Drum roll please....
I am proud to introduce my latest and one of my favorite interviews with a
great company, an amazing person and my friend Greg. He has an amazing story
and I am so glad he decided to share it with me. I couldn't wait to post this
gem to share it with you. I hope all of you read this in its entirety. I
learned some very important lessons from this interview and if any company out
there has a need for talented content for your website I am sure Greg and his
company will take great care of you. Content is King!
How did BKA Content come about?
In 2009, co-founder
Matt Secrist graduated from Utah State University with dual degrees in
Economics and Finance. The economy, however, was in recession and
Matt had no real job prospects! Greg Secrist, the other co-founder and older
brother, had been dabbling in ways to make residual income online. Feeling a
bit sorry for his younger sibling, he decided to help. For several
months, Greg had discovered the power of internet marketing, having created a
few blog sites that were bringing in steady, albeit small, residual income.
Greg helped Matt set up his own blog sites in the hope of similarly generating
some income. Considerable time was spent searching for providers of quality
content to help update the blogs and improve their search rankings. Much of
what they found was written by off-shore content providers and was often
garbage, unintelligible and stuffed with keywords.
Through their
research, they quickly realized that there was a market in providing quality,
American-written content to companies with websites. In early 2010, they
decided to create a simple Word Press site that advertised original content
written by American writers – Buykeywordarticles.com was born! The original
idea was that the site might generate some revenue for Matt while he continued
to look for a Finance job (that he will admit that he didn’t actually want to
get). A simple order form was placed on the site where clients could
order 1, 5 or 10 articles, and they sat back to see what would happen.
Several years
later, Buykeywordarticles.com has now become BKA Content, and is one of the
industry leaders when it comes to internet content creation.
Q: What would
you say are the top 3 keys to your success?
A: This is a great
question. In our industry especially, technology and automation are the
name of the game. Most of our competitors simply offer an automated
platform in which a client and writer can connect in order to complete a content
writing project. We provide something different to our clients, which I
would consider to be our first key to success, which is to provide good old
fashioned business to client relationships. This means that we have real
account managers who can talk with clients, discuss their needs and ultimately
help them process their orders so that the client has one point of contact
throughout their whole experience with us. This approach, while considered
old fashioned by today’s internet standards, has created customer loyalty and
has made us a trusted, accessible, and well recognized partner for their
content needs.
I would consider the 2nd key
to our success to be the people that we have brought on board in our
company. As a new company, we have sought out people who we can not only
trust, but who have bought into our vision of what BKA Content can become with
their help. Some of these individuals have come from large corporations
and have taken pay cuts to help us bring this dream into fruition and to
progress the company to new heights. We love these people as they are talented,
loyal, and have the company’s best interests in mind.
The 3rd key
to our success would have to be the company culture we are working to cultivate
here at BKA Content. Even though our writers are technically independent
contractors, the management goes out of their way to listen to their feedback,
send them little gifts when they go above and beyond on a project, have company
writing contests, summer company BBQ’s, or even send them flowers during a time
of loss. By taking care of people, we have fostered a healthy “team”
mentality. This mentality helps our people to care more about their work,
which in turn gives our company better quality and more dependable workers.
Q: How do you solve
business disagreements and decide which direction to go?
A: I have to admit that
most of the disagreements happen between my brother Matt and I, and I apologize
to all of the other managers for having to witness some of these spats, but
while we may disagree, we always do our best to respect each other’s view, get
other people’s feedback and shelve the discussion if things are beginning to
get a bit tense, or if we know we won’t come to a solution at that specific moment
in time.
One thing that really
helps us to decide on a direction to go as a company is through doing
research. This research helps us to decide a direction based on the
possible impact the decision may have on the business, who it may effect,
etc. The decisions that have to be made regarding the unknown are always
the hardest for me, as there typically is no research to support a decision,
and in those cases we really try to just check out gut feeling and the gut
feelings of others on our team to make the final decision.
Q: What were the
failures you had prior to your success?
A: Wow this is a painful
question. Right after I married my sweet wife, I had an extended family relative
who was involved in real estate/financial investments who pressured a few of my
family members to join in on what he was doing. When I was first
approached by it, I had a bad feeling about it and decided to opt out. My
parents on the other hand, who are about the most frugal people I know, decided
to join in. Within the first few months of joining the program, they were
making very good returns and my Dad was even planning on retiring from his job
of 20+ years.
By seeing my parents
do so well with this investment opportunity, my logic took over in the place of
my feelings. I started convincing myself that if my frugal parents, who
have always been responsible with money, felt that this was a good idea and
were seeing results then I should be just fine participating.
Well I stupidly
borrowed $50 thousand dollars, which was a huge investment for a newly married
22 year old (most investors in this program put in several hundreds of
thousands of dollars) in the form of a personal bank loan to put into this
investment. Did I make any money? Not a dime. The week after
I put my money in, my relative’s assets were seized by the SEC due to fraud,
and my parents, myself and others were staring financial ruin in the face as
all the money invested was ultimately lost and never recovered.
Now I want to make it
clear that I don’t blame my parents for my joining in. I had my gut
feelings, and I should have listened to them because sometimes we shouldn’t
participate in things, even if they look good on paper. As we found out
after the fact, my relative leveraged his family and religious relationships in
order to operate an elaborate Ponzi scheme.
Through MANY years of
struggling, lawsuits and hopelessness, I’m happy to say that 7 years later, my
parents and I are recovering well from this mishap due to undeserved
blessings. While this experience was absolutely horrible, it taught me
many things that have helped me with owning a business. Here are a few of
the ways I have implemented a few of the things I’ve learned from this life
lesson:
1. At
this current point in time, BKA Content doesn’t owe any lender a cent. We
are completely self-funded and run off of our own capital. Has this
slowed our growth? Yes. Do we pay ourselves peanuts to put more
money into the business? Yes, but it has given us greater stability and has
not burdened us with the threat of debt.
2. I
spend a lot more time researching things now before we make a decision as a
company, especially when it comes to money.
3. I’ve
also seen the power of not having all of your eggs in one basket. While
BKA Content does take the majority of my time and efforts, I am always pursuing
other avenues in which I can make additional income. I do this to potentially
help soften the blow if an income stream all of a sudden disappears.
Q: What is the best
thing about being your own boss? What’s the most challenging part?
A: One of the things I
enjoy most about being my own boss is to be in control of the success of the
company. I like having no-one else to blame but myself if the business
succeeds or fails – which is a lot of responsibility.
The responsibility of
employing people and ensuring that the business is doing well enough to keep
them paid is probably the most challenging part because I really do care about
these people. I know that I am directly
responsible for having their basic financial needs met, which definitely weighs
on me.
Q: If you could
start all over again what would you do differently?
A: If I could start over,
I would have brought on more qualified help sooner. I was pretty freaked
out to stretch our own assets to be able to hire people based on my horrible
financial experience, but in hindsight, I think we could have definitely
benefited from having the expertise that we have on board now earlier to set us
up for more increased growth.
Q: What book has
inspired you the most?
A: “Delivering Happiness:
A Path to Profits Passions, and Purpose” by Tony Hsieh – CEO of Zappos.com. This book basically shows that by taking
care of your people (employees), they in turn take care of your and your
customers.
Q: What is the best
piece of advice you have ever received or have given?
A: To slightly exceed
your customers’ expectations. The reason why you should “slightly” exceed
the expectation is that if you go too overboard, the client will expect that
type of response every time, which is unrealistic. But if you slightly exceed
their expectation, they are a little happier than normal and will more than
likely attribute any correspondence with you to happiness.
Q:Superman or
Batman?
A: Batman! He
actually had to earn his “super-hero” status through honing his skills, and
hard work!
