About Me and My Passion for Technology, Marketing, and Entrepreneurship
I run my management and marketing consultancy out of my home in Pittsburgh and I’ve been building websites for fun since 1997.
I quit my full-time job to pursue my dream in June of 2024, just 2 months after the birth of my first son, Max.
This is my abbreviated story for anyone who is interested.
I don’t know why, but I had a strong desire to be a computer programmer while I was growing up.
Maybe it was my innate ability to solve problems quickly.
Maybe the movie Office Space just gave me the idea that it was a cool job.
Either way, I spent a lot of free time working on my software and website development skills in high school.
I figured it was the closest I’d ever get to being a rockstar. And it really did take me places.
Over the years, I’ve had many professional adventures, including starting my own web hosting reseller business while I was in high school. I had to sell the business at a discount due to what I can only describe as a bit of hereditary bad luck and a total lack of self-discipline.
But I never gave up and I never stopped learning, especially when it came to the areas of user interface design, SEO, and entrepreneurship.
I’ve been all about solving real-world business problems ever since I was a young adult. It’s too bad that I was forced into post-secondary education after high school and I didn’t have the spine to stand up for myself.
I just wasn’t ready. I became a burnout, a dropout, and unemployable.
After hitting rock bottom in 2005 and almost being homeless, I reenrolled in the same program that I dropped out of 2 years earlier.
But this time, I was on a mission. I was ready to turn my life around and be their biggest success story.
It didn’t take long for me to go after what I wanted. I remember it like it was yesterday.
In what was possibly the boldest moment in my life up to that point, I walked into the IT Director’s office, slammed an ASP 3.0 programming book down on his desk, and demanded to know what else he needed me to learn before he’d let me loose on their intranet site that was being held together by a work-study with virtual duct tape.
He said, “keep your grades up.”
After posting straight A’s for a couple of months, they gave me what I wanted. Well, mostly.
I became a help desk support technician and web application developer.
I was that guy in the hoodie who made that sweet app everyone used to check their grades.
I had finally made it. I got my fame, albeit for $7 an hour as a part-time work-study.
HUGE shout out to Hunter at Triple H Solutions for giving me my big break!
But I wanted and needed more. I was hungry (and still am).
I immersed myself in materials like the Google founders’ Anatomy of a Search Engine paper that they published through Stanford. I was reading Microsoft system architecture books that were just a little bit outside of my depth.
Those things might be normal for some college students… but I did it for fun.
To help make ends meet, I also started freelancing as a website developer, and I found that I really enjoyed it. I was able to make an extra few thousand dollars every year or two from my website design work. But I still sucked at SEO and couldn’t get an ROI if my life depended on it.
After graduating, the school kept me part-time as a 22-year-old developer, instructor, and help desk tech. I was hot shit, at least in my mind.
And at the same time, I was greedy, naive, and still a little bit ignorant when it came to the real world.
After a traumatic layoff, I settled into my software support niche in 2011. It paid the bills but didn’t allow me to grow my income as much as I wanted.
Don’t get me wrong, I learned a lot. But my now ex-wife was much more interested in financial stability than independence, so I put my big dreams of owning my own business on hold to focus on my career.
And saying that I was focused is actually an understatement. I was obsessed and refused to be anything less than #1.
That’s how I earned technical leadership positions at the last 2 companies that I worked for and finally started making the kind of money that I thought I wanted.
But there was a price and the cost was my time and mental health. I felt trapped and there was no way out.
That all changed when I learned my 1 missing ingredient for running a successful business in 2020 – recurring revenue.
I immediately pivoted my side hustle from website design freelancer to SEO agency.
Apparently, being able to make local businesses show up on the map in Google searches is a pretty big deal. So I’ve used that expertise to help my customers scale their businesses and multiply their revenue.
Fortunately for me, I always stayed up to date on the latest SEO trends and hit the ground running. It was nothing short of magical.
And I did it while still holding a full-time job thanks to the power of delegation and my innate ability to create effective systems.
Thanks to my efforts, my biggest customer was found by Epic Games as well as several other big national brands.
Along the way, I was able to help them navigate all kinds of challenges that were well outside of what I thought was my area of expertise. I guided him through dealing with a problem child employee, accepting and improving from negative customer feedback, and even talked him through contract negotiations.
In 2023, they paid themselves almost $300,000 with no other marketing.
They’ve graciously given me the credit for their growth.
It’s probably needless to say at this point: I’m always looking for new opportunities to help myself and others grow professionally.
I’m going to provide you with a lot of great material, including details on several tools, techniques, and shortcuts that I’ve utilized to help small to medium-sized companies grow throughout my 20 year career.
If you’re interested in learning more about me or how I can help you, please don’t hesitate to check out some of my content and contact me. I’d be happy to chat if you think we can help each other out.
Thanks for reading!
– Bill Wolf