Lean Into Opportunity

The bus brakes screech.

“See you tomorrow!”

I grab my backpack and jump off, walking to the front door.

I run up the steps, open the door, toss my bag on my bed and start walking to the kitchen.

The news is on in the living room as I pass through..

“Oil continues to spill as organizations scramble to stop it, racing to mitigate the ecological impact.”

My heart jumps..

I turn around, sprinting back to my room.

Turning on my computer I bite my nails nervously as the Windows logo appears. Tapping my foot rapidly, I wait impatiently for my PC to boot.

The desktop appears and as fast as my fingers could move I open up Firefox and pull up Google Analytics. Switching views from acquisition to channels to organic traffic, then peering over to conversions, my jaw drops.

I can’t believe it. My mind can barely process what I see.

$50,000,000 order value in the past hour alone.

I dig deeper.

“Where are the sales coming from?”

I was 15 years old, a high school student still living with his parents. My brother, who at the time had just left his position in one of the largest marketing agencies in the world to work for himself, had been teaching me SEO for a few months.

He had many ideas of how an agency should run, and those ideas conflicted with how his previous agency was run. They parted ways, but on good terms. Such good terms in fact that he was frequently referred clients from the CEO, which helped him get started with his freelance consulting business.

I saw how my brother, seven years my senior, had created something great for himself with SEO.

Making good money for the first time, he moved to downtown Atlanta. A far cry from the childhood home we both grew up in.. the home where I sat, rapidly analyzing dashboard after dashboard tracking the surge of traffic and conversions happening in real-time.

I knew he was hooked on SEO at the time, and I wanted to learn it too.

He wanted me to learn SEO because he knew what it did for him, and I wanted to learn SEO basically for the same reason, but I didn’t really understand why it was so valuable yet.

With no real plans on what to do after I graduate, I started learning everything I could. On weekends I would go to his apartment in Atlanta. He would pick me up and we would usually go get some pancakes for breakfast, then go back to his apartment and he would teach me all day.

He would show me his processes for keyword research, for technical audits, for content improvements, for on-page optimization, and link building.

He taught me everything he could and I tried to keep up.

During the week I would study SEOmoz, Search Engine Journal, and read anything on marketing that I could get my hands on.

If this was my ticket to a good job, I’d take it.

One day the CEO of his old agency sent him a huge deal.

He thought this would be a great learning exercise for me, an opportunity to optimize a site from the ground-up and test everything that I had been learning.

My own project.

I was psyched, and I dove straight in.

Keyword research, keyword mapping, on-page recommendations, technical audit, structural recommendations, the works. I delivered them to him, he gave a once-over and he delivered them to the client, usually without any changes.

He paid me for the work I was doing of course, and much better than I had made working at Subway, but for me that wasn’t the most exciting part.

I was so excited, watching as the site’s rankings grew, checking them every night and adjusting little things here or there week after week. After a couple of months the site ranked on the first page for every major keyword, then in the top three positions, then first.

A few weeks after reaching the first position on Google for their most important keywords something insane happened.

The news story I saw as I walked into my house that day was covering the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The products that the site I had been working on sold were massive pieces of equipment used to clean up oil leaks, or other chemical waste in the ocean.

I watched my client’s analytics dashboards all night.

I watched as the conversion value went up from $50,000,000 to $75,000,000, then to $100,000,000, and it didn’t slow down.

At the end of that night over $250,000,000 worth of conversions had passed through the site, all from organic traffic.

All from the work I had been doing.

I was just a kid, a young teenager sending recommendations in my pajamas from my bedroom computer after eating dinner with my parents each night.

The work I did from my computer in my bedroom grossed a company over $250,000,000 in a matter of hours.

I was hooked.

If I didn’t understand the value before, I understood it perfectly now.

My brother wasn’t hooked just because of what he had gained, he was hooked because of the value he could bring to businesses all over the world, and what value that instilled in him.

He was hooked because his knowledge could mean thousands of new jobs, massive shifts in commerce, and it could create a better life for his family and the families of the employees at the companies he helped grow.

Not only that but he could achieve this from his laptop, from anywhere in the world, working when he wanted to.

I saw the opportunity and I never looked back.

I learned everything I could and after I graduated high school I immediately moved closer to my brother and got a job at an agency to learn everything I possibly could at the ground level.

I wanted to learn how I could bring value to as many businesses as I could, and by virtue of bringing value, be valued.

The same holds true today.

Now we have our own agency, our own team, and we focus on working with businesses we believe in that use software to change millions of lives around the world.

My message to you is to be open to opportunity in your life.

Lean into it when it shows up, and find a way to be of value to others.

The greatest way to build your value as an individual is to be as valuable to others as you can possibly be. So if you see a way to be valuable, do it.

Take action, be bold, follow your gut, trust your intuition, and act.

It won’t just change your life, but countless others that you will affect along the way.

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