From CEO to SEO at Sasha's Pet Resort
Sasha's Pet Resort for SEO
Showing my age but in 1973 I graduated from the University of Washington with a bachelor’s degree in communications. There were multiple divisions within that category including journalism, advertising, public relations and others. From a hardscrabble background, I found the allure of plentiful riches in the glitzy world of advertising to be to my liking.
At the time, having worked my way through high school and college at my local Albertson’s, I was seriously entertaining the idea of moving to Boise at graduation to go to work for Joe Albertson. But upon more sober thought, the idea of crafting grocery ads for the rest of my professional life didn’t warm the cockles of my heart.
Back then the nirvana of salaries from my POV was $1,000 a month! It danced through my head like an evergreen sugarplum. I figured I had chosen the righteous path to financial security, even at the young age of 23. But my first internship was at a radio representative firm in downtown Seattle. Essentially, they represented a multitude of various radio stations.
Their task was to present their broadcast properties to the dreaded whip-carrying media buyers (who were usually 30+ something women) at the advertising agencies and larger advertisers. So imagine my disappointment when I found these reps were driving ten-year-old sedans with dents and no air. And their biggest win of that week was when they creatively reasoned they could trade advertising on the side of milk cartons in exchange for other types of advertising in TV, magazines and print. But not much coin.
Maybe I had just wasted my last two years of college!
Back then in the advertising world, success was essentially measured by reach and frequency. Two easily understood metrics that targeted and measured how many prospective customers were reached and how often. And the feared media buyers used a rudimentary algorithm (though I don’t even know if that was a word back then) to utilize those two axis to evaluate the demographics of targets reached by age, sex, location and psychographics.
That was the Cadillac of advertising science in 1973. But also it spawned the famous quote that was timely and relevant: “Half of your advertising is wasted. You just never know which half!”
So my first job out of college was selling radio time for a Podunk radio station in Bellevue with little to no listeners. I worked for commission with a monthly guarantee of $400 and a VW car emblazoned with KBES on the doors. Kill the evergreen sugarplums!
Fast forward to today. I eventually worked for various radio stations, ad agencies and advertisers before opening my own ad agency in 1991. Suddenly, I was a CEO and my salary surpassed my wildest dreams and I no longer drove a VW bug emblazoned with radio call letters.
With a focus on high-tech and the evolution of the internet, my partner and I killed it. We were absolutely in the right place at the right time. With offices in the Puget Sound region, most of our clients were telecom and internet wanna-be millionaires located in Silicon Valley.
We were literally turning new business away every day because we couldn’t find enough high-caliber troops to hire. Kids straight out of college were asking for $50,000 a year though they hadn’t even learned the basics of good storytelling. We eventually had a stellar and well-respected team of 40 employees and service revenues nearing $2 million.
But the old adage of what goes up, must come down struck with severity when the internet bubble burst in the early 2000’s and our world suddenly transformed. Couldn’t buy a customer with a truckload of green stamps and our staff shrunk from 40 team members to 5. When I finally came up for air we were insolvent!
A few decades later I abandoned the advertising/PR world, retiring and opening up Sasha’s Pet Resort. But a strange thing happened on the way to the golf course.
While all this was going on, the face of the advertising/marketing world evolved disruptively, undergoing a technology-fueled transformation, arguably as impactful and significant as the industrial revolution itself.
Radio, TV, newspapers and magazines were joined by social media, world wide web, search engines, mobile phones, corporate web sites, artificial intelligence and learned practitioners who were versed in a new lexicon of SEO, DA, PA, AI, APIs, RAG, LLMs, crawlers and snippets. Seldom was the refrain of reach and frequency still mentioned.
This all became a reality for me when I decided on a business pivot from just a dog resort to a Sasha’s Pet Resort e-commerce site (store.sashaspr.com) to provide us with supplemental revenue and extended branding. And boy was I in for a rude awakening--as if I had relocated from Madison Avenue to the Falkland Islands. The only common denominators I brought with me were the ancient applications of Word and Excel. I was, and am, a dinosaur.
Beyond that I was a strange man in a stranger world striving to climb the ladder of Google rankings without so much as a compass or ladder. This was perhaps the steepest learning curve I had ever encountered.
Grandma used to say that when one door closed, another opened. That was true in this instance.
When I began to use Shopify to craft Sasha’s e-commerce site, I was lost and frustrated. One of the most challenging projects in my professional life! So thank God for Artificial Intelligence (AI). Baked in as a support component in Shopify, it rendered me enthusiastic rather than suicidal and was ALWAYS there to assist me when I was stumped, even willing to make the actual edits for me on my site. A godsend!
So life from that of a CEO to a practitioner of SEO has been one of the most disruptive, but fruitful rides of my life! Thanks for listening! Dan
Remember! Please support “Have a Heart for Chained Dogs Week” February 7-14th in North America. This week focuses on dogs who spend most or all their lives chained or tethered to a fixed object, often with inadequate shelter, social contact or veterinary care. This campaign encourages dog owners to bring dogs indoors as family members or provide secure fenced areas instead of chains or ropes as a primary means of confinement.