t—it’s going right past, right?

So I said, in the middle of the meeting, I said, “How about this? You want to get on page one for these keyword phrases? I think I can get you there. If I can get you there, you pay me, and you’re going to pay me this. If I don’t get you there, don’t pay me, but you’re gonna sign a 12-month commitment, and I’m never doing one of these reports again.” They said, “Great.” So I walked into my business partner and said, “So we have to figure this out. I think it’s gonna work.” And honestly, what we do for SEO isn’t any different.

But it’s also important to note that I’m not guaranteeing page one. I’m guaranteeing that if I can get you there, you pay me. If I can’t get you there, you don’t pay me. If you absolutely 100% need to be on page one in a certain time frame, in a certain position, then I’ve got a Google AdWords program that can get you there. So I can guarantee page one with AdWords; I can’t guarantee it with SEO, because this isn’t meant to be scammy. It’s meant to be, “Hey, we think we can get you there. We’re going to do what every other SEO company typically does to get you ranked by building relevance and creating content and making sure your site structure is healthy.” And, you know, all these things that SEO should be doing. But we don’t waste our time on reports.

And we did it partially because there’s a lot of misinformation and scams in SEO, and I thought it was going to make the sale easier. What came out of it unintentionally was that that customer service is much lower because if we’re doing our job and they don’t believe us, they just Google it and they can see that they’re ranking. And thankfully, we’ve been doing, you know, this is our, like, going on our 13th year of doing this. So a good benefit that we have is, you know, we can take three to four months to get clients ranked on page one. But because we have so many people that we’ve worked with and we’re continuing to work with, we can afford not to make any money for a few months on projects.

Yeah, well, it’s maintenance and watching. Like, we have a proprietary app that we built, it’s a rank checkup, but when there’s a dip in a ranking, it signals my team. And the team will go, “Oh, why did this dip?” We’ll have to go look into it. Is there any adjustments that we have to make? But that, you know, the important thing is, is that it is that because we’re paid for performance, all those things like building link farms and hiding text and things you’re not supposed to do, whether our clients know what they are or not, Google is way bigger than we are. And yeah, if they figure—not if, when they figure it out, I don’t want to wake up and realize that every single one of our clients has lost all our rankings, and I’ve lost my entire billing.

While it takes even a terrible year, right? You know? So while it, you know, when it, if you’re doing what you’re supposed to do, it could take a little bit longer. But you know, my clients don’t have to worry about that. I don’t have to worry about, you know, losing sleep over getting busted for some fancy rank scheme.

A month.

So, the way that I think about quantum theory and quantum physics is in a lot of people think this is weird, and is this something I don’t typically talk about publicly, but it’s kind of funny. I just wrote it in the, you know, the question, because I still think it’s really important, and it’s something that I’m working on on a continuous basis, but it’s the, you know, it’s the whole thoughts become things, or what you’re thinking about actually affects material things in the universe, right? I know it sounds strange, right, but I can tell you like over and over and over and over again in my life and in this business, and what I see in clients, and what I see in the employees here, and how I see in our trajectory, how many times that it is like, if I’m dwelling on things that are negative, more negative stuff happens. And if I’m dwelling on things that are positive, more positive things happen.

And I can also tell you that every single sleepless night that I have ever had, and I have a lot of them, because when you’re growing an agency, there are things that are happening and changing all the time. Not one of those things has happened that I’ve worried about, and it’s pretty amazing that that you’re so… but I’m spending my effort thinking about things that might happen that never do, and it’s literally just a giant waste of time. So the more that I try to focus on learning more, and trying to like, you know, trying to make my clients happier, trying to focus on the things that are important, focus on getting, you know, having your team be happy and successful. Working, like, if you’re working with a client that comes in and says, “This shit’s never gonna work,” and they’re not a client for you, because they’re going to find a way for it not to work. Guarantee. Yeah, if they’re positive and think it’s going to work, it’s amazing that those things happen precipitously.

So even if you, like you read like, Think and Grow Rich, way back to that. He actually, you know, Napoleon Hill actually talks about that in his book. And there have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other books that have spawned off from that. But it’s, it’s more about, you know, being positive, being grateful. I have this, I have this jar over in the corner of my office, that’s a Tim Ferriss thing, and it’s like, he calls it the jar of awesome. And I try to write down like a little notepad, something good that happened that day, and try to focus on that. And it really helps when you’re having a crappy day to open, pull that open and say, you know, and all the things that are great are tip. Things that are very, very minor and small, right? Like, I’m still excited, you know, through grad school and college and growing up, I’m still excited that I can decide what I want to eat every day now, because I couldn’t do that when I was in grad school, you know? Yeah, there’s a beer that’s expensive, that’s, you know, 21 bucks for a four-pack, and I want to try it. I can do that without stressing about it. That I’m more excited about that than anything else.

Yeah, I agree. There are so many things that I think we don’t quite understand yet. Like one of my favorite examples, and they take a proton and they split it, and they put one of them in Boston, one of them in California. And someone observes the proton in Boston. The second they observe it, it changes, and the second it changes. The instant it changes, the one in California changes. Like, how does it know that it’s not a millisecond between it, it happens at the exact same time. So they were like, it only happens by observing it, right? So if that can happen, then think about all the things either you’re seeing or you’re not seeing, if you’re in a shitty mood, or you think nothing’s going to work out right? Or you’re going down that path of, you know, my life is awful and everything bad happens to me.

Just little pieces of paper. But, you know, I, I envy that you’re, you know, positive all the time. I am not. So it’s, this is a—it’s way easier said than done, you know. So it’s a constant thing that I’m, I’m consistently working on. So I think if anyone’s listening to this and they’re like, “Well, I can never be that way,” it’s, it’s not like a flip of a switch. It’s just something you got to work on. And I think if you think about all the, like, all the first world problems I have, I don’t really have any problems. If, you know, I listened to something this morning where philosopher said, a Greek philosopher, said that if everybody brought all their problems into a store and we divided all the problems between everybody, most people would be more than happy to leave with the problems that they came in with.

18. Well, so what, I think that the biggest challenge that we have in growth is how to scale effectively and have the same, the same positive effect on employees and clients, and even down to like billing that we did when we were smaller. So, you know, if I’ll just give you an example, when, if we had, you know, we had like, five clients a month. You know, years ago, billing was easy. We used FreshBooks, which was an awesome tool, and, you know, spreadsheets. But now we have five to 600 projects a month that come through, and FreshBooks just couldn’t when you get up to that point, FreshBooks, you know, couldn’t handle that.

Like I said, it was an amazing tool until we got to that point. But just little things like, like, how do we scale billing effectively? How do I have to make sure that I don’t have to spend hire two more people just to do my billing, which ruins your profitability in, you know, in things or, you know, now that we have all these customers, how do we make sure that each one of them is getting proper communication, and we’re not, you know? So we tried Salesforce that didn’t work. So we built our own system in Monday, right? We reskin, I mean, we have a developer that helped us reform at Monday, and business partner is he’s really good at process and those things. So I’m really fortunate because I’m the crazy idea relationship guy, and he’s amazing at looking at those things and building processes around them. So that’s been our biggest challenge. And it’s continuous. It’s probably never going to end, like, you know, just probably kind of like, Amazon is never going to be done developing, right, find something wrong and fix it.