Who you'd be hiring
About The Founder
Thirty years of having to find my own customers, and the phone call that changed what I did for a living.
A note from the owner
“I’d rather you knew who you’re dealing with before you decide anything.”
I was born in Astoria, a small town on the Oregon coast where the Columbia runs out into the Pacific. I work out of Vancouver now, about ninety miles back up the same river.
If you call the number on this site you’ll get me, so it seems fair to tell you where I came from and why this business exists at all. It started with a recording studio and a phone that wasn’t ringing.
I’d spent everything I had building that studio. It was finished, the money was gone, and I had no idea how anybody was supposed to find it. Back then you got customers with a Yellow Pages ad, direct mail, or space in a newspaper or a magazine, and all three cost more than I had left.
Then I saw an ad for software that claimed it could get your business ranked on Google. That was a strange idea at the time. The internet was the thing that reached the whole world, and using it to bring somebody from across town to your door wasn’t what anybody thought it was for. It cost little enough that being wrong wouldn’t hurt, so I bought it.
I ran it two or three times over a couple of days. The next day the phone rang. Somebody had found the studio on the internet and wanted to book time.
What I said out loud was that it was “like friggin’ magic!” I didn’t believe it. Then it happened again, and it kept happening.
Why it landed on me
I’d been finding my own customers since I was thirteen.
That isn’t a figure of speech. At thirteen I was a working musician and I booked entertainment, which meant the money only showed up if I went and got it. Nobody hands a thirteen year old a list of people to call.
What followed was a long run of jobs that were all, underneath, the same job.
- Top five in Arizona in the Liberace Entertainers Search, which was the sort of thing America’s Got Talent would be decades later.
- Private music teacher to children and adults, which meant finding the students myself.
- Warehouse manager at Sears and Roebuck at seventeen.
- Warehouse manager again at twenty-one, where I designed my first inventory control program because the one we needed didn’t exist.
- Policy sales at Farmers Insurance at twenty-two.
- Big-ticket musical instrument sales at twenty-three, then store manager, running the store’s sales and its marketing and still selling on the floor.
None of that was a marketing career, and yet, all of it was. Every one of those jobs came down to the question you’re probably asking on a slow month: where does the next customer come from, and what do I do today to make one appear.
1999
I helped build one of these companies, which is why I’m careful about what I tell you a name is worth.
In 1999, seven partners and I started an internet company during the dot-com boom. I was the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and the Marketing Manager. The product found people who were shopping for a technology service and then sold those names to businesses that wanted them. This is the same model most business owners have been burned by at least once since they opened their doors.
It was software sold as a service (SaaS) before anybody used that phrase. Forty-two employees, every one of them remote, no office anywhere, in a time when that was close to unheard of. No investors either. We paid for the growth out of what the business made, and inside eighteen months it was valued at over twenty million dollars.
My end included buying the advertising, often more than fifty thousand dollars at a time, plus designing and maintaining the back office, the marketing strategy, the web design, and the multimedia.
That’s where I learned what one of those names actually is, and isn’t. It isn’t a customer. It’s a chance at one, and what happens in the minutes after it arrives decides everything.
So when this site is blunt about buying names by the pound, that isn’t a swipe at a competitor. It’s somebody describing a room he stood in for years.
The turn
Other owners watched it happen to me and asked the obvious question.
After the recording studio I started one of the first podcasts about the music industry. I kept the studio running, but the whole time the thing people wanted to talk to me about was the phone and how I was getting new business.
Friends and other business owners had seen it work for me and asked whether it would work for them. I honestly didn’t know. A recording studio isn’t a landscaper or a law firm. So we tried it a few times. It worked.
I paid less attention to studio work and more to helping other people get the same result, and in 2003 that became the business. More than two decades later it’s still the only thing I do.
I started in online marketing in 1998, which happens to be the year Google launched. I’ve never worked in a version of this industry that Google didn’t exist in, and I’ve watched every change it has made to how a small business gets found.
2016
The award we didn’t set out to win.
The Historic Columbia River Highway turned a hundred in 2016. The Troutdale Historical Society built an exhibit for it at the Barn Museum called King of Roads, and Lewis Creative led the campaign around it. Our mobile app division, Big Appz, built the interactive app and the iPad kiosks that ran on the museum floor.
The campaign won the 2016 AMA MAX Award for Best Integrated Campaign. We didn’t design that program to win anything. We designed it to be worth a visitor’s time, and it won because it was good.
That distinction is the whole argument this company makes. Nothing here is built to be admired. It’s built to work for the person using it, and the recognition, when it comes, is a by-product rather than the target.
It mattered to us for a plainer reason too. We’re Oregonians. That road is the first scenic highway in the country and it runs through the gorge everybody here grew up driving. Every one of us was glad to give it the respect and the attention it deserved.
What the years actually taught me
A lot of what I know came from reading things nobody enjoys reading.
I’ve read thousands of feedback forms from customers who were leaving. Not just leaving me, but also leaving the businesses I work for. Almost everybody in this trade learns from the customers who stayed, and those tell you what you’d like to hear. The ones who left tell you what actually went wrong, in their own words, and there’s no course that sells that.
I’ve listened to a great many recorded calls, too. Missed calls are the least of what’s on them. I’ve heard front desk staff send a caller to a competitor. I’ve heard owners answer their own phone so abruptly that the caller assumed they had the wrong number and hung up. Nobody was doing anything malicious, and none of it reached a report.
Those two things are why this company provides the services it does, in the order it provides them. Reviews, the phone and the website are the three things people complain about when they leave, so they’re the three things I fix first.
What my own trade says
The people who send me their own clients’ problems.
Both of these come from people who do this kind of work themselves and bring me in on their own projects. Not customers who liked the result: colleagues with the standing to judge the work, which is a harder audience and a more useful one.
“I have consulted with Allen many times in the past on various projects. I have found his advice to be rock solid and right on point. I have also seen him have great success with other clients. I highly recommend him to put together a viable marketing plan to anyone looking to increase their web presence.”
“When it comes to SEO and all things technical Allen really knows his stuff. He’s been in this field longer than almost anyone I know. He is always extremely knowledgeable and helpful when it comes to anything website or SEO related. He gets amazing results for his clients and they generally stay with him for years and years. I can’t say enough positive things about Allen as a person… He is a stand-up dude. He is someone you want in the trenches with you. Highly recommend!”
What I still think about that first phone call.
It wasn’t magic. It was the first time in my life that work arrived without me going out to get it, and after twenty-odd years of going out to get it, I knew exactly how big a difference that was.
That’s the whole of the services I provide, and it’s why the promise on the front of this site is the plainest one I could write. Not more visibility. Not a better ranking. Clients that just show up, which is what happened to me in a studio I couldn’t afford, and what has happened since for a lot of people who were standing where you are.
If you want to work out whether I’m the right person for it, I’d start with the page where I say who I’m wrong for, and then what I’ve written about what this costs and why I won’t quote it blind. You can read both without talking to anybody, and that’s deliberate.
That said, I’d genuinely like to talk to you. Even if you’re nowhere near deciding anything, or you’re just working out what you might want to do next year, I enjoy hearing about somebody’s business and how they’re getting new clients now.
Fill in the form below or call me, and let’s have a conversation about it.
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