Hey, it’s Tim here (“Head Ninja” and Founder of Exposure Ninja).
I started Exposure Ninja in 2012 after building a website for my next-door neighbour — a plasterer. Having helped it get to the top of Google in our sleepy little town and seeing how the work that resulted from it changed his life, I was hooked and started building sites for other trades. Word spread, and soon my small freelance team and I were building sites for plumbers, roofers, scaffolders, drainage experts, heating engineers and electricians.
Having had so many conversations about digital marketing with these trade clients, I realised that the misinformation spread by big firms to sell their ineffective and largely automated services was a big problem. Each time a business got burned by signing up for 12 months of inescapable hell, it became less likely to dip its toes into the shark-infested digital marketing waters again.
This was creating a gap between large businesses and SMEs that were terrified of being scammed, resulting in a complete lack of marketing.
In 2013, I wrote the first edition of “How to Get to the Top of Google.” As much as I’d love to say that this was part of some grand plan, I just wrote it so that I had a reference to point people towards that would explain search engine optimisation (SEO) in plain English. But the book started to take off, and people started contacting me asking for help with their SEO.
So I set up Exposure Ninja and started hiring more people to work for these clients who, by now, were no longer only trade clients — they were SMEs of all varieties spread across the world.
Then the book became a bestseller on Amazon, and chaos ensued.
As we contemplated how to handle the demand, we somehow concluded that a physical office was required. It was time for Exposure Ninja to grow up and become a “proper company.” You know, desks, meeting rooms, a kitchen. We even got a pool table — we are a marketing agency, after all.
Being the absolute geeks that we are, we had always relentlessly tracked our productivity and performance. We noticed quite quickly that the office wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Our productivity didn’t go up; it actually went down. As did our sales. We all became busier, with clients coming in for meandering three to four-hour meetings rather than the focused one-hour calls that had worked so perfectly before.