BluShark Digital 0:00
Welcome to the SEO Insider, with your host, Seth Price, founder of BluShark, taking you inside the world of legal marketing, and all things digital.
Seth Price 0:11
Welcome, everyone. We are thrilled to have you here with us at the SEO Insider. We have Tim Warren, a co-founder of Helium SEO, welcome, Tim.
Tim Warren 0:18
Hey, thanks, Seth, thanks for having me on.
Seth Price 0:20
You know, this is a you know, one of the benefits of having a podcast is sort of like a dinner party for two, we get to sort of meet people I’ve heard a lot about you, don’t, you know, your your reputation precedes you. But tell me, tell me about your story and what you know how Helium SEO came to be?
Tim Warren 0:37
Yeah, hopefully the reputation precedes me in a good way. Not, not in a bad way. But no, man thanks Seth, I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, so I’ve been, man I’ve got I’ve got a unique background. So I was actually a med student, turned SEO professional turned agency owner, if you will. That was my journey. And I started my first SEO company in 2013. It’s now 2023. So 10 years in, owning SEO companies. I sold my first one, I learned a lot of lessons of what not to do when selling an agency and how to actually make money. And then we started Helium, from all the lessons we’ve learned about not having tech and link building and then all that stuff. So
Seth Price 1:22
Let’s, let’s talk that, that’s, that’s yeah. You gave it to, you know, just for point of reference I’m the accidental agency owner, a lawyer who left law during the first .com Bubble late 90s in New York, got got addicted during the US law build out, which is sort of a precursor for Legal Zoom or fine law. [Yeah.] When my law school buddy wanted to open a firm, I didn’t. So we divide and conquer. I did the marketing. He did the lawyering. Blew up. 30, Now 43 lawyers, and about seven, eight, almost nine years ago, we launched, I took my in house digital, and that’s what became BluShark. Mostly in the legal vertical now, some medical. And it’s been a great run. So I’d love to hear, when you started talking about that piece right there. Lessons learned from first agency, what what did you learn from your first agency that you didn’t want to replicate in your second?
Tim Warren 2:20
So I was a med student and I left med school because I wanted to be a surgeon. My goal was to be a surgeon. And I after meeting and spending a lot of time with surgeons, I realized surgeons don’t really like their life. They make a lot of money, but they have a pretty crappy lifestyle. And I define lifestyle as time and money. You need time to enjoy the money and you need money to enjoy the time if you have time and no money… or I’m sorry… yeah, if you have no money or college student if you have money and no time, you’re a surgeon.
Seth Price 2:46
Beieve me, I get it. I remember graduating law school, and I was with backpackers. So I was no longer a backpacker backpacker. I was going back and forth to a corporate law job. [Yeah.] And like, I took a flight from Bangkok into Cambodia. And I loved it, was great. I got toured, everything. My buddies who had time, took a truck to the border switched to another truck. I mean, that journey, I always regretted not being… so yes, I get it. And surgeons can’t work virtually, they try once a while and get in the headlines. So it’s like you got to be there early doing stuff, it is not a great lifestyle while it is very well paid.
Tim Warren 3:26
Yeah, exactly. And so. So as I’m in med school, I’m starting to meet surgeons and I find out and I’m talking to doctors, and they’re buying urgent care clinics as passive income generators, so they can quit being doctors and surgeons. And so I’m like, in med school, I’m realizing, wait a minute, you guys are all trying to become business owners. “Yeah, I’m trying to leave medicine to become a business owner.” And I have like an interest in business and I’m in med school. And I’m like, maybe I’m doing this all wrong. Right? Like, I got this thing backwards. I’m about to spend nine more years getting every certification on the planet when these guys are trying to become business owners and get out of being certified for everything. So that was this journey of discovery for me and I was very interested in marketing and sales. Then I read a book Robert Kiyosaki’s book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and then you know, classic business book and in the book, he said, “if you want to be an entrepreneur you gotta learn how to sell. I’m in, I have this like crisis of belief. What do I do? I meet with the Dean of the School of Medicine, you know, I’ve worked super hard to get the med school, right, worked like eight years, straight A’s, you know, top of my class. 4.0s, like, all this stuff, right? And then I sit down with the dean, and I’m like, man, I worked really hard to get here. But I don’t know that I want to be a surgeon. And I didn’t want to be a GP, like I had no interest in being a GP, right? Like, that sounded really boring to me. I was like, surgery or nothing. And I remember the advice he gave me Seth, it was great advice. He said, Tim, he said, I’ve seen a lot of people come and go through this med school over the years, and it’s really hard to get in. He said, but then there’s students who get here and their third year they’re like, don’t think I want to be a doctor. And then they keep going with it because they’re so far in and they get all the way to the end and they’re like, I don’t want to be a doctor. He’s like, and then you’re 350 grand in debt. And you go work at Starbucks. He’s like, that is a terrible idea. He’s like, if you’re not 1,000% sure you want to be a surgeon, don’t do this. Like, that’s good advice. So I left med school and then got my first job selling door to door in Columbus, the in the middle of winter. Commission only. It was the only sales job I could get. I tried to get a farmer or, you know, medical device sales job. But I’m not an attractive female. And I’m not an I’m a college athlete. So they didn’t hire me for that. And so I couldn’t get the job. Right. You know, I dressed up best I could. They said, nope, you’re not pretty enough. I’m like, dang it.
Seth Price 5:29
Not only that, you are pretty enough. But like, it’s also a hot mess. Nobody wants to see a guy who just failed at something. You know. I mean, I get it. Like, you know, you didn’t fail, you made a conscious decision. But like when we interview people, [Yeah.] when you see somebody take a right, hard, right? It means one or two things: they found their passion, or they have no clue where they’re going. And good luck to you.
Tim Warren 5:50
Totally man. And I like I own a company. Now I have salespeople I have a whole sales team, like marketing and sales are so interlinked, right? It because it’s the human psychology of how people buy and marketing is the process of taking people through human psychology, to buy. And how I end up in SEO and SEM Long story short, I went to work for Lamar, and then I worked for Yellow Book, which is gone now. But at the time, they had 6000 salespeople, and they were looking to move into digital. And so they poached me out of Lamar and said, Hey, don’t sell billboards come sell digital. It’s like, aren’t you guys are a Yellow Page company. And I don’t I don’t use yellow pages they’re like, no, no, we’re an SEO company. We’re trying to be an SEO firm. Okay,
Seth Price 5:50
An SEO company without content or links, but an SEO company nonetheless. Don’t let that get in the way of it.
Tim Warren 6:30
Yeah. That’s a whole other story. And we’re not going to deliver what we say so then they’re gonna go bankrupt. That’s a whole nother story. So So I go start there, right. And I’m 24. At the time, I have an iPhone three. And I was all about digital marketing, like digital is awesome. And so they sent me to a three week training in Boston. And that was that was Seth, that was my first exposure to SEO didn’t know anything about it before that. But they started talking about SEO and SEM and paid ads. And it was bodily or was this yellow book was this this is yellow book. This is yellow book. And I was one of 6000 salespeople, okay. And they were trying to pivot away from the book, which I had no interest in selling the book, and they’re going digital. And so I got that job. And I went home, and I was like, why wouldn’t everybody buy this? This is this is this is 2011. Okay, so I wasn’t alone. So I’m like, why wouldn’t everybody buy this? Like, why would you buy a phonebook, you’re a lawyer, you’re in like 27 pages of full page ads. I don’t want to be next to 27 of my full page competitors, like screw that, I want to get on Google, where I am the top guy, because no one’s going to page two. So I would literally just walk into a business on my iPhone and be like, hey, what do you guys do? Oh, we’re plumbing. And I’d be like plumbing, Cincinnati. And they look like “what is that” like, “Oh, my iPhone,” like, “oh, yeah, I’ve seen those, like, who comes up?” And you just show them that they’re on page 200. Right? And they’re like, oh, my gosh, we have to do this, what’s the cost? So I started selling SEO and SEM like crazy. But here’s what I learned really quickly Seth, and this kind of leads to the story of today is, the yellow book. I think they outsourced to boostability. You know, I think it was who they used. But they didn’t do it in house, they had an outsource provider. In that company. I sold tons and tons and tons SEO. And then about six months later, seven months later, I start getting calls from clients. “Hey, you said I was gonna be on page one in six months. I can’t find myself on page 10 yet, where are we?” I don’t know how the sausage is made. I’m 24. I’m just selling it. They told me it’s gonna work. And I’m like, I don’t know. I google them. Yeah, you’re right. You’re not here. What’s going on? So I talked to my manager and he didn’t know. So then I can’t get an answer. So I pretend to be a client call my way through the Yellowbook phone tree. Finally get to Tony is the guy doing my work? Right, on these clients, and like Tony, what’s going on with my accounts, man, like all these people are pissed. He’s like, well, what do you mean? And I’m like, oh, we’re not ranking and whatever. And no lies what he told me and I’ll.. this is.. this is why I started agencies. He was like, he’s like, Tim man. He’s like, he’s like, let me level with you, dude. He’s like, I have 50 accounts. 50. five zero. 50 websites I’m supposed to optimize every month. I’m supposed to write the content, do the do the like, on page opps, the off page opps, the link building. I got to do their socials, like, he’s like, I have 50 accounts. He’s like, I work 40 hours a week. He’s like, I don’t even log into half my accounts ever. But for the time that they start to the time they turn, I never even touch the website. Like, but we bill them 2500 bucks a month? Yeah, every month. You don’t even touch em? Never can even log in. I’m like, oh, oh, we’re scamming these people! Like, legit scam! Right?
Seth Price 7:08
Well, let me ask you a blunt question. Because in those days putting a website up was you were a little bit later, right? So this wasn’t this isn’t like… No, it wasn’t it wasn’t like that. There was more nominal competition. And it was getting bigger by the month, sort of what was a widget for a month then, for Yellowbook when they were selling these guys their bill of goods?
Tim Warren 9:19
Oh, man, SEO was 1500- 3500 a month.
Seth Price 9:35
So it’s not nothing. There was money that if they if they had chosen that that was always my analogy when I sold against Thomson Reuters and others, you know, Yellowbook would be the same thing right? The sales reps gotta make money. Your regional managers got to make money. The the guy who’s doing the work, the guy supervising the work and lord knows there was nobody doing the work. But like, in theory, you would do the work, then you have shareholders then you have, you know, there’s all these different people before you eat, before a single, and when you do it, you take out profit margin everything else, like how many dollars are left. And that was what always amazed me because a lot of guys a lot of the sales will probably that 1000- $1,500 range. And you’re like, you weren’t paying, it’s like the old joke of sending small bills to big companies, like just some percentage would never complain, the other guy’s churn, and they just add more. So,
Tim Warren 10:36
No, that’s it, man. And so like, it’s one thing if you’re, if they’re charging him like GoDaddy, you know, like 100 bucks a month for SEO or something, right? And you’re like, I don’t really know what I’m getting.
Seth Price 10:44
That’s also, why it’s not SEO. So like, it’s, it’s tough. We’ll talk about this in a minute, I want to get your thoughts on it. So. So basically, so you realize there was the emperor’s new clothes, you got to get out. And that was when you started your first company?
Tim Warren 10:55
100%. That’s literally, and so my first company was called SEO Exposed. Because I went to this thing at yellow book, and I was like, okay, not this, like, we can’t do this man, like this is this is not the reputation I want to have in this industry, holy crap. And so it was it was literally my wife and I, my wife got married in Cincinnati. She was the director of marketing for her dad’s software company. And she actually knew what SEO looked like and link building and how to do SEO, and the whole process was, so we looked at this thing and we’re like, man, these businesses are getting taken advantage of because they just don’t understand SEO. They don’t know what they’re buying. And so these people are coming in and they’re selling them stuff. And then they don’t know how to keep them accountable. Because they don’t know what an H1 tag is, you know, from from a meta description from a link, they have no idea. So yeah, that was what led us to start SEO expose that was in 2013. And then we started that company built it up and sold it in 2016.
Seth Price 11:43
How advanced were you when you sold that one? What were you guys doing in revenue?
Tim Warren 11:52
We were about probably 3 million in revenue, 20 employees? [Why get out?] Two reasons. The first reason was, this was my first real company. I started I tried some other stuff started em, and didn’t work, right, entrepreneur. But I didn’t understand culture. So we just start hiring people. And it was like, cool, you do ads, great. You’re hired, you do SEO great. You’re hired. And then three years in, I realized, like, Who are all these people? Like? I’m not even friends with these people. Like, this is not a culture of people that I connect with. I’m not friends with any of these people, but we do the work together. [Gotcha.] I realized I’m like, All right. I didn’t know anything about building culture. I didn’t know the value of culture. And I was like, I’m gonna have to restart here. If I if I want to really do culture right. And I don’t want to restart. That sounds like you’ve pain in the butt, I’ll sell it. The second reason was, because after three, four years of doing, you know, white hat SEO for brands, I realized, right, if you don’t have proprietary technology, you have nothing that’s truly differentiated. You have a service team, and you have SEM rush and Screaming Frog and ahrefs like everybody else. So if you don’t have something different, how are you going to win? Right? You know, military battles are won by better technology and better strategy, SEO battles are won the same way. And so, for me, I realized I need a tech founder as part of my process, we need to be a tech driven company that does things differently. That’s how we’re gonna win. And so that was the other reason I sold it because I wanted to start over and build something from the ground up that was very AI driven and very technology first driven, which is how we ended up at Helium building Helium.
Seth Price 13:20
And then talk to me about that. What was the, you know, look, get culture, like we’ve been through this, we spun out of the law firm, it was just a hodgepodge. My top deputy who is now President started as an intern at the law firm, is sort of like the fact it’s, it sounds crazy, and not that I probably couldn’t figure it out. But my men- as an entrepreneur, they call it in the EOS world, visionary. I did not relate well, particularly to what was Millennials now, Gen Zers. Coming in, you look a couple years younger than me, but when I go in, no matter how hip, I may think I am, like kids tell me, say I’m cringe, but when I’m talking to a 23/24 year old, it’s like their father talking to them. It doesn’t matter what I say, by creating layers, between of managers and managers that relate and having people that are all in on culture, where that’s the number one driving force, huge, huge differentiator, I think, between us and other companies. And it wasn’t like it’s not a straight line. I learned a lot of lessons early on even when you wanted to have culture, right? Partially because Helium is not Helium SEO is not what it was when you started, it was harder to hire when you started. Despite wanting culture, you could only do so much. Once we had a brand and could say no to people that became, but you know, when you start and you know, just like you had that 1.0 so maybe you had- you would use that as your first but no, I remember early days of our company when you know three guys in the links room were passing Adderall around and you know, we had a, we had one guy who came in to do something who was like day trading in full view of everybody while multitasking his job, you know, just you like, we’ve come a long way that was maybe I’ll just look at that as my 1.0 like you and then we’re like, okay, we really need to hire differently. So what was it get understanding culture and that, like, it’s, they don’t teach you that at least when I was in school that was not taught as a definitive factor. I’m sure it is now, what were the technology differentiators that you brought to bear, to mix with culture to and systems that you that sort of differentiate you guys from the rest of the world?
Tim Warren 15:34
Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there. I’ll start on the culture piece, because that part’s really important. Then I’ll talk about technology because we have strong feelings on both. First on on culture, so one of the roles of the CEO should be the chief culture officer, right? Until you’re big enough to have a chief culture officer. And my CEO coach that I used for a long time in Cameron Harold, you know, he he coached? You know, he was at 1-800-gotjunk from like, 2- 106 million and he coached the CEO of sprint.
Seth Price 16:03
Well, friend of the friend of the show he, you know, [Oh you know Cameron?] our COO is in the COO Alliance. We’re big fans of Cameron.
Tim Warren 16:10
Yeah. So so yeah. So Cameron and I are very close, he was my CEO coach for a long time at Helium. And, and as we’ve kind of grown, and now we’ve gotten to a certain size, like we’re off and running. And, and so he told me, he said, “great companies are a little bit less than a religion, but more than a business,” right? That’s how he defines culture. And I was like, man, it’s really cool. If you look at like Zappos, right? Zappos was like that. It was it was less than a religion, but more than a business. [That might have been pretty close to a religion. But yeah.] They were closer to a religion, but still, right. It’s like not a full religion, where there’s like a, you know, there’s like a whole religious text and whatever. But it’s like, close, right? Where people really feel strongly about this, the culture and organization, and the brand and how it’s done and how it’s supposed to be done. So it’s more than a business, but less than a religion. I thought that was a great analogy. And so and then the, here’s the second thing that we also thought about, which is the founders of Google, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, they had this like, elevator airport test that talked about, they said, one day, Google is going to be huge. They had vision, and they said, Google is going to be so big, we’re not going to know all the people that work there. And, and one day, we’re going to be at the airport, we’re gonna be going somewhere, and we’re gonna, we’re gonna meet someone comes up to us, and they’ll be like I work at your company. And they said their culture test was, they wanted to make sure they hired so well, that when that person walked up to them, and 20 years, like I work at your company, they didn’t talk to them for five minutes and be like, oh, my gosh, I’m sad that you work in my company. They wanted to hire people that were interesting and smart and innovative. And they wanted to create this culture that people couldn’t get into Google who they would ever meet an airport and be like, hate that you work in Google? Right? So I was like, wow,
Seth Price 17:48
Which I now get, because I’m now enough removed. What I meet, people, it’s really, really cool. Yeah. And that like, I, and are we 100% there? No, the few people that probably don’t fit as well into the culture, but are hard workers and they’ve kept.. we’re not at Google level. But it’s, you know, I would argue it’s 85-90%, which is, you know, when you do it. And that is when there’s a buzz about it, that that, to me is the immediate, it’s the it’s the idea of when you see these people, you’re like, oh, I am so thankful, I can’t believe this person works. That’s awesome.
Tim Warren 18:26
Yeah, so here’s so I just, given that background of like, how to think about culture, because I think it really matters. It’s not just like, culture is not a ping pong table, and benefits. Okay? Those are employee benefits, culture is something different. And here’s, here’s how I would define culture is you should be able to sum up your culture in like two or three words, right. And those two or three words should really describe how you view the world. And to have a great culture, you need to hire people that fit your view of the world. And so I’ll give you an example. When we started Helium, we said, look, we want to hire people that are really fun, because we don’t like working with boring people. And we really care about humor. And we want to tell jokes, and we want to make it a fun environment. We don’t want to make it an environment where people can’t ever tell jokes, and they can’t take themselves lightly. And it’s like, all uptight, like, we hate that. There’s never going to be our culture here. And so, you know, as we started to build out what we want a culture to be, we’re like, we want to be fun. We want it to be to be light hearted. And then at the same time, we want to, you know, we’re a tech company, we need to hire really smart people, because things in digital move fast. And if people move, don’t, don’t learn quickly, they won’t make it here. And so we also need people with with large horsepower in terms of their ability to learn quickly. And so we quickly, as thinking through this, we shaped all those things. And then we came up with one last piece that really mattered to us, which is we said, we realized we thought about the people we’ve worked with, we’ve really enjoyed working with the most and who are the people that are the best to work with and who are the people that aren’t the best to work with. And what we landed on was people that are highly dedicated to personal growth to self development on their own. They typically tended to be the most interesting, engaging people to spend time with, because they were trying new things, and they were pushing themselves. They were learning new things all the time. It wasn’t, hey, sup? How’s it going… “oh you know, the weather and, you know, whatever, and politics,” and they were only complaining, it was like, oh, I’m learning this new language. I’m teaching myself how to code. Oh, I’m doing something like, wow, sweet. Interesting people. So then we started to boil down our culture to four things, right? Fun, light hearted, highly intelligent people dedicated to personal growth. That was that was our culture. And that was who we hired. And so you know, there’s all different ethnicities and religions and backgrounds and whatever, we didn’t care about that. We cared about those pieces. And that was how we’ve always focused and I think that’s what’s led to the culture, we have at Helium, which is strong. Because when you when you focus on those things that we we have in common. That’s what we focus on. We don’t focus on the things we don’t have in common.
Seth Price 20:57
That’s awesome. No, I like it. Are you guys remote, in house, hybrid?
Tim Warren 21:02
Hybrid. So we have a corporate office in Cincinnati, we have about 30, you know, 35 employees out of that, and then we have remote people all across the country, and now all across the globe. So we’re, you know, we’re about 50/50. You know, I guess we have a little more and, you know, we’re prolly 50 employees. So we were more people in office, and then…
Seth Price 21:22
Well, that’s the that’s the next challenge, right? We’ve had, on my other podcast, the founder of 15five, you know, our, you know, it’s one thing to have culture under a roof. And we were under one roof, pre COVID, post COVID, we’re in a clubhouse with once a week meetings, people maybe show up twice a week, we have twice a year, people, you know, all hands on deck. And partly it was demand, that we’re in little blue bubble in the DC metro. So that COVID was COVID wasn’t like my friends in Florida, where there was no COVID. So, you know, that, to me, could be a whole nother show talking about like, as you pivoted out of, you know, the home bubble, making sure those people, you know, are part of it. And I think it’s just been one more fun challenge. Although, I think the truism that we’ve seen, I’m sure you would assume you would have seen as well is our A players were A pluses working remotely. And our B minus players became C plus players working remotely. That it was sort of an exaggeration of everything.
Tim Warren 22:24
Yeah, that’s, that’s a really interesting comment. I’ll give you my exact thoughts on all this. Some people make really, really good remote employees. And those same people may make worse office employees, and vice versa. It depends on the person, I think there is A player, B player, C player as well. And if you take a B player and take them remote, and they get C player, whatever. But like we have, like our recruiter is in Florida, and she’s awesome, she’s hyper responsive, always on camera, always on video always on like, she’s remote, but she doesn’t feel remote, because she’s so engaged. And anytime there’s chance to come to corporate, she flies up, she’s there. So like, she’s remote, but she doesn’t feel remote. And then we have other people who are even less remote. They might, they might live one state over and they feel like, like they’re completely remote. Right? It was like camera off and never like, you know, barely engaged or whatever. So I think here’s my thoughts on that Seth. With Helium, we have remote, and we have in office. And one of the things I’m learning is that as a company, we have to realize that we have two different experiences. We have the experience of I work at Helium, and I’m in office. And that’s a different experience. And I work at Helium, and I’m only remote. That’s two different experiences. And I don’t have empathy for that, because I live in Cincinnati, and I work in corporate. And so I don’t actually know what it’s like to be remote in my own company. So that’s something that we’re realizing. The second thing we’re gonna do…
Seth Price 23:46
By the way, you just had a lightbulb moment, there should be a chief remote officer, or at least a, you know, a manager, senior manager level somebody like, again, you always have a chief people officer that’s doing stuff, but you’re a person that’s solely focused on that constituency, just like you would have in a, you know, any sort of organization where you have a, a minority or a different class, like how was that class being treated?
Tim Warren 24:13
Yeah, I think it’s a really good point. And, and because what we have realized as we’ve gone through some stuff at Helium is if you go through a challenging time, right, let’s say you lose a major client and it was challenging or whatever, right? Where the economy’s rough. And you show up at corporate and you see the executive team, the leadership team, see the owners show that people dogs are coming in and out, you know, you’re like, okay, we’re okay. Right? If you go to that same thing, and your experience with Helium is a computer screen in a in your guest bedroom. Right? It’s a whole different animal. That’s, that’s your whole experience is a zoom screen. And I think the challenge of that is it’s so much easier to quit a zoom screen than it is to quit friends and deep connections you’ve made in person. And so, you know, for us, I think the difficulty, Seth, for us is realizing like remote work is here to stay okay, like remote works not going away. At the same time, even for our remote teams, we’re realizing we need to bring our remote people in office more often.
Seth Price 25:08
How often do you have the whole team in?
Tim Warren 25:11
Right now we do it once a year, we bring the whole team in once a year, but but I think we want to try to move it to quarterly, have the whole remote team in all at the same time on the same week, once a quarter. And it’s less about keeping track of people because, look, you and I both know this, right? Like if you want to go to an office and waste time, you can stand around and talk to people at the watercooler anytime. It’s it’s not about that. It’s about people building relationships, and people knowing each other and truly being friends, and helping each other.
Seth Price 25:40
No, couldn’t agree more. Right. So we worked twice a year, everybody at the same time. And then the question is do people come in on? You know what I’m working with is because when you bring everybody in at once, it also has it takes on a different life? [Yeah] it’s not, you know, versus I would love to have twice a year where it’s all hands on deck for learning. And twice a year where you’re with your teams just to get those extra touch points, maybe not all the same time, that takes on a different thing of every single body is there, the thing that we have noticed, I’m curious. So we, because we’ve gone so extreme in the other direction, we knew that our in our market, we couldn’t get people back full time, that was not happening. We knew that if we didn’t have some sort of office, we would lose people the other way. Now, the funny thing that we’ve seen with exceptions, that many of the people that are, that love to come to the office, when they have the option of doing otherwise, are the least productive people. And the days in the office are the least productive, which is just again, it goes how, like we’ve almost gone full circle where we’ve weeded out. And the people that are sort of meeting that it’s the good news was we lost a lot of office drama, like weird sort of interpersonal nonsense disappeared. But we also had like this segregation, where the people that were sort of like, needed that as a drug, not just as collaboration or the, you know, we do weekly events, and we do things like that. But the idea that I had to be there, those people were the least productive by comparison was just an interesting juxtaposition.
Tim Warren 27:13
Yeah, it’s really, it’s really interesting. I mean, here’s, at the end of the day, man, what I think it boils down to Seth, I think as a company, you have to decide like who you guys want to be. You have to decide, look, are we remote? Are we in person? Or are we hybrid, because all three, all three are very legitimate. Helium is decided we’re hybrid. And the reason is because we we don’t want to be fully always remote, like a top towel or whatever, that’s fine. There are companies who can do that. That’s just not what I personally like and what our management team likes. Like, we’d like there to be some person to person tie, right. But also, I don’t need to sit with you five days a week to have a good relationship and have a working relationship like we can work from home a couple days a week. So what we do at Helium is Monday, Wednesday, Friday in office Tuesday, Thursday remote. And then if you live in a city where we don’t have an office, you can be fully remote. And then what we’re learning is to do a better job on the front end of asking questions like for people who would be remote? You know, have you worked in a full time remote capacity? Do you like working full time remote? Do you want to be in an office? Why do you want to be remote? What are the benefits? Right? Because if you live in downtown New York and commute is an hour and a half each way every day? Dude, remote, remote is so much better. Right? Because that’s that’s three hours of wasted time every day. Like that just makes- [You know, even if it’s 45 minutes.] Yeah. But like in Cincinnati, for example, like our offices are in northern Cincinnati. Yeah, the average person’s drive is 20 minutes to the office. It’s not that bad. Exactly. So it’s like not a big deal. And so I think you have to have empathy for your team. And like, there shouldn’t be just like, blanket statements across the board. I think it should be empathy, I think you should look at market by market. They also think you should look at it with individual leaders, because there are some leaders who are better remote, and they can build a good remote teams. But where we have seen a breakdown is if like an entire team is in office and the leader is remote, that has not worked well. Or the other way around. [Interesting.] And so my encouragement to like people listening and kind of what Helium has figured out is you got to be true to your your core convictions. So if you have a leader whose core conviction is, in office is better, that person is going to really struggle with remote because they don’t believe in it. And then they’re not going to embrace it and they’re not going to make the remote experience good for those remote employees.
Seth Price 29:23
And it gets exponentially more complicated because let’s say okay, you have your, now you have your pod. [Yeah.] as there, does that mean that you can you really need to hire from within to create your leadership bench? Because if you don’t, then you’re sort of like you may one day on a person in house the next day that’s out and then you’re saying that that’s an another lightbulb moment or I’m like, yep, that’s right. Versus and to me, that has been you know, you want to give opportunity to advance. [Yeah] which means that sometimes that person’s remote, sometimes they’re not when you’re in hybrid, which then would limit the oportunities for the hybrid people, if that person has to be, or you’re saying the whole team could be remote, which is, you know, a whole nother. And that’s, I think, partly why we went to the clubhouse is that we wanted less of a distinction. Because it I think to to your point, if everybody is used to working remote like we want the opposite the opposite of you. But the if the primary is remote where the office is a plus, it’s less of a differentiator negatively to the people that are fully fully remote on the other side of the country. ,
Tim Warren 30:32
Yeah no, that’s interesting. Oh, so I’ll give you a couple examples. Right. And by the way, this is our own personal take on it. There’s other companies do-
Seth Price 30:40
It works until it doesn’t work, right. Yeah, that’s…
Tim Warren 30:42
That’s right. So so take sales at Helium, right? So we have a VP of sales, we have a whole sales team. We have had remote salespeople. We have had some be successful, some not. We’ve had all in house sales team. And when our VP started about a year and a half, two years ago, he came in and he said, I’m only going to build an in office team. I’m not interested in having a remote sales team. And I said, Why? Because I was like, we’ve had remote salespeople, and it’s been fine. He said, because that’s the culture I know. And I like, and that’s what I want to build. And I was like, okay, that’s your call, you’re the VP. So he’s, he’s always gone all in an embraced that, and I will say he’s done a really good job, because he’s been able to lean into that, like he knows what he wants, right?
Seth Price 31:23
God forbid he’s not there, then you’re left with a team that the next guy is like, why do we have why have we settled for local? I mean, yeah, no disrespect here. And again, I struggle with it, because I’ll give you one last piece which, well, we’ll end on cultural have to come back for part two to talk to talk more. But yeah, let me ask you this. The piece, one of the struggles that I’ve had, and maybe it’s just us is that I look at culture, and it sounds awful. But there’s a culture for a business. The sales team in most businesses is almost an entity unto itself, very often. And never the two should meet because you want all those attributes. And those are amazing attributes. Not all of your salespeople, you know, if you find somebody who sells, other attributes very often go out the window. And in perfect world, you get everything but you’re lucky enough you find something you can sell. That’s that’s not that’s not nothing. What are your thoughts on that differentiation, but the balance of when you’re dealing with, I get for rest of an organization before a sales team itself, especially since they’re going to be in house for you? Is that at all a challenge? Because culture means different things with sales and non sales?
Tim Warren 32:32
Yeah, that’s a good question. So Helium is a pretty unique agency in that we invest very heavily in sales tech stack, we use SalesLoft, and Salesforce, and we have a sales team, we have the head of sales, we do cold emailing campaigns really aggressively and effectively. And like we were pretty sophisticated when it comes to sales. That’s my background, right? I was a sales guy, then a sales leader. And then when I started a company is like, well, we’re gonna invest in sales, because I know and believe in sales. And then of course, we do our own marketing as well. So we kind of get the best of both worlds, which is part of why we’ve doubled for the last five straight years is because we’re good at sales. Let me talk about that. That’s a that’s a nuanced conversation. I have a lot of thoughts on this. Number one, it’s important to know who you are and who you want to be when you grow up. And so as a company, we’ve been really clear with the team, like, we’re a sales driven organization. And that’s what we believe in. And we’ve had some employees who have come and said, I don’t like that. And we’ve said, and this is probably not the place for you. Right? They don’t, you know.. and there was like, there was a time when we had, I’ll give you one example, right where like, stuff came to a head, one of our top sales guys. You know, he, there was a project manager. And there’s an account and there was an accountant who the accountant was being very needy, they were asking for extra stuff. I think it was stuff that wasn’t in the SOW. And I trained a lot of our sales team, initially myself and then pass on to a VP of sales to train and train these guys. I said, look, service is all that matters. Serve people and money will follow. Take care of the relationship, take care of people. Just, just make sure people feel loved and cared for. It’s okay. If we go above and beyond we deliver extra It’s okay. Right. So that was the mentality and they’re like, dude, let’s do what it takes to make the client happy. And so when the client called, they said, We need these things are my sales guy said, we’re gonna we’re gonna service this account, we’re gonna, we’re gonna manage the relat-, we’re gonna make it happen. We’ll figure it out. Let’s do this work, which I think is the right call. And then the project manager came in and they said, no, they’re stepping all over us. We’re doing all this stuff aside, like you shouldn’t do this, this is the wrong fit in and so then this whole fight breaks out. And this mediation comes up to us as a leadership team of like, mediate this, we basically came back and we said, look, the sales, the salesperson is right, we need to do what the client asked, to service the client. And then the product manager, you know, got pretty frustrated and said, you always take sales’ side, and she quit over it. Yeah, she left. And, and she basically her feedback to us was well, you need to fire that top sales guy or for me to stay. Right, and this guy is bringing in millions a year in revenue. And so here’s the challenging thing about it, right. There, there’s a- there’s there are cultural misalignments sometimes between that sale driven personality, where it’s a hard charging, you know, I’m gonna go get it, sometimes, you know, they’re like out- very outgoing people. And they’re their drivers, right, they’re pushing business. And then there’s other personality types in the business, that they’re not going to be like that. Right? The product managers are not going to the engineers. And so what we’ve had to try to do Seth, internally is work with people have empathy, to tell our salespeople, hey, you’re a different breed. These guys are not the same breed as you, like, you’ll pick up the phone and make cold calls, that would terrify some of these people. And but then they’re frustrated that you make so much more money than they do. And so when we need to sit them in a room and say, Guys, yes, salespeople make six figures and a lot of money, they make a lot of money. But are you willing to do the job they do? What will you make? Are you willing to make 100 cold calls today? No? Are you willing to go face rejection? No? Would you like a quota, that guy’s quota is a million dollars, if it doesn’t sell a million dollars, he gets fired? Like, oh, my gosh, I absolutely don’t want that. But then that’s what comes with that high pay.
Seth Price 36:07
No, no understood. But it’s one of those things where we made a conscious decision, or something, I couldn’t find the people locally so, that our sales team is not there, which allows for some insulation and protection of the core culture, because if you as you just said, you have a top salesperson, and again, I’m not, I sided with your salesperson here, if anything, it’s our non sales team that bends over backwards for people, it’s our sales team and says, “Hey, we’re going to charge more for this.” So it’s funny, I have the opposite dilemma. But that I find that inter- and again, this, maybe we’ll have to have you back to go further and deeper into this. But the integration of sales into traditional culture that got you where you are, is not nothing. And it’s something that I don’t wanna say, I have struggled with, I just haven’t succeeded, I amazing company culture, and not that we don’t have great salespeople. And there is, but it’s almost like ships in the night, if it does hit, great. But as you said, you’re not firing your you’re, not going to you know, get rid of your top salesperson, because it’s not a perfect cultural alignment with the rest of the company. That said that, you know, somebody went there, I, my guess is there was more going on that there always is, but that I love the fact in one sense half empty half full, that you have employees that understand your bottom line. And then if they go beyond it, the profitability of the company, not that you as the leadership may say, You know what we do want to do more. It is always amazing how things take a life of their own. But in one sense that person is looking out for your best interest in one respect. Because if everybody did that, your margins would shrink, and you would not be happy.
Tim Warren 37:54
Yeah, I think so, so how did we get it where we have an in house team that works with the agency without separating? How we did it, Seth is is just like anything with clients. There’s an education component to it, where we’ve had to take time to educate. And so what we’ll try to do at, you know, company wide staff meetings is we’ll try to address these issues and say, guys, why do salespeople make so much more? Well, they have quotas, and it’s a performance driven sport. If they miss quota, they get fired. None of you want that job.
Seth Price 38:25
But it’s, it’s it’s more than that. I think it’s the like the mentality, you’re talking about, you want to people you want to hang out with. Sometimes that can work, sometimes it doesn’t. And then so you know, I mean, everybody’s got their issues. Tim, this is fascinating. You are a fascinating guy. I have thoroughly enjoyed this. I hope that our paths cross sooner than later. If they don’t, we will do a part two to dive deeper into this because this is, you know, you have done some just amazing things and, you know, can’t wait to continue this conversation.
Tim Warren 38:56
Sounds great, Seth, thanks for having me on.
Seth Price 38:58
Thanks, Tim. Bye bye.
BluShark Digital 38:59
Thank you for tuning in to the SEO insider with Seth price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand’s online presence. episodes are available to stream directly on blue shark Digital’s website.
