Hi. Thanks for your interest in Steelhead. My name is Chris Wibbe. I founded Steelhead to give small businesses access to elevated development and marketing strategies that are usually only available to enterprise-level clients. In this first blog post I’ll give you a brief history of my experience in website development and digital marketing. You can read more on why I founded Steelhead and how we are helping clients in our About section.
Throughout my career, I’ve seen my share of new technology disrupt the marketing industry. Early on I worked in commercial printing just as it was shifting from old paste-up production into desktop publishing, direct to film, and eventually direct to plate, all within the span of just a couple years. I was one of the “new computer kids” the company hired to help the transition.
Being one of the most tech-savvy employees at the company, I seized an opportunity to build the company’s website. This was the early days of the internet, so straight HTML and CSS. The new site went live and almost immediately our printing clients starting asking to hire us to build a site from their businesses.
As I watched as our clients’ marketing budgets start to shift from printing to digital, I tried to convince the company to offer digital marketing services to pick up where printing budgets were being left behind. However, as with most classic disruption stories, they were in denial, thinking that offering something like SEO would only confirm digital’s new dominance over print. I was building client websites, but the company leaders didn’t want to help market the sites we were building, so I decided to do it myself.
I started my first web development agency in 2006
(Has it been 20 years already?)
I started my first web development agency in 2006 (Has it been 20 years already?), offering design, development, SEO, and even some print design services. I ran that firm successfully for about six years. I eventually merged with another local firm who was focused on white-label SEO. My web development skill joining with their SEO and PPC services became a powerhouse combination.
Google search and SEO were evolving rapidly during this time. This was before real time PageRank algorithm rollouts. There were disruptions every time Google dropped a manual update. I served as a Vice President there and made it a policy as we grew, to continuously research and test our SEO and website strategies. We maintained effectiveness and growth for years, but being a white-labeled provider for other agencies, we did not have the opportunity to interact directly with the clients who were utilizing our strategies. Eventually our largest client (a much bigger agency) offered to me a role to help shape their SEO and Website Development strategies, and how they work together.
Working at a big agency has its pros and cons. I enjoyed the chance to work with a wide range of clients across multiple industries and learning the different strategies work for each of them. One of the downsides of the big agency environment however, is that executive decisions have a tendency to be based on the agency’s profit more than what is best for the client. This is especially true in sales-dominant agencies. It is normal for an agency to want to financially healthy, but if an agency’s largest and highest paid team is the Sales team, the agency’s leadership team are all salespeople, and the Sales team dictates product evolution… If all these things are true, you can be sure that the agency is more interested in selling their services to you than they are in helping you sell yours.
…you can be sure that the agency is more interested in selling their services to you
than they are in helping you sell yours
It is this type of environment that motivated me to found Steelhead. Our products and services are designed and constantly tested by analysts, strategists, and marketing experts, to produce the best possible results for our clients and their budgets. Our team is motivated and rewarded for client success, not sales quotas. Reach out to us here, and we’ll get started.
Thank you!
