Should innovative SEO focus so much on keywords and links these days? 

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Wil Reynolds, founder of Seer Interactive, suggests moving beyond those concepts and using data to identify what Google has learned about certain search terms. 

"I'm trying to find ways to harvest those clues to better create social ads, better understand the customer, speak more in their language, understand what Google has learned about them over the years of them searching for these words," says Reynolds in the latest episode of the Marketing Smarts podcast.

Search is only one of many topics covered, however. We start out with a discussion of leadership and what it means to know what you're not good at. Reynolds is passionate about charity and giving back to the community, and he shares some of what he and his company have been doing on that front—including a Sleep Out event with a fundraiser for homeless youth.

Listen to the entire show now from the link above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode.

This episode brought to you by Agorapulse:

Agency Accelerated is where we explore ways to grow & scale your agency with some of the most trusted brands and experts in the industry. New episodes drop every other week, featuring ad agency veteran Stephanie Liu talking with an incredible guest about how you can manage your agency better.

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Full Transcript: SEO, Sleeping Outside, and Super Tuscan Wine

Matt Snodgrass: Welcome to another episode of the Marketing Smarts Podcast brought to you by MarketingProfs. I am excited to welcome Wil Reynolds to the show. Wil is the founder and the VP of innovation at Seer Interactive.

Wil, how are you, my friend?

Wil Reynolds: I'm doing great. How about yourself?

Matt: I am doing fantastic as well. It's so good we finally got a chance to talk. I know we've gone round and round a couple of times, had a couple of fits and starts in terms of when we could actually do our interview, so I'm super excited to talk to you today.

Wil: Thanks for having me.

Matt: We're going to have a good talk. Tell me a little bit about Wil, about Seer Interactive, about what you do. What's your day to day look like? What's today look like? Let's start there.

Wil: Oh my gosh. What we bring to market is we do search, so it's SEO, paid, we do paid social, analytics. The idea is I like helping people to find what they're looking for, period. It's one of the reasons I started in search, I like helping people to find the thing they're looking for. It's a great feeling to help somebody find what they're looking for. It's one thing to be found. It's another thing to make sure that being found is profitable for your clients. That's how we got into analytics and making sure that the data was there to say that the investment was worth it.

That's pretty much what we do. In terms of day to day, I'll tell you it's like these days you're a full-time recruiter. That's really what it is, that's what it feels like.

Matt: We were just driving around this morning and I couldn't believe the help wanted signs everywhere. Everybody is looking for people. They just need warm bodies to show up and be there, regardless of if it's a restaurant, if it's a grocery store, if it's a search marketing agency, they're just looking for people.

Wil: Seriously. We had 200-something people at one point. We just took a bunch of roles down because they're not getting filled. It was one of those things. At one point, we were 205 with 35 open roles or something. You're like that's not happening, so let's just focus on the ones we can get.

Matt: Are you just not having folks apply for them, or you're just not getting the right candidates through the door? What are you fighting with?

Wil: I think it's the right candidates. We get tons of resumes. One of the beauties of owning the business is we don't have any pressure to grow at a pace that's faster than however fast we think we can continue to deliver good service and grow. At least for us, it has been one of those things where I have to say to my team that we're not going to take on this extra work.

So, we're turning away so much opportunity that we wish we could take on, a lot of great companies we wish we could work with, but I'm just afraid that everything that got us here was doing great work and being referred often by our existing clients. That flywheel is amazing when it works, but once you ruin it, it doesn't work and then you're trying to figure out how to go out to the market and convince people to work with you, and that's not really in our ethos or DNA.

Matt: It's hard when you come on a recommendation from someone and then you can't fulfill. That's a double whammy because it makes you guys look bad and it makes the person who referred you look bad, and that's trouble for everybody. Like you said, that flywheel when it breaks, it's a hell of a thing to get back started again.

Wil: It is.

Matt: This wasn't what this podcast was supposed to be about, but listeners, if you're job hunting, Seer Interactive is hiring, MarketingProfs is hiring, we need a copywriter, so we're just giving you job opportunities here on this podcast.

Wil: Seriously.

Matt: There you go. How many times does that happen when you listen to podcasts? All right. Wil, we have three questions that we like to ask all of our guests before we get into the meat of things. I want to throw these out at you. These are intro questions just to learn a little bit about you.

My first question is what are you reading right now, or listening to, or what's on your nightstand, so to speak?

Wil: I'm starting to read books on how to build products teams, teams that manage products. We've built a couple of things at Seer that I think more people should get than just Seer's clients. That means I have to produce a product, and I know nothing about that, so I'm reading copious amounts of information on product teams and how they're structured so that I can help my team to be successful.

Matt: If you weren't in this position where you had these things, is this something that you would find at all interesting, or is it only interesting to you based on what your current roles and responsibilities are?

Wil: I think it's mostly the latter. I am learning these things because I need to be a better manager to my team, period. I can't lead them in an area that I'm not even up to date with the basics of how other people have tackled this kind of problem or brought these solutions to market. So, yes, I'll do this. My whole MO is I run things up until a certain point, and then I don't run them anymore. It's why I'm not the CEO. It's why I don't run big teams. My biggest value to Seer is getting something started and getting it big enough to gain momentum, and then putting a leader over it so that they can then truly run it and know how to run a part in an organization.

Matt: There's an element of that that speaks back to this whole idea that being a great salesperson doesn't mean you're a great sales leader. Some of the people who are best at doing are not necessarily the ones you want in the leadership position. I'm wondering is this something that you have moved away from or intentionally not taken on because it's not in your skill set, or is it something that genuinely doesn't interest you, is it a combo of both, where do you fall in there?

Wil: I know where I get my energy from. I think one of the things is I'm very in tune with where I get energy. The bigger a team gets, the more you have to have defined roles and the more you have to define what success looks like in this role. Whereas I'm more of just let's run through walls and break stuff down and try to figure things out. You know your team needs that, but then I hate having to be like, "How do I provide that?"

Now what happens is there are certain things that you'll get through as a leader and you'll end up at a great place, but it might take you hours of work to get there. Creating all of that sometimes takes me months, whereas someone else who comes in and thinks in terms of frameworks and certain types of things to build teams would be like, "Oh, yeah, in two or three weeks I could knock that out."

It might take me two months to do it because I'm slugging through the mud of working against the inertia, my insides are like, "Go play with that. Go get that data set and see if there's something new there." I have to turn that off to get focused and be more of a leader of a team who needs me to provide them direction.

Matt: I think a lot of being a good leader has to do with surrounding yourself with good people. One of the things that I've always tried to do as a leader is surround myself with people who know more about the things that they're doing than I do. I feel like from the top down perspective you can have some guidance in there, but if you have people that really know what they're doing, and to the point you alluded to, someone who can do something in two weeks that might take you two or three months to do, that tells me that you have the right people in place, that you have people who know how to move that business forward and to run things.

Wil: They have to, because I don't want to run it. It's cool. You have to be good at this, because if you're not, then there's no role here for you, because I am not going to run this thing in perpetuity. I am not good at it, it's not best for the team. So, yes, I need leaders who I can start off day one being like, "Here you go. I trust you to run with it. Do the right thing." I always say it's really my job as the owner of the business to make it easy to do the right thing. That's it. If I make it easy to do the right thing, I think we end up in the right place most times.

Matt: There's an element of metacognition there and self-awareness to have to say this is not where I get my energy, this is not where I am strongest, I'm not going to force myself into this role and force myself to do XYZ because it is not in the best interest of the company. That I think is something that a lot of folks really don't develop until later in their careers, the ability to actually see themselves for what they are and where their strengths really lie.

Wil: For me, it's easy. I also worked at a company where the founders were super visionary, and they lost it all because they didn't know how to run a business. I poured my heart and soul into that company after graduating college, and it was one of those things where you were just like, "Damn." You can be a visionary and know where something is going to go and still fumble the ball on your way to the end zone. Having experienced that firsthand, I'm like where do I not like to do certain things that could be fatal to this organization.

I don't like finance, I don't like operations, and those things can be fatal. What happens is early on I realized that when it came time to look at the spreadsheets and look at the margins and see how we were doing in our financial health, I didn't want to do it. I would spend the least amount of time I could to make sure things weren't messed up, and I would spend all of my time on where is there something I can change in the marketplace, or whatever it might be. For me, it's always been in my DNA to build it to a point and then let somebody else run it, and then you watch them run it and it usually runs better than how I ran it every time.

Matt: All right. Tell me, what is your drink du jour right now? What's something that you're enjoying in life either right now on this call or in general?

Wil: I love wine, but I'm not good with Italian reds. For some reason, I can't find Italian wines that I like. Two days ago, I had a really good Super Tuscan. I was like, "I don't know what that is," and I had it. It was a really good one that one of my friends recommended to me. It was as advertised, it was amazing.

Matt: What even is a Super Tuscan? I have no idea. I've never heard that phrase.

Wil: Hell if I know. I told this person I'm a Zinfandel guy, I like big wine, I like big, peppery reds, heavy, high alcohol content, that kind of thing. It was like if you want to learn more about Italian reds, give them what you like and the profile, and he was like, "Try this Super Tuscan." Sure, I'll drink anything. Oh, this is good. I've been looking for good Italian reds for a long time. It seems like the Super Tuscan is the way to go.

Matt: This is officially in my show notes now, Super Tuscan. I need to figure out what this is and do some checking on this. Reading books about product teams, drinking Super Tuscan. Finally, and most important here, what are you thinking about in terms of business, in terms of marketing, what's keeping you up at night?

Wil: What's really the big thing is I believe, I'm still trying to figure out where the number lands, but I feel like Seer can have a $15,000,000 to $25,000,000 impact on our community over the next 10 years. I've been watching a lot of very high-powered execs spend hundreds of millions of dollars or whatever to go to space. I was reading about one of these folks that went up on Elon Musk's rocket, an entrepreneur that lives in Pennsylvania. A young guy, drops I think $100,000,000 to take a seat on a rocket for three days and go up to space.

Matt: No big deal.

Wil: I think that's great for him, but it was frustrating to me given how much time I spend working with homeless youth and other types of organizations in our city. I was frustrated and that made me be like, well, I've got a thing that's not a billion dollar thing, but I've got a thing, and that thing at Seer is big enough to have a material impact on some real people's lives. So, now I'm doubling down on my commitment to having a community level impact and using this company to do that.

Matt: When you talk about Seer having this impact on community, you're talking about in the community of Philadelphia. You're not talking marketing community, search community, or anything like that that we think about when we talk about communities. You're talking about literally where you are.

Wil: We're going to do at least 50% in Philly and San Diego where we have offices, and then the other 50% will be anywhere. Our team is now fully remote, so the way that I'm looking at is how much of that $20,000,000 over the next 10 years is in team volunteer time, there's a value on that time, how much is in direct contributions. We're going to be hiring a director of community impact. All of our other directors have KPIs. If I really want to get to that kind of number, I'm going to need to have somebody own making sure that Seer is doing all we can to be successful within our communities.

We've been giving out gift cards to this organization called TisBest where I can give people gift cards to spend on any nonprofit they want. We looked back at the data, we had $46,000 unspent over the last four years and people who just never spent the gift cards that we had given out. We give them out to clients, we give them out to team members, whatever. That's what happens when you don't have somebody owning community impact. I can't have that, so now we're going to hire a community impact director and they're going to help us get to that hopeful $20,000,000 impact over the next 10 years.

I just see business owners, a lot of them, once they get good, they're getting a rocket to space, they're doing something else, and I just see too much opportunity for us to double down on our commitment to community, which is how I even started this business. I started this business because I wanted to spend more time volunteering at the Children's Hospital playing with sick kids when I was 26 years old. For me, that's the root to this business, and I want to get back to that.

Matt: What does that look like in terms of some of the giving back things that you're doing or some of the community involvement that Seer is doing? You mentioned the gift cards that you've handed out. What else are you guys doing?

Wil: For the last five or six years, every month the person who spends the most time volunteering that month gets I think it's $2,000 donated or $1,000 donated in the name of the charity that they worked with. We do that for our team members. We make volunteerism a core part of what we do, we track that time on volunteerism so we can actually see how we're doing. We encourage all of our team members to spend time volunteering, and we give them time off during work to do it if they need it.

Those are some of the things that we do. I have a sleep out that I'm doing in about a month where I'll be sleeping outside for the twelfth time to raise money for a youth shelter that I work with here in the city. That will be in Philly in November, a month now, it will be fricking cold. I've been out there in the snow.

Matt: It's going to be chilly.

Wil: Yes. I've been outside in the snow, in the sleet, in the rain. I'll be doing that. It's like I have to lead by example there. It's just really important for me to not just impact our community from a marketing standpoint, which is also important to me, but also from there are real people out here that I see hurting and I want to be part of trying to be part of that solution.

Matt: I saw that you took a hiatus, and I can't remember, is it from Facebook or Twitter that you're off of right now?

Wil: Facebook.

Matt: I saw that you had been asking folks to spread the love and spread the word about the sleep out, so we'll absolutely include that in the show notes so that folks can check that out and learn more. You said that's at the end of November, so we have about a month left?

Wil: Yes. I'm trying to raise $40,000, so we'll see how that goes.

Matt: Nice. Folks, you will have a link to that in the show notes if you want to learn more about that. If you want to make a contribution to Wil and the charity he's working for, that would be fantastic, and we would love it.

Let's talk SEO a little bit here. That's your bread and butter, right? That's the stuff that you're loving.

Wil: Kind of.

Matt: Just a little.

Wil: What I mean is my SEO skill set is starting to atrophy in the way that the industry defines SEO.

Matt: What are you finding?

Wil: People are still asking me how many links you need. People are still asking what's the monthly search volume. People are still asking really basic questions when it comes to SEO, like should I canonical this to that. Those are important questions to answer. It's just not where I focus. My focus has been on how can I better use search data. The way I look at it is when you scrape Google to find out where you rank, you also end up with a lot of intel that goes unused. What questions are people asking? How old is the content that's on the page? Google puts all that out there for you.

Google's people have some really smart machine learning engineers, AI engineers, they have some of the smartest people on the planet, and they use that. People are like they use it for beating people at board games and self-driving cars, but ultimately they make all of their money on search, so that knowledge gets back into search. If I am looking at a Google search result, that is just a series of clues of what Google has learned about that person that searches for that, and I'm trying to find ways to harvest those clues to better create social ads, better understand the customer, speak more in their language, understand what Google has learned about them over the years of them searching for these words. Not just how can I rank as high as possible for this keyword.

I think there's a lot of people that can help you with that, but there's not a lot of people that can help you with the way that I'm doing things, and that's why I focus in that area.

Matt: Do you find that the brands and organizations that you work with are coming about this in the wrong way, do you feel like they're tackling it from sort of an archaic viewpoint?

Wil: Not entirely. Because if they're coming to Seer, they know what they're buying, that's what they're buying. If you want to come at it from "I already know exactly what I need, I know exactly how to get the answer, I just need somebody to help me get it done," well then there's a thousand agencies for that.

At Seer, I have a client who just dumped a bunch of their Salesforce data into our data warehouse. It's like how can I do your paid and SEO better if I had access to your Salesforce data? Then I'm starting to realize little things like you have a fraud column in your Salesforce. A lot of leads that come in might be fraud. I'm like that doesn't make its way back into my SEO or paid strategy, but if I'm seeing that certain degree programs are triggering a high degree of fraud that's increasing as my budget is increasing on that program for paid, then maybe I'm paying more for leads that aren't good.

I'm always looking for the nooks and crannies in data to how to make SEO and paid better versus how to use the same data that everyone else uses and try to squeeze a little bit more juice out of that rock. I like to go to green field or blue sky, or whatever people call it, where there's nobody looking. What would happen if I took my paid data and joined it to all of my SEO data? Because SEOs don't look at paid data, not at scale at least, and paid people are like what would I do with that, that's rankings. It's a machine learned data set, Google knows exactly what the customer wants when people are ranking in organic. Before you build your landing pages, before you build your ad copy titles, might you want to look at this?

Matt: It's really interesting and somewhat scary, I guess, somewhat big-brother-ish when you think about how all of this is intertwined and how much is known about what you do. To your point, looking at this data even before you start to build anything, I think typically as marketers we think about that in the opposite direction. We've built our landing page, we have our copy, now how can we "optimize" for it, how can we take what we have and squeeze blood from that rock, versus why don't we start with the intent data on the back end and build around that. I think that is something that obviously is much more powerful, but is a much less used technique, at least among marketers that I'm chatting with on a day to day basis.

Wil: I have really interesting questions for you to ask people that will let you determine their level of listening to the data. One of the things that's very broad, before I got into looking at the data side of SEO and paid and all that more, if you were to ask someone, "How many keywords do you think I can rank with one page?" I'd bet you almost every SEO you ask will have a best practice that they believe.

At Seer, we're like we don't answer that question. We take all of your paid data, we run all of those words through a rank tracker, and we find out which page is able to rank for the most of those keywords. Sometimes you find that a singular page can rank for 800 or 900 keywords on the first page of Google. Right? Someone will say about 15, five, 10, 20. People will guess. I'm like, "What are you doing?" If you just knew to ask for the paid data and you joined it to your organic data, you would know to be able to come back to a client and go, "Wait. This one piece of content is ranking for 500 different keywords in the top 10 with one page."

If we want to figure out what kind of page to build, instead of you giving me a page all ready for me to optimize, shouldn't I do this analysis first and show you the pages that Google is willing to allow to rank for the most keywords? Wouldn't that be an interesting place to start from?

Matt: It sure seems to make sense.

Wil: Another thing that I'm playing around with right now, I'm super early in it, but it's like if Google shows Pinterest in the first result, they've already learned that an image is the right answer to this query.

Matt: I feel like it always shows Pinterest as your first result. I feel like no matter where I look, I feel like I'm always seeing that. I have to put in the minus Pinterest just to get out of that every time I search.

Wil: That's crazy. What that means is when Google looks at all of the different people that searched for the same words you searched for and all the click behavior that they had, Google's smart machine learning people are like we learned that those people typically had the best experience when they went to Pinterest. You could be an outlier, but if they see the majority of people who are looking for something, they're like why don't we show them what they seem to be looking for?

For me, when I see Pinterest showing up, I find out everywhere Pinterest ranks number one across millions of keywords for my clients, you then extract those images out, run them through a visual API and find out all of the different things about those images attached to that search term. You go, "Oh," if we're going to build a social ad, or banner ads, or whatever, Google has learned that for these queries, an image is the right answer.

Let me extract the top images from those pages, find out what those images are about through a visual API, and come back to my client and say, "The reason why I think we should use these images in your social ads is because Google has already learned that most of the people want images as the answer for this set of queries, this subset of queries that you have, and for that we then ran it through a visual API and found out was the background white, was it black, was there a person in it, was there a sun in it, are they at a beach, are they drinking beers.

Google's visual API will tell me all of the different things that are inside of those images. Then we go 85% of all the images that show up for these kinds of queries all have a person at a beach drinking a beer. That's why we think your imagery should either go with that or something tangential to it. That's so much better than however people come up with "I think we should pick this image." Why? "Because it looks cool.

Matt: And then we can test it against another random image we picked and see which of these two random images performs better.

Wil: What's interesting about that is think about how many A/B tests you're waiting for. I love them, they're data driven, they're going to A/B test. I'm like wait. Why would we do that when what we could do is say, "What search terms has Google identified that an image is the right answer?" So it's not right for everything. It's only where Google has identified with their smart ass machine-learning people that an image is the right answer. They're running analyses on millions of people searching before you and turning that into answers on search engines. Why would I not leverage that information?

For me, it's a no-brainer, but I got there by being open to saying the way I always did shit before was wrong. Right? I think that so often we look for people like me with all my years of experience to be like, "Wil, what do you think? You've been doing this for 22 years." I think I should go get the data. I don't think I should tell you what I think, because I've worked on 0.0001% of the internet.

Matt: That example you just gave, looking at images that come up and Google showing you Pinterest, to do what you just talked about, to pull those images, to run them through a visual or image API, how long would that process take for you to go through that for a client? Is that something that you can do in an hour or is that something that takes a month to go through?

Wil: Right now, that is in super alpha. We're working with it for two clients right now to see if it creates value. Once it creates value, I already bring in every search term for every client every day at scale. When I'm bringing in every search term from paid with all that paid data, and every day I'm bringing in what ranks, the top 100 keywords that rank, I already have the info structure to automatically tell me anywhere Pinterest is showing up for our client from within a few days of them signing up with us. Then this is just a pivot off of that that I have to add in.

If there's value, I'll have to add in where Pinterest ranks number one, go to that page, pull the top five images off that page, store them in my data warehouse, then push those five images into the API, find out the most common five tags for each one of those, and then bring it back into my data warehouse. Once I do that, it's happening every day automatically. "Hey, we think you should try this kind of image." Why? "Because we saw Google started showing Pinterest as an answer." Great. "Then we took the top five images from Pinterest and ran them through this thing." Instant idea for a new test.

Then you also run your own ads and your own visuals through the same thing to find out what's the distance between what I'm showing and what Google is rewarding with rankings on Google Image search or with Pinterest.

Matt: I want to talk a whole hell of a lot more about this, but we're running low on time here. This is fantastic. Folks, if you want to learn more about all of this stuff, if you want to hear what Wil is really working on and not just what he can get to in the 25 minutes of our podcast, you should check out his B2B Backstage at MarketingProfs on December 14.

Wil: One thing I have for you, because it's B2B, with B2B most I tend to find that most people have just blown it off whereas we're running it at scale, so we find instantly where software and B2B type companies are ranking.

The other thing that's been really fun that we're just starting to play with is looking at company reviews and seeing how company review fluctuation ultimately affects how you perform in paid when you're bidding. Imagine if you're able to acquire reviews from a company like Capterra or something like that, and you're finding over time this organization that we compete with is getting rated lower and lower, so we're hypothesizing that should I then trigger to bid differently on their brand because people aren't as happy with them as they were six months ago, so my branded spend against them doesn't perform as well as it might now because they seem to be losing some momentum in these reviews.

Those are the other kinds of things from a B2B standpoint that I also play around with, but we don't have time to talk about all that.

Matt: That's a whole new level. That's like Inception, a dream within a dream within a dream. You're going real meta on us.

Wil: It's really cool. One of my coworkers came to me and said she realized that she was adjusting bid strategy based on watching how people in education specifically were reviewed. I thought we have to try to find a way to do that at scale, so now we're trying to play around with that, too.

Matt: That's fantastic. Before we go, I have a question for you, and I want to spend a couple minutes talking about the concept of having enough. I want to talk about how you kind of got there and a little bit about your story. Can you talk about you having discovered this concept of having enough and where you are?

Wil: Sure. It starts with me going to school to be a teacher. I went to school to be a teacher, so I never dreamed of what I now have. I realized that as I hung out with entrepreneurs, it's like you find yourself realizing there's always somebody out there that's crushing it more than you. Then you get back on the treadmill and you run, and you're thinking, "For what? What am I doing that for? Is it worth not seeing my kids when I want to see my kids because I'm working on growing a business from $20,000,000 to $200,000,000?"

Here's the thing that's interesting. I think of it this way. How much better does my life get from where it is today if I add in ten more million, thirty more million, fifty more million in sales to Seer? I can't really imagine a life better than the life that I have. The things that I would do, I think, are just grotesque. I wouldn't want to do them. Sure, I can fly private, I guess. Although, that goes through money quick. I don't have fly in private on all my trips money. I could fly private three or four times a year. You start looking at that and you're like, "That's not the life that I want to live. I don't want to be that guy. I don't want my kids being like what is this standing in line at TSA. I don't want to raise my kids that way."

The hard part for me is I really like my job, so it's not like I'm thinking I could sell this business and get out of here and do something else. I love my job. I like what I get to do. I think I'm working on some cool shit. So, I don't want to sell the business, and I feel like I have enough, so for me it's just been about putting the money back into coworkers and community. Right now, we split out something like 48% of our profits go back to the team. I'm just looking to ramp that up over time. I've given about 40% of the equity of the business to the team. No vesting, none of that shit. You've been here long enough, here you go, because I don't want it.

Once I just decided there's nothing else that I really want that would make me feel any better about me, but I like growing this business and I like my job, I was like why don't I just do it in service of my coworkers and my community. That's kind of how it all came to be. It just feels great.

Matt: You said, "I can't imagine a life better than the life I have now." That to me just says everything. That sums everything up right there.

Wil: I've got what I need. One of the things I try to tell people, it's interesting, I don't like to flex on numbers, I'm not one of these guys that's like "$100,000,000 this," because without that our world is so trained to look at YouTube and who said "how I made $100,000,000 in three days," click, so you realize that you have to put enough of that out there to show your legitimacy, but I freaking hate it.

The one thing I tell people is when Seer did a million dollars in sales many years ago, 14 or 15 years ago, I bought a house and I bought my first brand new car. I still live in that same house. I'm building a new house, but here we are, Seer is on pace to do $35,000,000 this year. I still walk to the same house I did when Seer was at $1,000,000. I just traded that car in six months ago because I have two kids now. It was a convertible and it just didn't work anymore for our family. I kept the same car and the same house that I had when the company went from $1,000,000 in sales to $35,000,000 over that time period.

I'm just grateful for what I already have. It's like why spend all this time working on this business and dealing with the stress and the hiring, this and that, the people leaving, the people coming and going? Because it's fun still to do. I'm not ready to hang it up.

Matt: That's the thing. Until it's not fun, you keep doing it until it's not fun anymore.

Wil: There is no such thing as a life that's better than mine right now to me. Nobody can come and tell me… I have all these bankers that hit me up saying, "Sell the business. You could do this. Before Biden changes the laws." So, I get taxed more. I don't want all of this anyway. I just keep getting pinged about the money as the motivator. I'm over that. I'm like, "Here, read this blog post. Come back to me when you can tell me why I should sell my business so I can have a bigger impact on the community."

Matt: Wil, thank you so much for your time today. It's been so great talking with you. I appreciate you being here.

Wil: It was awesome. I'm glad we finally got to link up.

Matt: Yes. Folks, if you want to learn more about Wil, as I mentioned, there's info in the show notes. Wil, where can folks find out more about Seer Interactive and what you're doing there?

Wil: You better be able to Google us and find us, otherwise we suck at our jobs. I'm Wil Reynolds, you can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn. I'm more than willing to have dialogues on those two platforms.

Seer Interactive, look us up. Our big thing is we like to share what we learn, so the things that I'm talking about, if you're thinking some of that stuff sounded pretty cool, on our YouTube channel we actually share how we build these things out so that if you wanted to do it yourself, you can do it. We're not trying to keep it all to ourselves so no one else can learn. We're big sharers on our YouTube channel.

Matt: Speaking of sharing, folks, I have one request for each of you listening to this. I don't need a five-star review, we don't need a long written review. If you found something inspirational or something inspiring, something good from today's podcast, tell one person about it. Tell a colleague, tell a coworker, tell a friend about this podcast. Let them know that the Marketing Smarts podcast is out there and there's good marketing stuff to listen to.

That wraps today's episode. My friends, thanks again for your time today. We'll see you in the next one.

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Published on November 4, 2021