How Ross Hudgens focused on high quality clients, content and services to grow Siege Media
How Ross Hudgens focused on high quality clients, content and services to grow Siege Media
Ross Hudgens (00:03):
I bet a lot of people doing like crappy link building and working with any affiliate that will give them money. And that's a big part of it too, is we're picking the right clients and being willing to say no to people.
Peep Laja (00:15):
I'm Peep Laja. I don't do fluff. I don't do filler. I don't do emojis. What I do is study winners in B2B, because I want to know how much your strategy, how much is luck, and how do they win.
Peep Laja (00:29):
This week, Ross Hudgens, founder and CEO at Siege Media, an SEO-focused content marketing agency. There are hundreds of content marketing agencies, around more on the way. The competition is fierce. And with over a hundred head account, Siege's monthly payroll is high. So how do they compete? How do they win? In this episode, we'll talk about the importance of choosing high quality clients.
Ross Hudgens (00:51):
Being willing to say this is not good enough, we won't work with you unless you do it almost always gets them to work with you.
Peep Laja (00:58):
We hear about the value of adding high quality service to your offering.
Ross Hudgens (01:02):
We have to win on every single variable, and the content experience is one of those variables.
Peep Laja (01:07):
And we talk about the power of building a personal brand.
Ross Hudgens (01:10):
I think people want to follow people. They don't want to follow brands.
Peep Laja (01:14):
Let's get into it.
Peep Laja (01:17):
Ross, you started your agency about 11 years ago. Back then, was it just yourself? Did you have co-founders?
Ross Hudgens (01:25):
Just me.
Peep Laja (01:25):
Just you. And now, you are how many people?
Ross Hudgens (01:28):
Over a hundred.
Peep Laja (01:30):
Over a hundred people. It's an SEO content marketing agency, and I can name another 500 or so just on top of my head. And of course, if I would Google this, I would find another 10,000. Most of those SEO agencies are small. So, tell me, walk me through some of the strategic bets you made over the course of the years that have gotten your company to where it is today.
Ross Hudgens (01:53):
I mean, early days, we started as just another vanilla SEO agency, but I was doing link building and content on the side, or that was kind of my focus and knowledge specifically that I felt I was good at, and just saw an opportunity that this market, and just knew from exposure, was significant in size. So, I effectively learned eventually I could lean into a big pie and just pick a piece of that pie that no one else was really representing very clearly and lean into that.
Ross Hudgens (02:26):
And that's how I leaned into content marketing specifically as part of that SEO pie. And over time, definitely knowing SEO helped in knowing how the industry was changing. We've stayed ahead in terms of adding service lines that other people might not be willing to invest in yet, that have slowly also allowed us to move up market over time as well.
Ross Hudgens (02:47):
That's kind of a moat that we feel like we're establishing in terms of we are large, so we're reliable to bigger brands because of that. We pay for a premium website that I think also reflects an upmarket message. We have good brands on roster that we've continued to add over time, which, again, kind of reinforces that from a compounding snowball point of view. And those kinds of things have moved us up.
Ross Hudgens (03:14):
Over time, we did have some competitors in the marketplace. It started as just link building, has gone more and more brand over time, and gotten better there. And there are people just do off target link bait work, and we realized there's more value from brand which also lines up market with search volume-driven content that also can generate links.
Ross Hudgens (03:35):
So, we've leaned into kind of a high quality approach that ties their brand while a lot of other people in the marketplace that were SEOs just didn't get that and went off topic, let's go viral, that Pepsi can't do very often anyways.
Peep Laja (03:52):
Brand and differentiation are inseparable. The less awareness there is about you, the more differentiation you need. The more saturated space that you're in, the more differentiation you need to stand out and get noticed.
Peep Laja (04:04):
If you start a new health supplements company, you can't be about health and fitness goals, it's been done to death. That place is already occupied. It will take insane amounts of money to build a new brand there. To stand out and get noticed, you need to be what Seth Godin puts it, a purple cow.
Seth Godin (04:20):
Consumers don't care about you at all. They just don't care. Part of the reason is they got way more choices than they used to and way less time. And in a world where we have too many choices and too little time, the obvious thing to do is just ignore stuff. And my parable here is you're driving down the road and you see a cow and you keep driving, because you've seen cows before, cows are invisible, cows are boring. Who's going to stop and pull over and say, "Oh, look. A cow"? Nobody.
Seth Godin (04:55):
But if the cow was purple, you notice it for a while. I mean, if all cows are purple, then, you get bored with those too.
Peep Laja (05:02):
A strong brand is the reason why companies are successful. It is not a reward for its success. A lot of the best brands are exclusive. The more appeal you have for a segment, the more you need to repel others. So, if your supplements brand or even your agency is for people that are into, let's say, orgies and heavy metal, it just might work. Probably nobody owns that space in the mind of the customer yet.
Peep Laja (05:28):
You said you invested in services that other companies did not invest in. What were those things?
Ross Hudgens (05:35):
Yeah. Some things we've done more recently, we started adding UX design. So, we hired multiple UX designers and we're helping... As things keep getting harder from a content standpoint, we're helping clients level up their content experience. Because that wasn't as needed like three years ago as everything was not as competitive, but now, we have to win on every single variable, and the content experience is one of those variables.
Ross Hudgens (05:59):
So, we've added that. We're doing interactivity, we have photography, video. We're doing things like you do with video, and I think that has also helped us. Even though we're not getting a ton of views, it's clear we're premium, and a lot of SEO agencies, you go to their website, they're crappy. They don't have a way of reflecting a premium service very clearly.
Peep Laja (06:19):
How soon into your journey did you figure out that you want to be premium, or you should be premium?
Ross Hudgens (06:25):
It just was kind of iterative, to be honest, we kind of move mid-market, but something about content and SEO, we knew if the SEO pie is only so large, you technically have to be more up market for that to be a big enough P and L line item for us to potentially be like part of a technical suite. And then, someone's hiring us as well.
Ross Hudgens (06:45):
And as Google has gone up market and we just see those sites winning long term, it's just a survival mechanism in some ways as well. Which maybe is not the most helpful from a positioning for other people standpoint. But yeah, we're kind of making a bet on who we see are the winning SEO sites long term to also align our service to those websites to also be successful. I bet a lot of people doing like crappy link building and working with any affiliate that will give them money, and that's a big part of it too, is we're picking the right clients and being willing to say no to people. It's part of our positioning and our service selection too.
Peep Laja (07:22):
So, tell me more about the client selection process. How do you choose who is a good fit client?
Ross Hudgens (07:28):
One, we'll look at did they recently get funding? So, are they series A plus? Maybe they've started to establish some product market fit that people like them. That's a good indicator that they're trending up in the right direction and potentially could win. One, are they actually the best product in the space? So, very often, the best product is not actually ranking and search yet. So, if they're best or, at least, like top couple, good chance we can help accelerate them to get there.
Ross Hudgens (07:55):
Are they actually adding value, or do they just rank for things? People that are just ranking for things which tend to be like affiliate sites aren't doing anything special, and those people probably will lose long term. And even though they can pay us 10K a month, they're going to churn. We're going to have to replace them. They're not going to be a great case study and all of that kind of compounds to success over time, in my opinion.
Peep Laja (08:17):
Another interesting thing you said that in order to be premium, that you also had to recruit "premium people". So, like experienced, people who know what they're doing. So, what were some of the strategies to attract those people to join your, I guess, back then, much smaller agency?
Ross Hudgens (08:36):
There was definitely an element of faking it until we make it, for sure. We continued to improve our hiring quality. A lot of that is, as we've slowly laddered up, we're charging more. And in turn, now, we can afford to, one, pay more experienced people that were already in our org, but also, higher outside people at higher rates. And we have a good looking, in my opinion, biased careers page. We did a careers video.
Ross Hudgens (08:59):
We're investing in recruiting effectively through that. And I think those are good differentiator. When hiring... Hiring is everything in agency. So, that's just got to be really dialed in to get people to join, for sure.
Peep Laja (09:16):
War for talent is real. It's very hard for small businesses to compete with the Googles and Shopifys of the world. Lots of people want to work for Google or Apple, but it's nobody's dream to work for your small company. One advantage and moat you can have is founder's personal brand. I can't tell you how many top applicants want to work at CXL or Winter because they want to work with me. That's an advantage most any small company with a visible founder can have.
Peep Laja (09:41):
Another thing you can do as a small business, accept and be transparent that you're a farm club. You're the Timberwolves when everyone else wants to join the Lakers. As soon as the Lakers come shopping, they all happily upgrade. You can't match their pay, you can't match the prestige. So, you need to scout for unproven talent, but you'll get a lot more playing time on the Timberwolves though.
Peep Laja (10:03):
Same advantage for a startup or agency. If you want to bet on yourself, a small company has a much better chance to shine. As an employer, you can explicitly say that we'll give you more responsibility in coaching here than you'd get elsewhere. So, you can go get the job at Google in two, three years, if you want. There's a two year old creative agency called Rise at Seven, who's been wildly successful at becoming an employer of choice. They do three things really well. One, the flywheel is social media, mainly LinkedIn and Twitter. It starts with attracting people who are eager to post on social anyway. This is mainly the younger demographic.
Peep Laja (10:38):
Every employee is encouraged to post on social daily, and company founders amplify their voices. The social content is mainly about the great work they do. This is the other side of the coin. They go for clients that agree to be talked about, who want publicity, who want to win awards. And the work they do for the client becomes an endless source of social content.
Peep Laja (10:58):
Two, they have great training programs, and they promised that this is the company to join if you want to become the best in the creative marketing field. And three, they're not afraid to take a stand and be vocal about their point of view. One example. While the dominant chatter is all about remote work, they're proudly office first. This, again, attracts a certain demographic and helps their culture.
Peep Laja (11:21):
You mentioned also then that you invested in the content design, UX design of content and video and things like that. When you are working with clients, is that something that they come to you, and they want that? Or is it that, during your pitch, when they come to you for link the link and you say, well, also, reasons to work with us instead of these other guys is because we also do this, this, this.
Ross Hudgens (11:45):
Exactly what you said. Rarely do people come to us wanting UX design. We tell them they need it, to win. It's kind of those things where you have a crappy looking website, if I'm pitching content, or want to rank, it just won't without that experience. So, that's kind of a necessary evil. We don't try to, very often, like make high margin off of it, but if it gets us a year client, it's worthwhile. But when it is a service that, yeah, they're not coming to you for, it's almost like let's charge close to costs to get it done. And, hopefully, that'll change over time. That's currently how we're thinking about it.
Ross Hudgens (12:21):
It does help position us, I think, in that a lot of other people that aren't potentially sophisticated will just say, yep, we'll build five links off site for you, but we're telling them you're not going to win unless you do this. This is why this is kind of the philosophy we have and kind of having those stances and being willing to say this is not good enough, we won't work with you unless you do it almost always gets them to work with you, in my experience.
Peep Laja (12:49):
If I'm a prospective customer looking for an SEO marketing link building agency, and I'll land on your site, are you saying something unique about yourself about why to work with you?
Ross Hudgens (13:00):
Yes. I think our site in particular says we're premium, biased, but a good... I think we have a better than average looking website as compared to the market, which also says we care about design, which we do. Design is a huge part of what makes us like what we do specifically from a content standpoint. A lot of people think writing, but we have like 35 designers on staff. So, we're communicating that.
Peep Laja (13:24):
Wow.
Ross Hudgens (13:25):
Yeah, we're pitching, we have good logos on there, which I think speaks to the kind of people that we work with. We're saying you're like this company, hopefully, if you're going to reach out and talk to us.
Ross Hudgens (13:38):
Yeah. I think our positioning, we also try to not be the same kind of link builder as everyone else by helping people rank for things and get them links that way more and more, and not many people are doing that. And we can only accomplish that through really good content, and also, working with brands that can actually rank for things because they're authoritative from the get go. Although we're helping mid-tier move up, for sure, is part of what we do as well.
Peep Laja (14:03):
Have you rolled out any, let's say, proprietary frameworks or models or does Siege Media master link building frameworks, something like this, have you doubled in anything like that?
Ross Hudgens (14:17):
We definitely have a clear process. We have a course that we effectively built just to train our own team, and we make a small amount of sales on it. It's not anything remarkable. But that course breaks down exactly our process. There is a framework of adding certain designs, billing shareable elements that lower the friction for someone to link to us. We have a very clear template for that outreach email that's proven. So, there's many steps that all glue together into a process that works, and we're iterating and adding on that.
Ross Hudgens (14:50):
So, some of the things I talked about, like there has to be UX design at the top. Are there passive link intent things that they can rank for? People have seen different elements of this process, but it's really connecting it all together, and also doing it over and over again as a team, that just compounds a knowledge as compared to like just having 10% of your work be content creation as an SEO agency.
Peep Laja (15:14):
Walk me through some of the marketing stuff that you have done. So, going from zero to a hundred plus people is no small feat. The monthly payroll, I can only imagine what that is. And so, in order to hit it every month and be comfortable, you need leads, right? Of course, retention is a huge part of it. So, walk me through how your marketing has evolved, what was it like back in the day, and what are you investing in right now?
Ross Hudgens (15:42):
Amazingly, it's not wildly different. It has been, similar to you, we've done a lot of personal branding exercise with myself that will amplify a lot of Siege content.
Ross Hudgens (15:52):
Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of content and links today. I wanted to share my opinion on the dangers of one size fits all link the link.
Ross Hudgens (16:04):
We eventually added a videographer who's been a big part of it to create high quality content and edit it and position us in that premium way. We also use that as a service offering too. It's not a huge part of our profit, to be transparent about that, but it's mostly about the B2B element of thought leadership and building trust that you can do via camera. I think people need to trust you when they're spending that much money with you. And that can be identified just through that conversation.
Peep Laja (16:38):
I realized the power of a personal brand and its business impact early on. When I studied my conversion optimization agency, I made it my goal to be a top name in the industry. How can you do the same? How can you become a top name in your industry? Well, you need to start putting yourself out there.
Peep Laja (16:53):
Step one, be consistent. Socially, want to be posting every single day or multiple times a day, depending on the channels. I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter predominantly myself, but you need to ask where are the people that you want to reach? Where are they hanging out, and choose the networks that make sense for you.
Peep Laja (17:08):
Obviously, if you're consistently boring, then, that doesn't help your cause. You want to be consistently interesting, which is, of course, a high bar. Nobody's a hundred percent interesting all the time, but you can, at least, try and become more interesting. Add value to the conversation happening in your domain. And it really helps if you stick to just one category of subject, because, then, people can easily put you in a box as somebody knowledgeable and interesting about that particular topic.
Peep Laja (17:33):
If you're running out of the things to say in social, then, talk about what you learned. What are the top things you learned about hiring. The top things you learned about motivation. When you make top 10 lists personal, you have a story, personal stories and lessons learned are the most impactful content for social media. People really love stories about personal experiences. It just sounds more natural, instead of just throwing out meaningless platitudes, like, well, work hard and become successful. People are not going to eat that up.
Peep Laja (18:00):
It's much easier to speak from experience. Just put yourself out there, and be consistent with interesting content. That's my advice.
Ross Hudgens (18:09):
So, we're doing more and more of that, it has gotten more iterative recently. I think you're doing a great job, and actually, have inspired some of our kind of recent thought processes, pivots. So even having content on the blog doesn't get reached anymore as compared to just going all in on like content that lives on social or LinkedIn. It's just going to get more reach than even a blog post. And we can't compete with Ahrefs or Moz to rank for things. So, we've been going more social, text and video that lives there natively, and being okay with that, and seeing amazing reach from doing that in recent months.
Peep Laja (18:46):
In a previous episode, Chris Walker of Refine Labs spoke in detail about using LinkedIn as a key part of their go-to market strategy.
Chris Walker (18:54):
We got our first two customers through comments that I left on LinkedIn. And then, those people who saw my comments said, "Oh, this person now is the CEO of this company. I worked with them before. I'm going to give him a shot." I don't think a lot of people are committed enough to the channel, or the content creation in general, especially someone as the CEO. They wouldn't do the things that I'm willing to do because it's our primary go to market. We don't have a sales team. It's our primary go to market to get revenue.
Peep Laja (19:18):
Back to my conversation with Ross.
Peep Laja (19:20):
So, I wrote this article that I thought was pretty good. And then, I counted basically the page views it got over six months or something. And basically, I get as many page views in two days on LinkedIn to my stuff. It's like mm...
Ross Hudgens (19:38):
Yeah. What am I doing? Is this really worth it?
Peep Laja (19:40):
Yeah, exactly. And of course, the lifetime of a LinkedIn post is just a few days. But, of course, then, recycling. I also put it on YouTube, on Twitter and send it to my email list and whatever. And there's probably better, smarter ways to repurpose content. So...
Ross Hudgens (19:56):
Definitely, that's kind of a next iteration, and I want to add more quality and like pull our designers, and why not do that on those things as well. But, yeah... Unfortunately, all those networks are cutting off content distribution, so you just got to iterate with what's working and it's native content. And it's probably going to keep going in that direction. I don't see any reason why that's ever going to change, at least on those networks.
Peep Laja (20:20):
When you're making your future bets for content distributions, okay, right now, you're on Twitter and LinkedIn, are you going to tap into TikTok and beyond?
Ross Hudgens (20:31):
Email, I think, is continually one to think about. We've been trying to improve our list there. And that is one reason to send people to your site, for sure, to get them on your list. And, sometimes, it just has to be done through blog content. I don't really have the mind space to really do that well, to be honest, but we are distributing our YouTube videos or things through that through our list, and still, important.
Ross Hudgens (20:53):
In terms of bets, yeah. I think just continuing to... Kind of shifting more to that personal mindset, I have realized also as agency, and one reason I believe our... We have a really high quality YouTube channel, in my opinion, but we don't have a ton of subscribers. I think people want to follow people. They don't want to follow brands, like if that was called Ross Hudgens or something. But there's a balance. People want to hire agencies, not a person.
Peep Laja (21:17):
Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I looked at who are the top TikTok people that were like brands, channels, creators that people follow, and it's mostly personalities.
Charli D'Amelio (21:30):
Hello guys, it's Charli. And I'm going to be showing you how I make my coffee at home. Yay.
Peep Laja (21:36):
It's not like the funny cats channel or... I think even in B2B, it's like... I don't care what Privy is saying, but I want to see what Dave Gerhardt is saying.
Dave Gerhardt (21:45):
Most people, when I talk about this, they don't want to believe it. Because they say, hold on, Dave, if the people inside my company become the brand, and then, they leave the company, then, I'm screwed. What happens? Well, that's what can happen sometimes, but that's the risk that you have to take. Because today, people don't want to deal with nameless, faceless corporations. They want to work with people.
Ross Hudgens (22:04):
Yeah. The G2 team has done a great job with that. I feel like I haven't seen them as much recently doing it, but it was just, I felt like, for a while, you just felt like every single person on G2 was just all over LinkedIn. And Jonathan Dane's name on KlientBoost is doing a great job with that.
Peep Laja (22:17):
Yeah. They're all commenting on each other's stuff. Amplifying their... Yeah. Good group effort, for sure. So it's interesting, you said that you cannot outrank Moz and Ahrefs, and being an SEO link building agency, that must hurt a little bit. Is that something that you've accepted as that's how it is, or is it like give us three years, and then...
Ross Hudgens (22:40):
We consider some alternatives. Something that Neil Patel did was buy Ubersuggest. I think a huge part of that was investing in it. I wouldn't say we're completely ignoring trying to rank, but that is one element that, we're at that threshold moment where we might be able to afford just buying a free tool and redirect it into Siege. And I think that could help take our, I think, quality content and give it enough authority to rank against those heavy hitters.
Ross Hudgens (23:07):
And that would be a big, bad, I have been thinking about, but otherwise, search in general is not always an amazing channel for services besides as a top funnel standpoint, it's a comparison channel. You don't want to not do it, but you're getting compared against 10 other people on content marketing services. You'd rather than just see you on video or me on video and our team on video, and just say, I trust that person, I'm willing to pay what... I believe that person's going to charge me fairly and give me a good service. I'm not even going to compare anyone else. I'd rather, much rather go those channels.
Peep Laja (23:41):
It's like what Byron Sharp is talking about, the mental availability, you want to be thought of in buying situations by category buyers.
Byron Sharp (23:50):
We're polygamous in our loyalty. It's largely a battle for mental and physical availability, which those two things together make things easy to buy. So, it is a constant ongoing battle for attention, not love.
Ross Hudgens (24:05):
You want to be that reference point, and I think that's a great way of thinking about positioning for anybody. And you're a much better expert at this than I am. But I think when people think of SEO-focused content marketing agencies, there's very few people they think of. And that's because we've done a pretty solid job of that.
Peep Laja (24:23):
Let's say... like there's a trend with agency consolidations, there's Brainlabs, it's buying up people left and right. So, there's money concentrated. So, are you thinking about scenarios of like, hey, five years from now, there's going to be a mass consolidation of agencies and just more money just coming into the space. Somebody can pull a masterclass, you've seen how much they invested in SEO, and now, it's ridiculous amount of traffic. They rank for food recipes and whatnot. So, I think somebody can come in and just completely overrun you with more money. So, you need certain moats. Are you planning ahead? Are you thinking about this?
Ross Hudgens (25:01):
I do think personal brand is a moat, that, it's just hard to outpace. So, those things, I think, we'll continually be reinforcing. Like it's hard to catch up all of a sudden from that. It can be done and accelerated, but continuing to invest in product quality will be something I think everyone should do. Like we hired a VP of learning and development recently, VP of client strategy, just to continue to improve our product offering, and the UX design as I touched on. And just whatever kind of just hits me or us of like this is what you need to win on content-driven SEO. We'll go place that bet almost immediately.
Ross Hudgens (25:42):
So, it's really changing with what the market is saying. We have done that. That's one reason we keep... I believe we're keep winning is because we're ahead of trend. And people are like copycatting, versus actually caring about this thing, and I do care about that and we do care about that. And I think as long as we keep doing that, we'll hopefully, knock on wood, stay ahead of the curve here.
Peep Laja (26:05):
So, when you look back at yourself 10 years ago, and you've gained a lot of experience since then, probably fuck a bunch of shit up, what some pieces of advice you would give yourself like, hey, don't spend too much time doing this. Put more resources over here.
Ross Hudgens (26:23):
One thing I would potentially do differently would be... We did start an affiliate site from scratch. That was somewhat of a distraction. I think a lot of SEOs and agency, which maybe I'm actually speaking to the wrong person here, but people will do multiple things. And it's just not my... Personally, not my personality. And that site just didn't do... It did solidly. It probably broke even after total investment, but it just was somewhat of distraction that I wouldn't go back and do again.
Ross Hudgens (26:52):
I think there's a lot of agencies that try to build software and do a really terrible job burn through a ton of money. So focusing, I think, in so many ways does add value. And if you can do multiple things amazingly well, which you seemed to be doing, all the power to you. But would love to hear your thoughts on what you advise people, do you advise people to do multiple things or...
Peep Laja (27:12):
Yeah. Well, from my perspective, I think distraction is massively destructive. So, the only way you can pull it off, if you invest in a separate team, so the people who, let's call it the distraction, or let's say, a new investment, new bet. You hire a dedicated team of people who only work on the new initiative, so the old business, so the SEO business in your case, would not be affected by the least.
Peep Laja (27:40):
I think there's also a person of authority needs to lead the new in initiative. So, in my case, like started with an agency, then, built the e-learning business, and now, doing SaaS and I've led each of these new initiatives, because, I mean, authority, and I've hired a new team each case. But the old organization was not ready for it until there was a, let's say, a mature leadership in place who could run the business while I jumped ship.
Peep Laja (28:06):
So, with the agency, when I started e-learning, there was maybe a one-year transition period where I was kind of like both boats, wasn't optimal, but it was necessary for the transition, until I got out of the agency. My co-founder became the head of agency. And then... I mean, it's grown a lot since I have physically left.
Peep Laja (28:26):
And now, with e-learning, it's the same thing. I have a very strong management team in place. On the SaaS side, on the Winter side, it's all new, totally new people. I'm still on both boats, but CXL has very strong management team. And on a day to day implementation, I'm not needed. I'm not doing anything. I'm only in the strategic capacity involved.
Ross Hudgens (28:46):
Great advice. And that is exactly pinpoints why I probably wasn't successful. We had a great person who run it, but it was still someone relatively junior in their career. So that's that threshold that I imagine. Even a newer agency that kind of tries to do, depends on how successful they are, I imagine a good senior leader is not cheap to do. Hopefully... That business wasn't quite in the place where it was just like printing money or anything. So, I don't think necessarily...
Peep Laja (29:13):
Yeah.
Ross Hudgens (29:14):
... I was ready to go hire a six figure person to run it. But that's a good lesson and make sense that it's really just about appointing a senior person. That's how I effect... We had a good person, if they're listening this, but still junior in their career.
Peep Laja (29:31):
I got some pushback on Twitter recently for my comments on this. Basically, if you ask me 10 years ago, I would've told you hire for talent, train for skill. But if you ask me today, I'd say you should hire the most experienced person that you can afford. You can move so much faster and get much higher quality from people who know what they're doing and know what great looks like.
Peep Laja (29:52):
I still hire plenty of young folks that we coach and guide, but it can take years to get to a level where they can own something without adult supervision. Yes, there are times when you need brute force or more human hours, and skill isn't the main factor, but for critical roles that really matter, hire the best people you can afford.
Peep Laja (30:12):
Tell me about some of the bets you're making for the future. So, you covered some things, but other, like three priorities. So, as you approaching 2030, or I don't know how long you plan ahead, but what are some of the longer... What are you like doubling down on in terms of your investment and strategy?
Ross Hudgens (30:30):
Yeah, I mean, we are iterative, I think, like where we want to be in terms of maybe having a presence in England or Australia, at some point. Even this year, those are things I'm thinking about. I do tend to move pretty fast, ironically, being a little bit shorter term thinking as an SEO person. But some things I'm currently thinking and just really on the fence about are whether or not we should go fully remote or not, as we go up market in terms of servicing better clients and having more senior people, they value remote.
Ross Hudgens (31:05):
We want to pay better. That's a massive real estate cost. We're like on the cusp of a lease expiring in Austin actually, and trying to ask myself, and I think I'm leaning towards going fully remote, just given all the other places we can spend that money.
Peep Laja (31:20):
Yeah. That's a decision for a lot of companies. We are not fully remote. We are more, let's call it distributed. We have a couple of offices, and then, some remote people, which is kind of different. Has these upsides and downsides. But I have learned that managing people fully remote is not the same as, the same things that we've been doing only in Slack. Yeah.
Ross Hudgens (31:46):
Yeah. It's tough. We have like 75% of our teams said they want to be fully remote, and we already have 50 permanently remote, 50%. So it's like, what is that threshold moment that this just works, and is a bet to place, because some of our competitors are fully remote. That's a huge cost that... Could be a differentiator as well that I've seen put index. Like you're not paying for that expensive office space. People say that index in the service world.
Peep Laja (32:15):
Mm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, might have some impact. People are irrational anyways. Yeah.
Ross Hudgens (32:21):
Yeah.
Peep Laja (32:21):
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Ross. I'll be keeping an eye in your guys' progress. And then, we'll talk about the remote management in a couple of years and see what you've learned.
Ross Hudgens (32:31):
Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
Peep Laja (32:35):
So, what are the three key strategic decisions that Siege Media has made in order to grow and succeed? One, they went upmarket and focused on working with high quality clients.
Ross Hudgens (32:46):
We're picking the right clients and being willing to say no to people as part of our positioning and our service selection too.
Peep Laja (32:53):
Two, they focus on the quality of their own brand and injecting more client brand into the SEO and content work they do.
Ross Hudgens (33:00):
We realized there's more value from brand, which also lines up market with search volume-driven content that also can generate links.
Peep Laja (33:09):
Three, they offered more high quality services as the market evolved.
Ross Hudgens (33:13):
Now, we have to win on every single variable, and the content experience is one of those variables.
Peep Laja (33:19):
A final takeaway from Ross.
Ross Hudgens (33:20):
Whatever kind of just hits me or us of like this is what you need to win on content-driven SEO, we'll go, place that bet almost immediately.
Peep Laja (33:30):
That's how you win.
Peep Laja (33:37):
I'm Peep Laja. For more tips on how to win, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Thanks for listening.
