John Waddy is current CEO and founder of TwentySix2 Marketing – one of Atlanta’s leading search engine marketing firms.
Waddy’s career began in 1990 with IBM. He later moved to Manning Salvage and Lee PR, where he honed his marketing skills. In 1997, Waddy launched Travel eMarketing,
an Internet marketing firm focused on the areas of search engine optimization, email marketing, website design and online marketing.
Travel eMarketing services over 150 clients in the hospitality space, such as Rosewood Hotels and Resorts and Gaylord Entertainment.
In 2003, TwentySix2 Marketing was launched to expand services to the needs of clients outside the travel industry.
Since then, TwentySix2 has worked with a variety of clients, such as Georgia Pacific, Verizon Wireless, Minute Maid, Cox Enterprises, Earthlink, Post Properties, AutoTrader, Internap and ChoicePoint.
Company Culture:
Our company culture is tied to our mission:
1) Serving our customers better than the competition
2) Delivering results to customers that positively impact their bottom line
3) Working hard to get better at what we do every day
4) Giving back to the community
Our culture and passion are seeing our customer’s successes. We measure our achievements not by sales we have won, but by our client’s degree of satisfaction with us. When our client’s website visibility has increased to the point that it dramatically and positively impacts their business and bottom line, we are successful.
We take companies that struggle online and help them achieve much more than they could alone, becoming great friends with almost all of our clients in the process. It’s about making a commitment and delivering results.
We are not the biggest agency, nor are we the smallest. We are right in the middle, giving us the ability to deliver results like a large agency without the Madison Avenue overhead.
We are a small family-like team committed to figuring out how we can do our jobs better and how we can get our customers ahead of the competition.
We reward our employees when they help in customer success by giving them unexpected days off, company outings at the lake and free lunches provided during Friday afternoon intra-office cooking contests.
We’ve even paid for a wedding anniversary night out for one of our employees at our expense. We participate in community service projects like helping out at homeless shelters and purchasing gifts to send to less fortunate children because community service allows us to share our success with others by giving back some of what we earned.
Biggest Business Challenges:
In the search engine marketing business, talent is in high demand. Finding and retaining the best people who understand the world of internet marketing is our biggest challenge.
We are currently in hiring mode, but we don’t make any offers unless there someone is a really good fit for the company. I would say that out of a hundred resumes, we interview ten people.
And of ten interviews, we hire one person. Somehow though, we have always found the right people when we needed them with the necessary skills to carry out our mission.
Search engine marketing is unique because you must possess three qualities:
1) A passion for the search business
2) Technical knowledge about web design, paid search and website analytics
3) An ability to communicate with a variety of different customers.
Finding talented people with this blend of skills is incredibly difficult, perhaps that is the reason we have stayed small, because we are so committed to quality.
Background and how you got into the industry:
I started out throwing newspapers at five in the morning for $7 an hour to pay the bills. I had a friend that was in IBM’s co-op program, and she got me my first interview with them.
I got the job and went to work for IBM while I was still in college. When they offered me $15 an hour, I thought I’d made the big time!
After working for IBM in technology for a few years, I switched over to advertising. While there, I worked part-time on my father’s vacation home rental business in Hilton Head by marketing his website online.
In one year using GoTo.com (now called Yahoo! Search), I was able to increase his company’s sales by over $2 million. At that point, I decided it was time to quit my job at the ad agency and start my own business.
I remember the first year of my new business venture; it was the late 90’s and I was working out of a condo making about $20,000. I wanted to quit. My old job at the ad agency paid me more than that! My dad had a talk with me convinced me to stick with it.
In the third year, my business finally started to take off.
My advice is never quit. You can’t see the future, so just stick with it.
When I started my business, if someone had told me that in 2007, my one person company would expand to almost 10 employees and 20 Fortune 1000 customers, I never would have believed it.
Never quit, period.
Biggest Accomplishment and goals:
My biggest accomplishment is all of the relationships I have built over the years. We have over three hundred client friends, and even more business partner friends.
We also maintain great relationships with most of our competitors. Relationships make the world go round and being a good friend and honest business partner is the name of the game for me.
You only get one chance for a reputation. Once that gets tarnished, you can say goodbye to your credible business and all the respect you ever gained.
My most important goal in life is to be a good Christian, husband and father. Business takes a backseat to these three priorities.
I remember going to Kevin Foster’s funeral this past year; he ran one of the largest web design firms in Atlanta - Macquarium.
He passed away at a very young age, leaving young kids and a wife behind. At his funeral, they quoted him as having said “Never trade a successful business for a strong, happy family.”
If that’s not some great advice, I don’t know what is.
Leadership Style:
There are two kinds of leaders – those that focus on control and visibility or those that focus on movement and progress.
I began my career focused more on control and visibility into how my company was performing. Since then, I have put managers and systems in place to worry about those aspects.
These days I am more interested in moving the ball forward and getting things done.
As the CEO, I juggle a lot of balls in the air at once. I just try to make sure that progress takes place every week with each ball and I have found that there are two ways for me to effectively get things done:
1) I come in early most days. I don’t read e-mails or answer the phone. I just sit down and work on my “to do” list.
2) I work a lot of Sunday afternoons. I find that Monday morning is a lot more fun if I hit the ground running.
At the end of the day, my job is to move the ball. Whether it’s marketing, technology or training, my job is to ensure that we’re constantly making forward progress.
Employee Hiring and Development
First and foremost, we look for people that love the search business. They don’t have to know everything, but they do have to be passionate about the topic.
Passion is critical to success in any business. If you don’t love what you do and continue the learning process, you’ll never be satisfied and you’ll never feel the great sense of accomplishment that comes with a job well done.
We also like to say that we “hire for attitude and train for skill.” Most companies look for skills and hope for good attitudes.
I have found that it’s much easier to train a smart person with a good attitude how to do a job than it is to train a topical expert on how to have a good attitude.
Attitude and work ethic are everything.
As for management, I look for entrepreneurs. My long term plan is to continue building our business and eventually put the employees in charge.
I think the only way to do that is to seek out smart people with an entrepreneurial spirit; give them responsibility and control, and get out of their way.
If you have to micro-manage someone, you probably shouldn’t hire them.
Organizational Management
Our employees all subscribe to industry newsletters and search engine marketing blogs to stay informed of what’s going on.
Continuous learning is the key to staying ahead of change. As an owner, I have to know what’s new developments are coming and make decisions about how those changes will affect our organization.
Overall, change is good for my business. If things didn’t change, I would not be in business.
Focus is another issue all together. Focus comes from the top. We all have too many things to do in the office, including me.
The key to success is prioritizing each task according to what will move the business forward and what will have the most impact on our customer’s success.
Putting tasks through this filter helps with decision making and puts focus back into the daily routine.
Most Exciting Technology Trends
Website analytics and tracking will continue to be important. The newest thing in search will be visitor demographic insight.
There are tools out there now that let you see who is on your site and what they do while they’re there. It’s pretty amazing.
But I think the key to technology is not the technology itself. It’s more about the business insight you can take away from it that’s important.
I think business strategy and thinking are the best things we can do for our clients. Technology just supports the strategic plan and validates our work.
Tech Insights
I am big on process and training. I think the key to success in any business, not just technology, is being able to give consistent deliverables and results.
I think one of the best books ever written is by Michael Gerber – The E-Myth Revisited. In short, Gerber talks about how entrepreneurs have to get out of doing the technical work “in” their business and start working “on” their business.
The only way to get out of doing the technical work is to install processes and procedures that anyone can follow to produce the same quality work.
If you want to grow your business, you have to dig deep to understand your customer’s problems. The more you understand what they need and how to meet that need, the better you can deliver a solution.
Tech Partnerships
Our business is unique because we work with large and small companies. Small companies usually have a single IT person that we work with.
In most cases, they just give us access to the client’s website and we go to work. On the other hand, large companies don’t normally allow us that same access to their website.
In this situation, we usually provide our recommendations and they install them. However, we do add value by training IT teams about search engine marketing during optional lunch and learns, which enables them to do their jobs with more expertise.
On the client level when we work with CMO’s, our job is to make them successful. In the services business, we want to make the people that hired us look good.
Community and Business
Every day I wake up and thank God for giving me a successful business that continues to grow and do well. I know that my blessings have exceeded anything I deserve, but I would like to think that some of our successes were a result of my hard work.
I think it’s important to give to others. We have worked with many charitable organizations in Atlanta such as women’s shelters and groups that help families with disabled children. In addition, we have done pro bono work for organizations like The Atlanta Children’s Museum.
I have found that giving to others always comes back to you. We don’t give back to the community to get something in return, but the more we give, the more blessed we are.
University/College Affiliations:
Georgia State University, Mercer University
Professional organization affiliations:
Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association Board Member, Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization, Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, Technology Association of Georgia
Best advice to those just starting out in technology:
Put your head down and get to work. Take the fear of failure out of your mind and move forward every day. If you work hard at your business and never give up, opportunities will present themselves.
Hometown:
Atlanta, GA
Quote:
“Never trade a successful business for a strong, happy family”
Hobby:
Golf, Running
Executive gadget:
Too Many