Vertical Go to Market_Damon Burton_EP 55_Audio _Edited_V1_Transcript
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Corey Quinn: [00:00:00] Hey everybody, I have an exciting update to share. First off, I want to thank you for being a part of this show. This is one of my favorite things that I get to do, and your feedback that I receive on almost a daily basis is truly wonderful. Okay, ready for the update? We're rebranding the podcast.
Currently, it's the Vertical Go To Market Podcast. The new name will be the Deep Specialization Podcast. We're doing this for a couple of important reasons. Number one is we've gotten great feedback on episodes that feature specialists of all types, and not just those who specialize in a vertical market.
With this new name, we'll be able to interview all sorts of amazing specialists who are doing things we can all learn from. This includes specialists in SEO and PPC and e commerce and SaaS and more. Number two is deep specialization is the term I use to talk about the right way to specialize. It's the intersection of focus, strategy, and customer intimacy.
I talk a lot about it in my [00:01:00] new book, and you'll start seeing more deep specialization content from me everywhere. Okay, so what's changing? In addition to interviewing amazing guests, You're going to start hearing from me directly. I'll be sharing my strategies, tools, and tactics with you on solo cast episodes.
What's not changing? It'll still be me bringing in fantastic experts who can teach us all how to specialize in order to scale and simplify our businesses and our communities. And our lives. I'm excited to bring it with you. Okay, that's it from me. Thanks again for being a part of the show. Welcome to the Vertical Go To Market podcast, where you'll discover new opportunities to grow your business.
From seven figures to eight, from the world's most successful agency and B2B SaaS executives. I'm your host, Corey Quinn. Let's jump into the show today. I'm joined by the president of SEO National and the Amazon bestselling author of a book called Outranked Damon Burton. Welcome, Dayden.
Damon Burton: What's up, Corey?
Hey, man, looking forward to chatting.
Corey Quinn: Really excited to chat with you [00:02:00] as well, Damon. You and I met out in Costa Rica, I think June of last year, it was at the Commitment Summit. And in fact, I think my wife and your family played hooky one day from the conference. That's right. To go hang out in Costa Rica.
And I was the sucker and I stayed behind in the conference. But you guys got to hang out and play in the jungle, which is awesome. I'm super excited for our conversation. You will get into it, but you are, as I said, the president of an agency that is specialized in doing SEO. So I want to unpack that.
Could you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your company to kind of kick things off?
Damon Burton: Uh, yeah. So, um, I started an agency 17 years ago. My background before that was web design. I always knew I never wanted to be an agency that did it all. And so when I Started to be exposed to SEO and, you know, maybe we'll get into that whole story later, but when I had the opportunity to focus on SEO, I said, since I don't want to do everything, I like SEO and let's see if it's my thing and decided to commit long enough to see if I [00:03:00] enjoyed it.
And 17 years later, I still enjoy it. Um, also been married 17 years, have three kids and that's the, that's the bio. That's
Corey Quinn: awesome. So that's been a very productive 17 years, both personally and professionally, it sounds like. What could you share, just for context, what could you share about some of the metrics around your business?
Maybe the number of employees, clients, revenue, growth, whatever you're comfortable sharing.
Damon Burton: So we do multiple millions per year. Never spent a dollar on ads, all been built on reputation. Don't have any outbound lead generation, don't have an email list, don't do any paid ads. We have, I would guess around 80 clients, give or take 5 to 10.
And then we have about 50 team
Corey Quinn: members. And do you provide services outside of SEO? Yes. And
Damon Burton: no, I mean, not really. The reason why I say yes and no is because we also do design, but it's because that comes with the territory of SEO. So we don't actively promote that. We do web design, but for SEO clients, we do solo design projects [00:04:00] because what we want to do is make sure we protect the integrity of the SEO that's been built.
There's been a lot of times where we've had other people outsource the design and then they ended up paying for it twice. They pay the person that did it and then they pay us to fix it.
Corey Quinn: Yeah, I don't believe you know this about me, but I, I have a background, I used to work at an agency that was doing enterprise level PPC or SEM and SEO, and we would do very complex, large websites.
We had an amazing SEO team that would get really deep in the architecture and the, and the content and whatnot. So I have an appreciation for design and its impact on SEO. For sure, but from a go to market perspective, that's not something you lead with. You know, some coming in saying, we're a design slash SEO firm.
You're, you're, that's an add on service that is helping to facilitate the implementation of good SEO
Damon Burton: effectively. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I never talk, you know, I do a lot on social media and evangelize what we do and clients, but it's, it's always SEO. It's never like we just did a design.
Corey Quinn: And [00:05:00] then tell us about who you serve.
You mentioned you have 80 clients. What, what's the makeup of those
Damon Burton: clients? They're all over the place. And I think we'll get deeper on that because of the, the different verticals that they're in, you know, I'll give you extreme. So on one end, we have mom and pops that have been with us from year one for 17 years.
And so those are, you know, automotive shops. Dental clients, attorneys, plumbers, kind of the standard local things that you think about, but then on the other side, we've worked with professional sports teams. We've worked with Utah Jazz's retail division. We've worked with America first field, which is the field for Rael Salt Lake, the soccer team.
We worked with Amar, which is the world's largest commercial real estate company that owns the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest tower in Dubai, billion dollar software companies. I mean, and then in between we got. Travel, software, hospitality, medical, it's all over the place. And
Corey Quinn: we'll get into that for sure.
But before we do, what's your role there day to day as the president? What's your primary
Damon Burton: focus? So it's kind of in a transitionary point right [00:06:00] now. It's, I hired a COO, I hired him about two years ago, but in his current capacity, he's been COO for about a year. And so I've been, Transitioning all the day to day to him, my team's done the day to day fulfillment for a while, but, you know, managing it and quality controlling and things like that.
I've had to keep a pulse on. And so I'm, I'm, I've had a personal interest in continuing to scale, which we can talk about the evolution of, of. My intentionality of growing slowly. And now I want to be aggressive. So I'm going to start focusing more on that. And then I have a big personal interest in, you know, building a community and just like we chatted before we hit record, you know, like what's in it for you.
And so for me, there's a lot of personal reward in helping people. And then at the same time, the more that you support people, the more it continues to build your reputation, which then in turns, in turns, coincidentally also drives revenue. And so it's kind of like a win win. And so I've been Moving more towards increasing the, the influencer position of my name and the company building a community behind it.
Um, [00:07:00] so it's kind of evolved.
Corey Quinn: So real quick, when you, when you, when you mentioned your community, by the way, you are prolific on social media and you, you're very. down to earth and real on social media, which is refreshing and nice. So it's, I enjoy looking at your posts. So thanks for that. When you're, when you say building a community, who, who are you trying to attract into this community?
Damon Burton: So there's two paths and then I'm trying to figure out how to prioritize it because on one sense it's, you know, do I want to go for the masses? And so there's an opportunity to help a lot of people. But if you are familiar with any level of success, you know, that the adoption rate of helping people is pretty low.
And so it's, it's this conflict of in your brain, you think you can help a lot of people, but the problem is not. The problem is, what people absorb on the other side. And so, I continually struggle with like the vanity metrics of I could help thousands of people in the community knowing that like 10 of them are going to take action on it.
And so, it's like, do I do that, or do I go on the other side where people value what they pay for, [00:08:00] and And Go after supporting people that are more inclined to take the action, which is better for both of us. And so, I mean, I think I just answered my own question thinking out loud about this, but there's always just this compelling conflict of, you know, just helping people, even though I know that, you know, The majority of the implementation is not my call.
Sure.
Corey Quinn: And it kind of reminds me of what you just said about going, growing slowly versus scaling and growing quickly. It's almost like you have to go slow to go fast is a, is a saying I like to say. So. Let's, let's dive into, let's just learn about the origin of the business. You've been in business for 17 years.
What was happening in your life as let's say a web designer that caused you to say, Hey, I want to, I want to start my own agency. Were you working somewhere else and you stepped out or were you an independent? Web designer at that time. Well, what was it, what was life like back then? Oh, no, this is
Damon Burton: a very easy question to answer.
So it's the, the short, compelling [00:09:00] reply is the company I was working for got raided and shut down by the ATF and the FTC. So I'll give some more context, I'll give some more context now. So what had happened was I had. been working for a gentleman who was highly successful financially speaking, but had a lot of toxicity in his personal life, family things.
And so I learned from that kind of helped break some glass ceilings as far as what was possible in entrepreneurship. And, and I think one thing that's important for entrepreneurs, early stage aspiring entrepreneurs to understand, or something to consider that's valuable that really helped me. is to don't feel obligated to pick a path or follow what other people are doing.
And so I always gave myself that freedom. And in retrospect, it was, it was so much weight lifted off my shoulders to not feel like I was obligated to pursue a path or to do it instantaneously. And then social media has only made it worse because everybody's always winning all the time. And so I saw this guy that was making like a million [00:10:00] to 2 million a month, but his marriage was falling apart, you know, all these other things.
And so I left purely because of the toxicity. Now, when I left, I had started to build up a reputation for doing certain type of landing page design that converted really well. And so there was these certain wells in the affiliate marketing industry that started to be exposed to my name. And so when I left the one gentleman, um, So I just took like a regular nine to five job and I was only there a couple of weeks before somebody called me up and said, Hey, we heard you left so and so I got this other guy that's interested.
Would you be interested? And I said, yeah, maybe. And he goes, well, he's on the other line right now. Can I bring him on? And so I ended up talking to this guy that was also really successful, but was. What was interesting about him is he didn't have the toxicity. He married his high school, sweetheart, had a handful of kids, always prioritize family.
And so it was, it was attractive to have that different environment, but he was in Las Vegas and I'm in Utah. And he says, well, we'd like you to come move down here. [00:11:00] Now, my wife and I were newly married. We'd been married about a year at the time. We'd been together for about two and a half years. And then we waited five years to have kids, but we knew they were on the horizon.
And so I didn't want to. I didn't want to move to Vegas. And so I told him, I said, I don't want to move to Vegas. And we went back and forth and he said, all right, fine. You can work from home and we'll revisit it in a year. So when I started working from home is when I started to build up my side hustle.
And so I would, my wife worked at a hospital. She'd go to work at like 4am and, and why not get up at 4am? When you have the energy in the 20s. So I would, I would bust out all of the Vegas companies work between four and 8am and then all of a sudden I had the entirety of the day left over to work on my own thing.
And so I started working on design on the side and building up side clients, which eventually became my first SEO clients. Now we're at transition to the agency was one day I went to message the Vegas team and this was before. Slack. And [00:12:00] so it was like AOL, instant messenger. And I couldn't get ahold of anybody called the office.
Nobody answered. And then I got a reply from one of the design, the overseas designers that I was kind of a lead for. And he says, did you hear? And I said, did I hear what I can't get ahold of anybody. And that's when I found out they got shut down. Now, what had happened was the. Welcome to the first episode of the it.
You know, there's a whole other story behind it. Somebody had the old stuff, the guy admitted to, and the new stuff, I think it was just a grudge and they caught him on technicalities. So they got shut down. So I, so I had three choices at that moment. Here's where we get back to your question is, you know, how did I transition?
Was. I had choice. Number one was to see if I still had a job and I was told I would. [00:13:00] And I told, you know, just that department was going to get shut down. And we still had these other businesses that he ran. So I could wait to see if that was true. I could go find a new job or I could take a bet on myself.
And so I took a bet on myself. I lost 60 percent of my revenue. So by that time I had built up 40 percent on the side, but I freed up 80 percent of my time. And so I was able to commit to those clients a little bit better. And if I remember right, you know, this was 17 years ago, if I remember right, it only took about three months to make that revenue back up.
And, and it was relative. I mean, I think I went from 50, 000 down to 30, 000. And so I was able to make that 20 back within a couple of months. And then from there, you know, I'll kind of pause because that's a lot to unpack. And, you know, maybe we can talk about the evolution since
Corey Quinn: then. I think I'm, I'm tracking, what were you doing at that company?
I'm just curious, the Vegas company, what was your role there? I did
Damon Burton: landing page designs. So, uh, in certain industries, they, they specialized in all the things you get spam for, you know, weight loss, insurance, [00:14:00] opportunities. Yeah.
Corey Quinn: Yeah. I'm familiar. Well, I'd love to, I'd love to hear the, you know, how you grew, how you grew the agency.
You mentioned that it's, It's been largely on reputation. Obviously today you have a much, I anticipate you have a much more established reputation than back then. So what were some of the things you did to bring on those early clients as you were kind of building it up?
Damon Burton: Well, the first way I got into SEO was from a design client and they're still a client today and, and they said, what do you know about Google?
And I said, I think I know enough that I can help you, but I don't know enough that I feel comfortable charging you, but I also don't want to work for free. And so I think this position is, is a unique opportunity for entrepreneurs to consider. And I've, a lot of people I mentor, I've told them to, you know, take the same approach and all of them that have actually.
Integrated, I have found success. And so I, I considered these benchmarks and we said, let's agree upon these goals. And if I hit them, you'll pay me retroactively and then we'll start a retainer. And so I think I hit the first [00:15:00] benchmark within three months. And so therefore they owed me three months of back pay, and then we started a monthly retainer.
And so it's a great opportunity for you because you're still incentivized as an entrepreneur while also admitting that you're learning. And then the company that you engage has nothing to lose. It either works or they pay nothing. And so when that worked, then that client had also referred another design client.
So I was able to go back and say, Hey, you know, those guys, here's what we just did. Do you want to do the same thing? And so then rolled out the same thing, had similar results. And then at that point is when I said. Let's give SEO a dedicated commitment and see where it goes. So that's how I got into it.
And then how it grew was transparency and communication and, and then results. And so the more you deliver results, then the more you start to. Get welcomed into people's networks and inner circles. And so I remember, you know, one gentleman who I'm still friends with, he's built and sold, he did five businesses in 10 [00:16:00] years.
And then he recently sold a six business for like 28 million bucks. And so out of those six businesses, three or four of them needed SEO. And so once I helped him with the first one, then I was this guy for all of them. And that one guy in my company's infancy, probably around years two or three, that one person gave me probably 25 percent of my entire portfolio.
And then those people bring intros and then those people's people bring intros. And so just getting really good at what your craft is and staying in your lane and. Dedicating to perfecting it and then being okay with delayed gratification is, is probably the, I guess it's the simple answer, relatively speaking.
Corey Quinn: And as you're, as you're building on these clients. It sounds like it's somewhat gradual, but there's only so many hours in the day. How did you manage the sort of the compounding scope of work that was falling on your shoulders
Damon Burton: with these new clients? You know, that's, that's a good question because that [00:17:00] breaking point evolves.
Over the years. And so the first breaking point was when I had to hire my first team member. His name is Marco and he's still with me today. And he's actually the one that messaged me. Did you hear? So, you know, when you hire your first person, it's kind of scary because you see money coming in and you're new to balancing books.
And then you also are, you have some insecurities about the sustainability. of a new business, nothing could be wrong and you're still thinking these things. And so it's like, so, so the first guy with Marco, I said, you know, I want to provide stability. So I don't want to take you on full time unless I can commit to you being full time.
Like I was more worried for him than me and that's how it's always been throughout for all my team members. And so for him, I did piece rate. I said, you know, keep your current thing you're doing and work piece rate with me until the piece rate starts to consistently exceed What a monthly pay would be.
And then we'll just go to salary. And [00:18:00] then where it started to grow was I was listening to two books around the same time. I was listening to E Myth Revisited and 4 Hour Workweek. And so if you're not familiar with them, E Myth Revisited kind of teaches you how to compress time. And then 4 Hour Workweek teaches you how to cut corners.
And what I found interesting in retrospect about listening to those two around the same time was that You don't want to, you don't want 4 Hour Workweek until you first listen to EMATS Revisited because you don't want to cut corners until you know what's at stake and you know you have your processes documented.
And so that was a really interesting combination. And what I took away from that is, you know, why don't I have more people doing this with me? And so from there is when I went from like four to eight team members. And, and the evolution of it was, you know, your team member, number one, and then two and three, then four is when I, I think it was a different ecosystem.
And then four to eight was, was a learning curve. And then eight to 15 was a learning curve. [00:19:00] Then I think 15 to about 30 was about the same. And then after 30 was a whole other ballgame. And so it's like each of those phases is there's different problems. The beginning is the obligation of responsibility and the weight of that.
And then as you grow, it's, you know, the financial commitments and liabilities and balancing. And then after that, it's logistical. It's, you know, how do you, like you run out of Damon. At some point. And so you have to make intentional decisions where, you know, having these really intimate relationships with your team members has been a superpower, but there's just literally no way to do it anymore.
And so how do you try to maintain that, but in a different way? And so there's just a different breaking point at each level.
Corey Quinn: And how have you as a leader had to change throughout these different sort of iterations of the business?
Damon Burton: I think the most notable notice was probably last year or two. It's, it's [00:20:00] admitting that despite how much you enjoy doing some parts of it, You just can't do it anymore.
And so that's been, that's been more of a personal thing that you deal with than, than a business fulfillment, because there's things that you're inherently good at, but then you meet resistance where it doesn't matter that you're still the best one. At some point, 80, 20 is better than a single day, a minute, a hundred.
So
Corey Quinn: you mentioned documenting processes, which I'm assuming is a fundamental to your ability to grow and bring on more of these folks. Did you ever. Attempt or consider sort of narrowing the focus to a vertical market exclusively or semi exclusively that ever crossed your radar?
Damon Burton: Yeah, I considered it and for a long time it really bothered me.
So, so I only do SEO, but to your point, it's like, do we only do SEO for just attorneys or just dentists or just roofers or just plumbers or just whatever? And I'd see all these other people niching down and then we always hear the phrases, riches are in the [00:21:00] niches and things like that. Um, And I, and I believe it and I see the value and I see the benefit.
But every time I sat down and spent time or money on narrowing down to our audiences, I couldn't figure it out. And I still can't figure it out because it's like the, what I realized is that the biggest factor in the probability of our clients having success is not their industry, but the point of contact.
And so it matters less to me. Whether they're a service or a product, if they're e commerce or non e commerce, if they're consulting or physical, it matters who we're dealing with. And so the ideal client is somebody that has been in business long enough that understands the value of hiring an expert and getting out of the way, but also being available and willing to communicate and contribute.
when asked. And so that persona [00:22:00] is the biggest variable for success. And so when I gave myself the freedom to like not feel guilty about having an itch, then that was a weight off my shoulders. But then I'm also grateful now that I've been at this for so long because it kind of bothered me in the middle years.
So in the beginning, it doesn't bother you so much because you're just figuring things out and you'll take on any client and you're just trying to keep the momentum moving in the middle years is when you're trying to find a focus and figure out what the next thing is. Scalable opportunity for momentum is that's when it was kind of a conflict, but now I'm fortunate and I think it's grateful for my unique scenario that we're agnostic and the value is in our SOPs and we can just roll those out to any industry now.
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So would you [00:24:00] advise, let's say the 17 year younger version of Damon, who's just starting his agency today, has a passion for SEO, loves it, and would love to build a career around it. Would that be something you advise them to, you know, to follow in your footsteps or would it be something else today?
Damon Burton: I don't think I changed anything.
The only thing that I maybe would have changed is it is I would have documented processes sooner. Okay. You say more about that? The only variable. Yeah. Well, when I started documenting processes, it was probably around year seven or eight. And um, what had happened was I went to a VC meeting, my friend that built and sold the multiple businesses.
He invited me when he was building that sixth one. And, and he says, Hey, I'm building out a consulting agency, you know, I have all these experience building and selling all these businesses. And so now I want to build a big consulting firm and we're going to specialize in this market. And I think it would be attractive if we also had other specialists, specialists in other markets, [00:25:00] hence you and SEO.
So would you come just join the conversation with no obligations? And so I went to this meeting and it was very quickly unattractive to me. I could see all the ways. This isn't to say that all VCs are like this, but this particular group, it was very clear that, that there was legal loopholes that they were guaranteeing they were going to screw you on.
And so it sounds all attractive and it's like fake money that they're going to take back anyway. And, you know, they're going to roll up your business and do this and that. And, and, but the two things I learned from it was when you deal with an acquisition. Ideally in a better scenario, a positive scenario, the buyer primarily wants two things.
And so the first thing is they want to know what the SOPs are. They want to take the keys and run. And so business in a box. Yeah. Yeah. And then the second thing they want is to know where the fire is, the cells, so they can just go pour more fuel on it. And so I had, at that point I had processes, but it was like somewhere in my head and [00:26:00] somewhere on a spreadsheet.
And so that's the moment where I said, I need to consolidate these to a centralized repository. Now what came from that was me also acknowledging that I didn't want to half ass the documentation and I didn't want to come back and do it again. And so that ended up, what that meant was it took me an hour or two every other day for a year to fully document our processes.
Wow. Because I wanted to know, I didn't want to just check off the box and say it was documented knowing that I had to go back and fill in gaps. And so I wanted to document it so efficiently that I could hire somebody that A could read and B could follow directions. And as long as those two criteria were met, they couldn't screw it up because I had documented it so clearly.
And when I did that, it was great timing because that was when we really started to grow more. And so I needed the comfort of maintaining quality control at scale. And SOPs did that. And it's also when we had our first client, an [00:27:00] opportunity to bid on a 10, 000 a month contract. And I wouldn't have felt comfortable doing it.
And even if you did bid on it and you got it and you didn't have those SOPs, you wouldn't have delivered well on it. And so it was good timing. And, and I'm grateful I did it the way I did it because it's, you know, you actually nailed it earlier. It's been probably one of the core things that's allowed us.
to scale and maintain a reputation. So
Corey Quinn: because I'm, uh, I'm assuming because you wrote the SOPs that, that the people you were hiring were, were resources to help you to take certain sort of actions off of your plate. In other words, you were, you were duplicating yourself by, by hiring this resource. And giving them this very clearly documented SLP for them to do this thing, all these steps, and as a result of that, you're going to get the same result as if you did it, theoretically.
So is that fair? It's like you were, you were kind of the, the [00:28:00] person who owned the whole value creation for the client and that you were just piecing it out to different people. Resources, or did other people in the organization have their own SOPs that they would own as part of this documentation process?
Damon Burton: So I built them all myself, and then I gave very specific tasks. And so originally when we were growing the team, we would hire based on individual skill sets. And so it's like, you're going to do this, this one thing. And then we would expose them to other things. So they could understand the value of the contributions and what came before and after it.
But they would focus on just that single thing. And that worked really well and still does to an extent. And so that was the main way of scaling the team for, for a couple of years. But now it's, now it's largely different. Now it's, now the team maintains a lot of the documentation, especially the seniors that have been with me for a long time.
Now they understand the importance of it. You know, you can tell somebody you need to document things, but until they see a mistake that happens because of the gap in documentation or the [00:29:00] benefit of the clarity of documentation, you can't properly communicate it. And so the people that have been with me for a long time now genuinely understand the significance of proper documentation.
And then I also know how obsessive I've been preaching it over the years. I'd be like, you have to do this very clearly. Because your team members are going to be as good or as bad as the documentation you provide them. And they're probably not going to screw up on purpose, but they will 100 percent screw up on accident if there's a gap in that documentation.
And so now I've, now the team largely has that. The team does the day to day. I don't. And so, you know, I heard a good analogy a while ago. It's where, where it's like now me and the seniors, we're not the bodies. We're the brains. And so we're not touching the things, we're just guiding the touching of things.
Yeah. And so I don't get exposed to as much. granularity as I used to. And so now, now, now adding the team members is different. Now it's seniors. [00:30:00] And now it's people that can continue to steer the ship and understand the importance of quality, control, and reputation. You mentioned you
Corey Quinn: started documentation around seven, year seven or eight.
What would you advise sort of, you know, younger or earlier stage agencies? What's the right time to get started on
Damon Burton: that? Day one, like, you know, okay, maybe not day one because you got to break stuff for a while. You got to figure out what you like and don't like. You got to figure out what's efficient, not efficient.
But the moment you commit to going, this is the process for this task, document it. Because if you don't document it, because here's what's going to happen. If you don't, you're, you're, you're going to go, I'm just such a master at this. And I'm going to do this forever. And then you start to grow. And then you're like, oh, I need to hire somebody.
And then you just kind of like it becomes so second nature to you that you dismiss how big of a knowledge gap there is between you and the person you're about to pass it to. And so then you bring somebody else in and because you don't have the documentation, [00:31:00] you're instantly going to be in for some pain because they're, they're either going to screw up a task, they're going to under deliver, they're going to affect your reputation and guess whose fault it is?
Not theirs. Right. And so when you do it in advance, you know, and the other thing is you're not going to have more time as you grow. You're going to have less time. So now how are you going to document all this stuff when now it's not only crunch time, but you don't have any time to do it. Right.
Corey Quinn: And you can't train someone and whatnot.
I was reminded of this lesson on a much smaller scale when I hired some resources via Upwork to help me, you know, execute a specific task. And of course, I wasn't as explicit as I should have been in my instructions and my You know, my SLP, let's say, and I didn't get back what I wanted. And they were good, solid people who were just doing what they thought was the right thing.
So there was that. That, that gap that they were filling in and I was, I was not communicating clearly. So it happens.
Damon Burton: Yeah. You know, what's interesting now is our mistakes are [00:32:00] so far and few, uh, few and far between, but when they happen, it's, for me, it's nearly maddening because of how well we've made, we've embraced that into our company.
And so for me, inside, I go insane, but it's a great learning opportunity. So forward facing, I come back to the theme and, and I go, you know, Hey, What happened and why and who, and not because I'm going to get mad, but because this is an opportunity for us to fix a gap somewhere. And so despite how maddening it is inside, it's actually quite exciting on the other side of the coin too, because it's like, great.
Now we're just exposed to something that we can make better. That's
Corey Quinn: it. Opportunity to improve. So how does remote teams play into the growth of your business? You mentioned Marco was your first employee. Was, was Marco Like, do you guys get an office space somewhere? Or do you both work remote? And how did you grow
Damon Burton: it?
I only know remote teams. I've always had remote teams. [00:33:00] So half of my team's in the States, half of them are in the Philippines. Marco's in the Philippines. And all of our leads are in the States. You know, it's important to understand that, you know, It's important to understand leveraging resources, but also maintaining quality control.
And so when you're looking into external team, remote teams, and especially the opportunities with VAs and overseas, there's a value opportunity financially, right? This is a, a place where there is a different cost of living and you can still pay somebody attractively in the Philippines, which is significantly still lower saving you money versus state side employees.
But you're also putting at risk quality control, not because of anything intentional, but because of gaps in understanding cultural differences and communications and jargon and things like that. So you have to be really careful about. Protecting your quality control based on what you hire for. So, you know, we are designing developers.
Because that's very literally literal, right? You design a thing that looks good, that converts good. You develop a piece of code that executes a [00:34:00] function. There's a before and after the end, but when it comes to reviewing the interpretive design, the emotions of a design, not only does it just look pretty, but will it convert what are the words on it and how did the messages convey.
How you solve a problem, then those are much more dynamic and interpretive. And so all of those, all those team members are in the States. All of our copywriters are in the States. And for about two years, I bought an office and it was just as an experiment. That was just about six years ago. So I was window shopping, commercial real estate, just to give myself a break, like just to try somewhere different and then.
I'm in Utah, but the majority of our clients are not in Utah. So I thought, I wonder if we have physical representation, if that would be an easy opportunity. And so I, as I was shopping around, I found a place that was cheaper to buy than to rent. So I bought the place and I worked there for about a year, [00:35:00] brought enough clients to pay the mortgage on the building, but not enough that I cared to be there.
And so I eventually just went back home. And then rented it out for a year. And then I got lucky and sold it right before the world shut down. And so I think the timing was coincidental and fortunate with that. And so there was just a brief, brief moment in between where just I, I went to an office, but my team has always worked from home.
Corey Quinn: And that's, I mean, that's interesting that you, that you experimented. And I think that's, that's great. Especially. 17 years, it makes sense to, that you, it's likely you may get a little, you know, what do they call it? Just itchy feet on, on trying to get cooped up. Exactly. I, I personally like working from home.
Uh, my, my whole business is run from my home. I used to go in the office every day. I had a 45 minute commute each way and, you know, on a good day and it was just, it was such a blessing to be able to, you know, to come home and not have to, to go into the office. But [00:36:00] some people like it. Some people would like, want the.
You know the camaraderie and the this or the more of the energy that comes with with being around people But that's that's
Damon Burton: not me. The one thing that I did enjoy The office was just right up the street. It was literally right up the same street And so it was five minute drive. The one thing I did enjoy was that five minute drive.
Hmm. I think There's a thing of time there and then the decompression time on the way home. Nice. Just that five minutes made a huge difference.
Corey Quinn: Well, I'll tell you for my 45 minute commute, it was again on a good day. Sometimes it was much longer than that. I became extremely well read. I listened to a lot of amazing marketing podcasts and I was, was, I learned a lot.
So I tried to maximize that time, but. Still it's better to be home with the family. Yeah. Let's shift gears a little bit. I'd love to get your opinion. You're deeply immersed in the world of SEO and you work with 80 clients of all shapes and sizes. So you probably have an interesting perspective or at least, you know, an opinion on this.
What [00:37:00] does the future of SEO look
Damon Burton: like? Well, I guess, Probably one of the easiest ways to take a shot at the future is to look at the past and how it's evolved. I can probably answer it two ways. One is I have no idea, which is going to be substantially different than the other answer that I usually give, which is it's almost entirely the same.
So a lot of people are really surprised because they, especially marketers, and they're like, Oh, SEO is constantly evolving and algorithms are changing, which is true. The algorithms are changing. There's. You know, some minor ones as frequently as daily, major ones, you know, quarterly. But what hasn't changed is the core fundamentals of SEO.
And I think that's a big part that's contributed to my success is not getting distracted with shiny objects and how do I manipulate the algorithms? And instead you can simplify it to three areas. And so the first area is how good or bad is your website built? It's going to be things like, does it load quickly?
Is it mobile friendly? [00:38:00] Is there a clear call to action? The second area of fulfillment is going to be content. You can only show up on Google for what Google can read. So do you clearly communicate your products and services and your value propositions? And then the third scope would be external credibility.
Do you have a reputation? Do other people talk about you? Do they link to you? And so when we look at those three, most of your visibility is going to come from So it's, it's a, it's a different website. So you can have an amazing website with great content and amazing credibility, but if your website's garbage and it loads slowly and looks like crap, then it's going to dilute all the other efforts.
So now that we've kind of set that foundation, we can look at how things have evolved over the years in SEO. And anytime there's been a major algorithm update, I'll give a couple core examples in 2011 and 2012 were some of the most significant ones, one focused on content, one focused on External credibility and links.
And to summarize them, they basically shifted from quantity to [00:39:00] quality. And then there's other algorithm updates that have come out. Like in 2016, there was a big one called mobile get in where everything went mobile first. And if you think about what does a mobile friendly site mean, it's that first category.
Does it load quickly? Is it easy to navigate? Does it happen? Then the second category content that clearly communicates what's offered. And so anytime there's been a major algorithm update, it reverse engineers into one or multiples of those three categories and always only has, even when we talk about AI, like AI, everyone's saying, well, AI is going to dominate SEO.
And what we've found is the opposite. AI is leaning heavily on SEO. And where is AI getting the results? A from websites that it can access quickly. you That has good content that it's unique and value added. So if anything, we've seen our clients increase and I'll make one other comment on the AI is where people are saying, well, how do you [00:40:00] compete with people that are mass producing AI generated content?
I don't, I don't even care about them. And here's why, because what that algorithm update that came out in 2011 and 12 on content, there's tools that still exist. They're not as used as much anymore called spinners. People would still their competitors, content. It's still content for Wikipedia. They'd paste it in there.
And what it does is it shuffles the paragraphs and swaps out synonyms to create quote unquote, unique content. What do you think AI is doing right now? It is largely just a more qualified content spinner. So though I agree that AI has a headstart and a hockey stick in the quantity of output, I'd be really surprised if Google isn't working on closing that gap and coming out with something to punish low quality content.
Yeah.
Corey Quinn: And I'm sorry, but the AI driven content. Is you think about, well, I'll say back in the day, there used to be content, like you'd load the footer with, you know, keywords [00:41:00] or you'd, you'd create content for the search engines, but not the humans. I, I, I would consider the AI content, you know, the, the generative AI that's being created right now, at least today is not necessarily meant for the humans.
It's meant for the algorithm. And I think that's one of the things that Google has been, has demonstrated. They know how to get recognized in the, in their
Damon Burton: rankings. Yeah, we did, um, we did an experiment where we pulled some outside contributors and we said, Hey, here's a topic. Give us your contribution. And what was interesting is every time we did this sample crowdsourcing, every time it come back with identifiable patterns.
And I am not an algorithm. This is just with my own naked eye, I could see five different people run five different prompts. and produce five different pieces of content that all had the exact same patterns. Now, if I can detect that just in an instant, just imagine what sort of catalog that Google is building up to identify these patterns.[00:42:00]
Corey Quinn: Thanks. Back to a little bit about growth. Do you productize your services or is it all, you know, sort of bespoke and custom based on where the client is and their specific
Damon Burton: situation? It's all specific. Yeah. So we have a core fulfillment model that basically the price just varies on how aggressive we need to be.
So do we need more or less of those things?
Corey Quinn: And what determines if someone needs to be, if you need to be aggressive, it's just the, the, the competitive nature of the keywords and whatnot.
Damon Burton: Yeah, it's either the industry itself. So, you know, real estate's obviously substantially more competitive than blue widgets.
Yeah. And then there's also geographical qualifiers. So are we, are we an attorney that's in a city, a small town, or do they service statewide or they affirm that services nationally? So the geographical qualifiers also contribute.
Corey Quinn: Very, very cool. Makes sense. As we wrap up here, I wanted to see what would be your advice for, let's say an agency owner who may be struggling with scaling.
That's a [00:43:00] vague question, but in general, like how would you, what advice would you have for them? They eagerly wanted to grow their
Damon Burton: agency. Yeah, I mean, it certainly can vary depending on the individual circumstance. I think as a general common problem, it's, it's probably either SOPs, you know, your standard operating procedures, your documentation.
They're not enjoyable to, I'm not going to say that they're fun, but they are Significant and important. So it's either that, or it's a lack of clarity and messaging, especially earlier entrepreneurs. It's, you know, what, what are you, what do you do? What do you offer? And what do people know you for offering?
And so too many times when we're in the early stage of entrepreneurship, we want to do it all because we, we want money, we want clients, I get it. But what that does is ends up diluting the clarity in what you offer. So pick one thing and do really well at that one thing. And then maybe later you can consider adding on things.
But [00:44:00] there is, you know, in my example where I've stayed in my lane and I've been consistent in evangelizing the lane that I've stayed in, what happens is now I am no longer an SEO option. I am the only SEO option in the minds of the people that follow me. And so you want that sort of clarity and confidence in the message that you deliver.
What is it that you offer and what do you want to be known for? So you need to look at what are you most passionate about, or, you know, what has the higher profit margins, preferably a balance of both so you can enjoy doing it for a long time, but pick one thing and master that before you delete yourself across everything.
Great
Corey Quinn: advice. Last question for you. What's your motivation?
Damon Burton: My family has always been my motivation, but I think even that's the scope of that's evolved. And so in the beginning it's, you know, providing for a young family. And then now I've been fortunate enough that I'm confident in the legacy and relationships that I have with my wife and kids.
And so now it's like, [00:45:00] what? I still have a long way to go. Runway ahead of me. So what do I want to continue to do with that? And my family will always be a big part of that, but what do I want things to look like when I'm gone? And the, the legacy, not only psychologically, but the, the literal impact that you can leave behind.
And so for me, it's kind of shifted to legacy in the last couple of years. That's
Corey Quinn: beautiful. Well, Damon, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people reach out to you if they have a follow on questions, if they want to pick your brain a little more.
Damon Burton: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Corey. Um, DamonBurton. com, pretty simple on there.
You can find all the social links and then you can also, if you want to go down the rabbit hole of SEO, you can get a copy of my free book.
Corey Quinn: Beautiful. Thanks so much for joining. Thanks Corey. All right, folks, that's it for today. I'm Corey Quinn, and I hope you join me again next time for the Vertical Go To Market Podcast.
If you receive value from this show, I would love a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks, and we'll see you [00:46:00] soon.
