Escaping the J-Curve in a $700k SDE Ecom Business

You know what? I think actually it ended up coming down to the dscr. Was that, like, to really make the numbers pencil out. That was what. What we needed to do.

And so you closed in October 2024. Okay, now let's hear about this J curve, this transition.

We hired, we talked. I talked to three or four different firms. Oddly enough, it seemed like the salesperson was the most analytical and maybe even the most technical person.

Once I got deep working with the staff, I found that they just weren't. And in retrospect especially, they were not as good as I expected them to be. Because of that quoting process.

It's.

It's referred to as an offline conversion process. One of the things that you want to do is to take that sales data and feed it back to Google so that Google is training its algorithm on that data. Given the fact that it's two thirds of our revenue, having it train the algorithms on the 1/3 is sort of silly.

They're completely different audiences. Right. So they assured us that they were going to be able to help us with that, and it just languished and left languished. In retrospect, they also were not doing technical SEO, like, right out of the gate.

And what I know now understand from really good SEO providers is that that's like the first thing you do. You know, you want to clean up and fix all of the technical issues, because that's the stuff that gets. No matter how much good content and whatnot you produce, that's the kind of stuff that gets in your way.

So, you know, I was right about the Concerns that I had about my lack of understanding and experiencing in these spaces. I generally have a pretty good intuition and I thought this company was really competent. The other thing that bit me a little bit with them is that they had a 90 day cancellation policy.

So I ended up having to pay them longer than I wanted to. I ended up firing them and continuing to pay them on the side because they weren't working for me. So we were, we were down, trending a little bit, you know, on our traffic. I found.

And by the way, this. So all of that time and energy and money that you spent on that, on that consultant, on that group was opportunity cost and lost money. But it didn't necessarily hurt the business because you were starting from a pretty weak position anyway, SEO wise.