Jeremy Weisz
How do you value a domain name when it’s not been built out?
Unknown Speaker
You know, I
Unknown Speaker
said, you know what you were willing to pay for it.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, if it’s not, if it’s not built out, the only reason I’d really want it for its value is if it had some, some sort of brand ability and If it’s a truly exact match for, for instance, like SEO CO, if it’s truly that type of an exact match domain, I strictly usually base it off of keyword search volume, average cost per click, I might use esteban.com and compare, you know, other domains on there. And so I use a combination of things. And a lot of times, it’s just got to it’s like, well, and and your ability to pay, it’s like, well, that’s out of my budget. Sorry, you know, I don’t, I don’t have enough money to pay for it. So it’s kind of a weighted thing. Cross cross different ones. I mean, like, for instance, we’re launching dev.co, for our software development teams, and we bought that, like literally about a week ago. We’re just building it out right now. So and that when we negotiate as well, so
Jeremy Weisz
the three letter domain and co it’s probably not easy to get.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, yeah. We have You know, and although all the good ones that I’ve ever had, it’s either I bought them in auction auction and had to compete that way or and those are the I mean, I’ve gotten some cheap ones doing that, like acquisition.net I think I got it for like 600 bucks or something, huh? I I use NameJet on auctions on occasion, but but most of most of the really good ones that are live domains that I’m using, it’s negotiated. You have
Jeremy Weisz
to reach out through the who is and and
Unknown Speaker
yeah, yeah.
Jeremy Weisz
Um, so we’ll talk about the acquisition of SEO.co which was audience bloom. But let’s talk about Alaska, you this company, who you helped in Alaska, walk us through a little bit about what they came to you with? What was the scenario?
Nate Nead
Yeah, so it’s an oil, gas oil and gas distribution business. And if anyone knows Alaska, it’s really kind of a provincial market. There’s, you know, 50 or so. 16 years ago when it became a state, you had a lot of families who were really entrenched up there. And it really changed the dynamic and the environment. So each town whether it’s Ketchikan, Juneau, and even even Anchorage, but some of those smaller towns, they’re really owned by like five or six families, each town will have five or six families that own the whole town. When I say own, they have all the they have most of the real estate, they own a bunch of the businesses and in this particular family up there and Ketchikan have this oil distribution business a lot of the homes heat themselves through a you know, burning of oil in the winter, and it gets real cold up there. And so they had run this business and the reason I like to tell this story is because it’s the perfect example of kind of a competitive auction that that you want to run. So the first valuation we did on the business was like 12 million plus whatever is on their balance sheet. And and we got five or six competing bidders to the table that we’re all strategic buyers and ended up selling for $20 million. And so the sellers were were pleased It was a they’re just a great family up there. Just a really, really down to earth awesome people, you know, that the the dad and the dad who founded it was still alive. I think he’s passed away. This has been about a couple years ago now, but I think he’s passed away, but he was willing to his 90s the son, who had been operating it for a number of years, was retiring in his 60s, but then held it for it had it for years.
Jeremy Weisz
What were some of the things you did Nate to prep because I know you are an expert exit strategy, value maximization growth strategy. So in that period of time, making sure it gets the maximum amount of value. What are some things you did to prep them in the business before so?
Nate Nead
Yeah, you know, it’s the obviously you want a really nice pitch steps you can show people but when it’s a lot of deals are done by broad auction where you’re it’s kind of spray and pray, you’re going out to all the private equity groups, all the all the both the financial and strategic buyers, in this case, we knew the five or six people, the five or six groups that were we’re going to be the ones that would be willing to pay that premium. And then apart from I mean, you prepare the financial statements as much as you can so that that you you’re displaying the EBIT da or you know, some measure of cash flow in a way that you know, puts the business in the best light possible. But at the end of the day, it’s all it’s all about supply and demand. You know, if if there’s a high demand for the the business as a going concern, then you know, and it’s it’s low supply, there’s only one you know, once a main supplier of the gas distribution flight going through Ketchikan, Juneau. And we also sold the sister business in Juneau so Ketchikan Juneau. They, they now the company that acquired both of those firms owns the distribution pipeline all the way up to Anchorage. So you just know.
Jeremy Weisz
That’s a key point though, which is, you know, identifying the targeted key buyers and I know some people. Now I remember I was in a room full of entrepreneurs and Vinnie Fisher shouted me for sure he’s like, sometimes before he starts a business, he’ll reach out to the potential buyers before he starts the business to see what the acquisition will look like. And start that relationship from the beginning. I thought that was I’m like, I didn’t think of that. You know, Vinnie, super smart, and you’re in but it ultimately you’re saying the same thing is like you have to reach out to those targeted buyers. What is your reach out look like? Nate, like you want to sell it and maybe they’re not maybe they’re not in the buying stage. Maybe they are like what do you send initially? To get interest
Nate Nead
Yeah, well, usually it’s done by blind teaser. Right. So, but but Bof, you know, much, much further prior to that you have, you’re always having conversations with potential buyers, especially if your most investment bankers really targeted at specific niches. So, like in the digital media world, you know, they’re, you know, dozens of private equity groups that would be interested in digital media type companies, you also have your strategic buyers. And so you’re always kind of networking and prepping and we have a pretty extensive CRM where we, we keep detailed information on on buyers and so we’ll have like their deal parameters in there. We tag them with certain keywords like maybe they want you know, marketing technology companies and they want to see EBIT da greater than a million. And so anytime that something comes Have cross you already kind of have your shortlist and then you can go broad and create a much larger list. I’m gonna close the door because it sounds like the wife and kids are coming back and it might get loud.
Jeremy Weisz
We’ll have a mom or
Unknown Speaker
um
Jeremy Weisz
I mean, so that’s the value mean with investmentbank.com. And when you run there, you one of the values I imagine is you have these relationships with in kind of targeted pre existing relationships who may be interested in these businesses.
Nate Nead
Yeah, and that’s, that’s a huge part of it, you know, the world is flat. Now when it comes to doing deals, you know, 30 years ago, it was all about your own Rolodex now you’ve got things like pitch book and Capital IQ and I just spoke with Andy. He’s a great guy Andy, the owner of privateequityinfo.com they’re kind of the poor man’s pitch book,
Jeremy Weisz
which he liked the saying that
Nate Nead
I told Like I said, and you’re like the poor man’s pitch book because they literally are. They’re a fifth the cost. Okay?
Jeremy Weisz
So it’s a positive thing and a negative.
Nate Nead
Yeah, no, it’s great. They, you know, they’ve seen an uptick lately because people are canceling pitch book because it’s too expensive and still need a solution. Right? Okay. So open
Jeremy Weisz
equity dot info you said what’s up
Nate Nead
private equity info.com
Jeremy Weisz
oh info.com guy private equity info.com Okay, we’ll link that up.
Nate Nead
And so, you go you can pull data from there on on relative buyers, you can search by industry by size. And so that the world is flat when it comes to the to the data. So I think when it when deal makers have less of an upper hand, I mean, you can be a great negotiator. But it’s really about I think, when it comes to doing deals, do you trust the people that you know that they’re going to have integrity and second to that Is Do you trust their their prowess to be able to close a deal? And also, I think it’s one of those things where could you see yourself, you know, having, you know, having hotdogs with their kids on their kid’s birthday? It’s like, Do you like them? You know, yeah, get along with them. Yeah,
Jeremy Weisz
deal with it, what else that people may not think of that goes into a deal like that. Because you’ve done so many of these, I’m sure there’s stuff you just do naturally. I mean,
Nate Nead
so there’s so many, many nuances. You know, I I overall reverse engineer it. So when I sold my own home about three years ago, when we moved, and I thought I can sell my own home and not a real estate agent never done that before. But I do these complex transactions. And by golly, it was super easy. Because deals, there’s always something there’s never, there’s never, it’s never not clean. Because the complexity of the transaction complexity of each business, their operations are so good There’s so many different ways that you can trip trip up and make mistakes that I would I mean, this is coming from, this is coming, this is not coming from a position of I make my money by selling business. This is just a, you know, if I were talking to a friend, never sell your business on your own, you at least need an attorney, minimally, an attorney that knows what they’re doing, you know, because there are so many areas that you can foul up.
Jeremy Weisz
Talk about some of those, what are some big mistakes people make?
Nate Nead
Um, I think, I think a lot of times, and this is just from one that we’re working on, like within the last this quarter, first quarter of this year, which all of the six or seven deals that we’re working on, are on pause right now because of what’s going on right now. But I think I think a lot of times, entrepreneurs, their greatest strength is also their greatest weakness when it comes to doing deals and they’re the greatest strength of entrepreneurs is that they’re they’re hard drivers. That they think of an idea. They want to get it done. They want to get it done immediately, and they will do anything to get it done quickly. But, you know, discretion is the better part of valor when it comes to getting deals done. And I think a lot of times, you’ve got people who, you know, we measure success in in months and years, not days and weeks. And so, when people want to have something done right now, a lot of times, you know, not firing off that email is the better response or just waiting, because a lot of times waiting, waiting to see what will happen. The other the other side will show their cards more rapidly. And not talking is sometimes preferable to talking. And it’s, it’s um, there’s a kind of a healthy balance there. And any any really good entrepreneur that’s done deals before in the art of negotiating, I think the best thing that you can often do and this is what Where the investment banker is there, there are two really two reasons an investment banker even adds value to a deal. The first is is it provides a buffer. And a buffer is that you’re not going to fire off an email or do something dumb, you’re going to bet the banker is going to do it for you. He’s going to take the arrows sheet he or she is going to take the arrows of you know, be take the fault if someone gets you know peeved off at something. And the second reason would be that you have you have someone there to provide options. You know, you’ve got someone that’s going to provide multiple options to get you the highest value because you’re providing multiple options get you the highest value buyers, multiple bidders, whatever you want to call it,
Jeremy Weisz
and the expertise obviously Yeah, in any pitfalls, right. Because one pitfall you said is a lot of money and a mistake could be worth a lot of money and time in itself. Like people trying to get it done fast. If they try and do themselves. I can imagine it will probably take longer. Then they, you know, if they they try it and what you’re saying is, it’s almost like go against at least for like an entrepreneur go against your natural instincts, like sometimes natural instincts.
Nate Nead
Yeah, it goes against because I’m an entrepreneur myself, right, it goes against my natural instincts, but yeah, a and because we’re FINRA regulated that the saying always goes if you can speak it, speak it. If you can speak it and not write it, speak it. And and because you know what’s written can’t be can’t be taken back. And so, it the old adage, you know, measure twice cut once it just you just, it’s more slow and methodical rather than kind of like shoot from the hip.
Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, stuff. I don’t know what your next book is called neighbors, thinking book titles, something about, you know, don’t follow your natural instincts or something like yeah, and the Yeah, the guide to entrepreneur selling their business. Don’t follow naturally. Don’t go with your gut. Why your gut is wrong. Yeah, exactly. So that’s your next like, best selling book right there. Okay.
Nate Nead
I’ll get someone who goes Friday if because I don’t have the time. But yeah,
Jeremy Weisz
proven Field Guide to selling your business. Um, so talk about Louisiana. There’s an interesting scenario and there’s a business you sold in Louisiana.
Nate Nead
Yeah, so we actually help acquire it, acquire it. Gotcha. Yeah. So it wasn’t us that acquired it. We were working with a search funder. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that model. No, go ahead. What is it? So it’s usually done by graduates of top business school programs. So your your Wharton’s your your Harvard guys, Stanford guys. They’ll go out and raise a get committed capital. They may not they’re not raising a fund. They’re getting committed capital to do a deal and oftentimes that committed capital also pay them a salary in the interim to find a deal that David Then become the operational CEO of the company. And they’ll get some sort of equity slice in the deal. And then a kicker at the end, depending on performance, when that’s when it’s sold in five or 10 years. That’s the kind of the basis of it right? And so this guy had reached out he, he was he had been at Bain. And he had done, you know, dozens of bi side transactions of Bain. He was a Columbia MBA great guy. I mean, his resume sold himself but he just didn’t have the time to raise the money. And the reason I like this deal is because I mean, this was a spray and pray we went out. We called like 600 groups, because you’re really you’re sourcing debt and equity. You got to have someone comfortable with the guy that they’re partnering with. And Boris brought some of his own money to table I think he brought close to a million bucks. So he wasn’t he was Isn’t your standard kind of no search fund model because he did have some capital, but we raised the additional equity and debt to do the deal. And he’s still operating the company. This has been about a year and a half ago now, I think. But he’s it. I like I liked that deal. Just because it was. It was not, it was a typical for what we do. Usually we’re processing a sell side or we have a mandate, we’re going out and sourcing, he came to us and said, I’ve got this thing under Li letter of intent, you know, I’m gonna buy it. I just need the money. And so we just went out and cobbled up the money from institutional sources. So
Jeremy Weisz
what was most successful so like in that case, sourcing The money is kind of the key point there. What was Did you find even though you did a spray and pray, I mean, you’re doing it strategically also, what was most valuable in that as you went through that process to source the money
Nate Nead
Yeah, I think it’s it kind of goes back to that that data, you know, we’ve done we’ve done a similar deal on capital raise for another business, but the data here was, you know, those that are comfortable with the search fund funding search funders. And so and then, and then processing that data quickly. So if they’re, you know, if they’re not interested, they’re not interested, you know, the struggle is is that you don’t know if someone’s there. There are a few data points and some of those like pitchbook and, and private equity info that, you know, they’ll they’ll say that they work with search funders, but then there’s a lot of stipulations. So it was kind of a discovery for us, which was helpful, because then the next deal hopefully will be easier if you have the right if everything else is equal, you know, hmm. So it was it was a little more discovery on that one. That’s true for no people. You know, when someone’s trying to sell a business, the optimum scenario is is you have a, you have an investment banker that’s done deals in the field. And part of that is, is it’s just that you’re not, you know, you’re not waiting for them to find the buyer for you, they already know who the buyers are, which is which is true in some respects, it can be faster, but it’s not that much faster if you if you’ve got a hustler, the way the world works these days,
Jeremy Weisz
but um, Nate let’s talk about AudienceBloom. Because that is your own journey of acquiring a business. So how did you What was your decision making? First deciding I want to even acquire something in that type of space?
Nate Nead
Well, I’m, I’m always looking for opportunities. So it came across. It’s an area that I just understand. So it’s not it’s not far afield. And I love the model. It’s a really high margin model. It’s, it’s super scalable. If you have the right team in place, and there aren’t a ton of people who do it as well, Hoover who’d still do it as well as AudienceBloom does it, they just do a great job. And, and I just I found them through so many networks. And just by happenstance, it’s a remotely run business. All of our employees are all over the country and in even a couple overseas, and it happened to be a business that was run by University of Washington grad that I mean, one of my employees is an is 15 lives 15 minutes away. And he’s, you know, so and the former owner still lives here in Olympia, Washington, so it’s, um, it was just kind of did you put
Jeremy Weisz
it out to your network? Did you say here’s exactly what I’m looking for? Was it more broad? No, I just
Nate Nead
found them. I found them on bizbuysell You know, found them on there, you know, and negotiated through the whole thing. And it’s nice when you know that when you know it, you know, the great thing is is, you know, attorneys, I know all the SBA guys, finance guys. And so you know, you get a sweet deal from everybody. So, when you when you’ve been referring business to people for years, it’s helpful because you’re able to get the best deal on all the processing for the transaction. But apart from that, you know, it’s had its attendant bumps after the acquisition, I think, you know, the former owner, great guy, but he’s kind of been he’d kind of been a little bit absentee for about 18 months because the business he’d set up great systems and processes and stuff and, but then we came in, I’m like, well, we want to grow it. So we that’s when we made the switch from AudienceBloom to SEO.co and you know that that is That’s a risk that we took, and it’s finally starting to pay off. That was over a year ago that we made that
Jeremy Weisz
move. So what made you decide to take that risk? Change the name?
Nate Nead
There was a little bit of negative press on the company, unfair, unfair negative press that had that’s still out there. But there’s also I wanted something that when you come when you came to the old website, you can look it up on wayback machine on archive.org. But when you come to the website, it’s always helpful to know exactly what they do right at the outset, and I wanted it to be very obvious. Yeah, you
Unknown Speaker
can’t get more obviously.
Nate Nead
Yeah. What are these guys?
Unknown Speaker
What are these guys do a Seo?
Nate Nead
Yeah, exactly. You might, you might say, yeah, it’s you know, it’s you probably could have and the, the other Flipside is, is when you have a domain like that, then event It may take us three years, it may take us five years, but it’ll be a lot easier for us in the long run to rank for terms that are really high volume high convertibility terms that we never would have touched with the old domain name without a much larger budget on you know, link building and you know, our own content marketing. So, that was that was another that that was probably the main motivation, you know, something that is more of a global brand type of site. So,
Jeremy Weisz
I want to talk about Nate you know, the growth strategy you know, anyone who buys a business obviously they want to grow it so the increases the value, and what that looked like, but but anything to talk about with the actual deal itself, like putting it together, it seemed like it was almost meant to be because you went to to Washington University, then they happen to be I mean, is that just a weird coincidence? Yeah, a
Nate Nead
weird coincidence, and that is weird. Yeah, you had to he had two other buyers that were interested in those deals fell apart. One was in New Jersey. One was in like Wisconsin or something? Yeah. So I mean, it just was. It just was happenstance that he in my backyard. Yeah. And he lives an hour for me.
Jeremy Weisz
Was there anything in the deal like putting together a deal or finalizing the deal itself? That’d be important to mention before talking about the growth portion.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, um,
Nate Nead
the negotiations went rather smooth, I think, you know, it was my first I’ve done, you know, I’ve been entrepreneurial, but I’ve never acquired using debt. And so I was super anal. I mean, I took all of their, their merchant transactions and I personally went through and did all the quality of earnings check against their tax returns. And that’s not something that I typically will do will usually have a CPA do it, but I’m like, I know what I know what to do. And I went through and I looked at all the inflows and outflows for the last, you know, 1824 months and just confirm that the numbers were real, and I recreated the the income statement off of that and it everything checked out. And apart from that, you know, catch the nuances of things,
Jeremy Weisz
and you decide to get outside sourcing of funds or did you? How did you end up?
Nate Nead
Yeah, I mean, it was a large enough large enough transaction that I did finance it, I used an SBA seven a loan. And there is a personal guarantee on those loans. But you know, I think the I think the most important part is negotiating things like like because for the SBA seven a loan, they do a debt service coverage analysis, and we do this all that this is one of my favorite conversation topics actually is people always tell me Oh, my business I want to get this from my business or I think my business is worth this Well, I just take an SBA seven a loan, debt service coverage analysis calculator that we built internally. Look at NSA, okay, if your business is worth this, then it would it would require a debt service coverage in your, on your avatar, your cash flow to equal why. And given that I compare it to a cap rate on a real estate deal. And, and if it you know, in so many cases people don’t realize number one real estate’s a lot harder to screw up, and a businesses easy to screw up. If you do something wrong, you can foul up the whole thing. And so if you don’t know what you’re doing, and so I always say it’s so number one, the risk profile of buying a business is much higher than buying real estate. And number two, for that risk profile, you should be compensated in the return on your investment above and beyond what you would on a real estate deal. And so if you’re, if you’re a seller, and you say hey, my business is worth $10 million Well do the math on and compete against. And this is I just use this as a comp, I compete against a what? What would it equal? What would the cap rate equal if your business were real estate transaction? So it’s the high side is what you’re talking about what that
Jeremy Weisz
is that like the high end because you can’t screw up the real estate?
Nate Nead
Yeah, it’s easy. It’s easy to, I mean, look, if you owned a piece of an asset, like real estate, you could hire somebody to manage, it’s just easier to manage, you know, there’s not all the operational controls and everything. It’s just a lot more complex. And, you know, and so, I always compete against that. That’s my benchmark is kind of commercial real estate, you know, cap rate, and if you’re way off base on that, it’s a no go decision. If you’re a buyer. If you’re a seller, it’s like, well, you’re priced out of the market. Do you really want to sell obviously, you don’t really want to sell because you’re not you’re not priced within what the market will bear and unless unless you’re willing to find that new needle in a haystack buyer who thinks you’re that strategic, you know, home run. But you know, the whatsapps and Instagrams of the world those are that’s funny money. That’s not real. That’s not real. In the in the normal world of business. You know, most deals are done at three x EBIT da three to forex, Eva da on anything, you know, less than 10 million in in revenue. Mm hmm. So that’s just kind of the nature of the beast.
Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that thought process. And then people can’t go to investmentbank,com and find that calculator. That’s something that you had you’d use internally.
Nate Nead
I’d be happy to share it if you want.
Jeremy Weisz
I think you should put it on your site. Have people like to calculate
Nate Nead
an interactive version of it? Yes. Say hey, you know, you think your business is worth this Go, go just fill out the form here and it’ll be worth you. Totally. Yeah. It needs to happen. I just have a I built the Excel spreadsheet number years ago because I got tired of people saying my business is worth this. Yeah. No, that’s not
Jeremy Weisz
the new page tired of your business where this actually put the test? Here’s my internal calculator. I know someone you can hire my dev.co probably to put it on your site. I
Nate Nead
know. I know plenty of guys. Yeah, prioritization.
Jeremy Weisz
You know, people have hard time, I’m allowed to do that. So, so you buy it, then what’s some of the steps you do to grow? grow the business as you’re?
Nate Nead
I think, well, we’re obviously doing our own content marketing. So it’s, it’s it’s an interesting discussion, just from, like, if you’re running a website, right. So the website had, I think, 1300 pages and posts on it. And we took, so we took all of those pages we read, I mean, if you go to archive.org, you can see the old site it’s it was kind of an ugly baby. And we took all of the content and consolidated it down to less than 300 posts. I think. When we were done, it was down around 280 Posts and Pages total. And we we took some posts that were like 500 words and combine them with other posts or a couple thousand. So we have a few blog posts on there that are 10 1015 20,000 words. And then we consolidated the link equity. So we redirected we three or one redirected all the links from, you know, five different posts down to one post. So you get that extra boost. And we we also change the domain name at the same time, which I mean super negative impact on on traffic and rankings and everything. It was a huge risk. But I knew that as long as we could weather the storm with existing clients for say, you know, six to 12 months, that would be good. And so we, we redesigned everything, we did all the 301 redirects properly, and you know, we’re starting to see it. Come back out of the sandbox a little bit it’s taken a little while but Well, I mean, we’re we’re ranking for things like link building service and stuff like that. So we get leads off of it more readily now
Jeremy Weisz
on Nate talk about the services you provide there. What are people go to there and check out
Nate Nead
most, most of what we do is link building. And and when I say link building we have, you know, Jason, the former owner, really great network networker with when it comes to publications, like really high end publications where you might want to get a brand mention or, or a link from. And in that we just have Ember constant we have we now have team members that do outreach for building the links. And they’re we’re constantly adding, you know, new opportunities. So it’s that our primary focus is really content marketing. So I think 17 members of our team are all writers. And they write for some really great publications out there online. And, and so that’s the primary thing that we do. And probably about 40% of the revenue of the business comes from other agencies. So we, we are the back office support for a lot of other agencies who don’t want to and just don’t have the capacity to, you know, do link building at scale or do content marketing at scale. So, you know, white labeling our services, we have a lot of clients who Well, I mean, it happens regularly where someone to come to us we’re like, do we already have this account, but it’s under an agency. So we’re already doing work for them through someone else? So you’re doing two things will work for Yeah, yeah. And usually usually will will alert the client so we we don’t want to step on anyone’s toes we want to keep keep a high level of integrity and honesty with our clients will say, hey, so and so reached out to us. And then we just pass them back to the client. So we have a you know, about 40% of the revenue comes from that and you know, we do we do do some Pay Per Click management and we are now you know the growth opportunities now what we’re looking at is we’re bidding on some corporate and larger requests for proposals. So those are much larger contracts putting together and that’s the benefit of being an investment banker you know, putting together large proposal documents
Jeremy Weisz
using PowerPoints, bread and butter so we’re doing we kind of corporations are fit or won’t be example I remember we are scheduling this for like Jeremy, we have a bunch of big corporate proposals we’re putting out so can we push this to another week? Because sound like you had a bunch hit at once will be last week.
Nate Nead
A couple of large university contracts. I sent them into a so I can’t Yeah, close them but a couple large university contracts have have large budgets for everything from content marketing to link building and SEO and and they want some web development and so, you know, kind of across the map
Jeremy Weisz
what’s like a popular service I mean, you know, you offer a lot of things like let’s say someone wants to grow their content marketing, what’s a popular service?
Nate Nead
Yeah, links are kind of the name of the game they still have such a high correlation in the search engines and it’s hard to get away from that and so usually, you know, depending on the budget, you know, we work with small businesses as well as large small businesses have been hurt pretty hit pretty hard. Of late like the local SEO, we don’t do too much local SEO. Our biggest thing is our biggest bread and butter clients we have really diversified so we have clients in in real estate, and ecommerce, SAS lots of lawyers. And so our bread and butter services really, you know, someone’s got a keyword that they want to rank for, you know, Attorney in Chicago or whatever it is, and and we’ll, the team will, will assess the site, do the site audit and then kind of make recommendations based on what their findings are, and then kind of go after it, you know, when it comes to building the link, so
Jeremy Weisz
it’s funny, you know, I’ve had people come on and talk to them after kind of him Come on the podcast. I was like, Oh, well, you know, one of the reasons one of the reasons for coming on the podcast was SEO. They’re like, I know, I’m gonna get a bunch of links up. Yeah.
Nate Nead
Yeah. And we’re requesting that all the time.
Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, get a bunch of links.
Nate Nead
I in fact, I had a, I had to refer people to you. I’ve got a couple of my email. Exactly. I’ve got a couple of them looking at that came in within the last week. I really will. I’ll send them your way. There’s some interesting, I just it’s not it’s not the core focus. So what I’m doing right now?
Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, no, but it’s it will, it’s like, okay, they will get a bunch of link, if it’s a fit for my show or for someone else’s show, then they’ll get a bunch of amazing links, you know, all over the place. So
Nate Nead
it is it is one of a handful of strategies. And in fact, I think podcasting right now is underutilized when it comes to SEO. And the reason the reason I say that is is syndication. There are I mean, if you’re using like we use libsyn. And if you’re using Lipson, it’ll syndicate the pod bean iHeartRadio. And you’re good and what’s the other one, they’re like half a dozen that you can get syndicated to, and you’re getting, you’re getting domain authority links in the 80s and 90s. For free, basically for free for doing a little bit of work and you’re getting five or six per episode because You’re syndicating. And so every episode you release, you get fired. Do you know how much that would
Jeremy Weisz
be appreciated the choir here? I totally.
Nate Nead
Do you know what that would cost you for our services to do that? I mean, you don’t have a podcast. Yeah, this is me preaching. But you’re I mean, I know this is what you do. So I’m just kind of doubling down on on your your audience here because it’s, it’s, it’s huge. You should be proud. Yes,
Jeremy Weisz
totally. And that, you know, for when we tell people they that’s like icing on the cake. Because when you really figure out who your best relationships are, and you want to give to them and have them on your platform. But there’s all these added benefits. Like you said, SEO alone, I’ve had people search other guest names. And I’m the top three search results, because I’m on YouTube, my website and one of those syndicated podcast channels. And so they’re searching that person’s name and the top three search results,
Nate Nead
which could be huge, which can be huge given what you know, whatever name it might be, right so yeah, Totally first of all I get a lot of search volume from my name though
Jeremy Weisz
don’t bank on that we’re gonna keep increasing that for you all the benefit you it’s all about you know investmentbank.com SEO co so in the end it goes back to to where your your sources are so first of all they thank you I want to point people at one last question but I want to point people to go do SEO.co investmentbank.com check out everything needs doing it’s really amazing what he’s done on his journey, starting and helping other people, you know, acquire companies grow companies, so named the boy the Boy Scouts of America. I see you do some work with
Nate Nead
Yeah, I I the so I’ve I am an Eagle Scout. And so I I love I love scouting and I the I mean I think scouting provides a lot of value. But I love camping and I love going out and just go. I mean, my favorite things that I did in scouting were 50 mile backpacking trips. I think I did, you know, three or four of those grown up and I just, it’s it’s a lot of fun. So, the scout committee chair is more of an administrative role, though, and that’s what I’ve been doing. What did you
Jeremy Weisz
get the grant, you know, being an Eagle Scout, what is a story that you think back on that kind of represents your journey as that?
Nate Nead
I think my I just I love that my first 50 miler I did when I was 13. And for a kid that’s carrying like a 60 pound pack that probably doesn’t weigh I mean, I probably weighed 100 pounds, you know, and it’s, it’s a good it’s just a good character building exercise when you’re hiking 10 to 15 miles a day, a day with you know, 60 pound pack on your back that weighs more than half of your weight and you’re preparing your own food and and you’re you’re not connected to I mean, back then we didn’t have there weren’t cell phones anyway. But you’re you’re just completely back to nature. There’s nothing else to focus on. And I mean, we I grew up around here in Seattle, and I’m not biased in the fact that I believe that we live in probably one of the prettier areas in the in the country, if not the world. And so we I mean, hiking around Mount Rainier. In the summertime, when it’s when the weather’s nice and you’re you’re drinking you’re filtering water out of these crystal clear streams and swimming in, in mountain lakes. It’s awesome using it, you know,
Jeremy Weisz
picture that. Thank you. First of all, Nate .Thank you Ryan for making sure this happened and everyone checked out investmentbank.com, SEO.co
Nate Nead
Thanks Jeremy. Appreciate it.
