I really liked this post from Kim Krause Berg regarding her schedule, her views on working at home or choosing an office and her thoughtful dialogue on a Threadwatch thread about men working at home (as opposed to women who do it). I’ve been meaning to post my own “day in the life” thread, recently but haven’t had much time.
Today, I acutally have a couple open hours (which is getting rarer and rarer), so I thought I’d share my own day in the life and biographical history:
In 1997, when I joined Gillian‘s company full time, it was primarily a marketing and identity design firm. By 1999, however, we were almost exclusively web design & development. We had a few clients at the time, including Shoe-Store and several legacy folks. We made designs for folks like Frontier Bank, David Lawrence (who recently switched to a new design), and some other local Seattle companies.
In 2002, after having some bad experiences with an SEO firm, I delved into education and spent countless hours on SEOChat, SEW, HighRankings and others. It wasn’t until 2003, however, when the sandbox started frustrating me to no end that I started SEOmoz – for those who remember, it was initially housed behind socengine.com/seo (we 301’d about 9 months ago to this domain). By that time I had been to several SES conferences and had built the tools (thanks to Dustin), the articles and the blog into a real community resource.
The SEOmoz company was actually formed in early 2004 with myself as the CEO, Gillian as the President and Matt as CTO. We recognized that SEO had become the cornerstone of our business and our success and decided this new service needed a name. Each of us has some ownership stake in the company and are looking forward to building a business largely from scratch.
Growth has been fantastic – exciting, sometimes nerve-wracking, but always interesting. We’re movin’ on up – the next 6-9 months will see 2-3 new employees, bigger offices and a new plasma screen for me to watch NFL games on (that’s actually in the next few weeks – I’ll be sure to post a photo). With success, however, comes responsibility and work, which is why my days no longer look like a normal 9-5 worker.
A Day in the Life:
I’m very lucky in that I get to walk to work. It’s about 1.5 miles and some days, it can be the only excercise I get. Yesterday, I had appoointments at 9am and 10am so I was in the office by 8:30, checking email, visiting forums and blogs and getting some papers printed out for the meetings. After my morning work, Matt & I picked up some sandwiches for lunch and brought one back for Gillian. I worked through lunch, had a good conference call with a client at 2pm and two more afternoon meetings at 3pm and 4pm.
I mentioned that I joined Ad Club Seattle recently and last night was the first meeting, so I drove down to Pike Place Market, met some folks for drinks, and took my girlfriend (who works a block away) out to dinner in nearby Belltown. After dinner I had an hour-long call with a reporter while sitting in the car in my apt building’s parking lot and was upstairs in time to catch the last 10 minutes of the “My Name is Earl” program (very enjoyable). I actually fell asleep on the couch and was awoken around 10pm. I got on the computer and worked until 1am, then slept ’til 7:30. Not an entirely typical day, but close enough.
I like a lot of things about running a company – creating the direction, crafting strategy, getting recognized and being able to give back to both the SEO community and my local Seattle neighborhoods. Five years ago, this wasn’t the life I had planned, but I’m thrilled at where I am now and I’m eagerly anticipating the future. To be able to say that at age 26 is really special – I recognize that much of my success has been thanks to you – the community of people who read this blog and publish your own thoughts and experiences online. My goal as I move forward with SEOmoz is to help improve communication, education and social opportunities in the industry – I see SEO as a very tight community and one worthy of preserving. Hopefully, there are a lot of folks who concur.
