The decision and the reasoning

A cold call from a contractor, and a firm nobody could tell apart

In late 2013 a contractor who had moved into search work for other contractors cold-called Tellus. I took the call. Most cold calls a general contractor gets are somebody selling leads. This one was different because he was a contractor first, and he talked about how a homeowner actually looks for a builder rather than how an agency sells a package. He and the people he worked with had built an agency out of Granada Hills that made websites for contractors and only for contractors. They did not do search work in any organized way at that point. They built sites.

Where Tellus was is easy to state. We were a small green design-build firm in Los Angeles with real press behind us, television and magazines and coverage that came from doing visible work. What we did not have was a search position, and by 2014 that was the problem I had to solve. Nobody was going to find us by walking past a job site. They were going to type "design build Los Angeles" into a search bar, and whoever showed up first was going to get the call. There were hundreds of general contractors in the city, and on a results page we all sounded the same.

I was already doing the work by hand. I ran the Tellus sites myself, I chased press wherever I could get a mention, and I commented on the articles that were already ranking so our name kept turning up beside the pages people were already reading. Years earlier I had bought the search term for green building when almost nobody was bidding on it, because owning a category early is cheap and proving you belong there is the part nobody does. So I was not looking for someone to hand marketing to. I was looking for someone who could build what I had already decided we needed.

What Tellus needed was specific. Page one for the phrase that mattered most in our market, before the category filled up. A web of sites that each ranked on its own and lent weight to the others. And a habit of presence, releases, comments, quotes, kept up for years on top of running a construction company. What the agency needed was an operator who knew what a contractor would actually pay for, and who could turn a website shop into a search shop. Those two needs fit together, and the fit is the reason this did not stay a vendor relationship.

Write the plan myself, then buy a seat where my judgment counts

The default move was obvious and I chose against it. Hire the agency, negotiate scope and price, judge it on deliverables, fire it if the numbers do not come. That structure gives a client control over what ships. It gives no control over whether the vendor's judgment is right, because a vendor paid to ship has every reason to ship and no particular reason to be right. Here the problem was sharper than usual. The agency built websites and did not yet do search, so the judgment I needed was not for sale from them at all. It was mine.

So I wrote the strategy and handed them the build. Press releases on a cadence. Backlinks among sites we owned. Separate sites for the separate Tellus companies and the trade brands, all tied to each other. Content and video. And a standing practice of being available to reporters, which was the piece I already knew mattered most.

Then I changed the relationship. Rather than stay a client, I became an advisor to Contractor Gorilla with an equity position in the agency, while Tellus stayed its client. The question I asked was who in this arrangement had a reason to be right, not just to ship. A seat with equity put my judgment inside their product. It gave them an operator's read on contractors they could sell to every other client, and it gave me a reason to keep the strategy honest from the inside.

I also knew what it cost. An advisor with a piece of his own vendor has less independence judging that vendor than a client does. I never ran a second agency beside them and I never commissioned an outside audit of the method. What kept it honest was that the result was visible to me without asking anyone. A general contractor cannot read an agency's code, but he can type the phrase that matters into a search bar every week and see who shows up.

The last move came at the end. It was a small business, and holding a piece of it was worth less to me than the work was, so I gave the equity stake up in exchange for trade work. That is the whole arc: vendor, advisor with an equity position, equity given up for the work itself.