The Success of Design in Digital Marketing | Steven Schneider

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Welcome to another episode of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Edison, New Jersey. I wonder if Thomas Edison is from there or that's where they named him. I don't know. Anyway, thanks for listening. Uh, my guest today is Stephen Schneider of Trio SEO. Steven, welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for having me.

Well, thanks for coming. You never know what happens with podcasts, you know, sometimes people don't show up, some people show up and, you know, they're not what you expect, but you look like someone that's going to deliver.

Hope so, that's what I came for.

Tell, tell us, uh, how you got into Trio. Well, let's start with what is Trio SEO? I mean, SEO is in the name, so I'm assuming that, that you do SEO, but elaborate.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we're a B2B and SaaS SEO agency. And so our primary strength is driving organic traffic, whether in the form from Google or Bing or even places like ChatGPT nowadays to people's websites and helping them get organic business that way. So primarily we do that through tools like calculators and quizzes and more engaging formats. But other things are going to be content, blogs, sales pages, kind of anything that would encompass all things SEO.

And how long have you been doing this with Trio?

Trio's been around for about 3 years. We just had our birthday, but I've been in the SEO space for almost 10. Thank you. Yeah, so almost a decade for me and SEO in general.

All right, so, so what was the journey like that brought you to launching Trio? Were you, were you, did you have another agency before, or?

Yes, I used to co-own a portfolio of about 40 different sites, and that was kind of my crash course into SEO. I discovered Amazon affiliate blogging back when that was still a viable path and kind of the space of creating like best of listicle style articles. I used to publish in the ballpark of like 300 to 400 articles per month. This was for AI and kind of all that sort of stuff. And so, um, scaled that portfolio to 7 figures alongside my partners and a great team. And that was, like I said, kind of my, you know, internship into SEO a decade ago in college. And we started that business from our dorm, and that was kind of what we did to figure out how to not get a real job. And then I've kind of been in SEO since. So now I get to help clients do the same thing and help businesses scale all through SEO.

So did you, did you and your partners exit that agency, like sell it or?

So we exited sites. It was kind of like more on like the very similar to like an M&A or like a private equity kind of setup where we would buy sites or flip sites or just cash flow them to kind of help sustain the business. We got hit with a couple of black swan events during the COVID area and during that whole kind of like chaos with Google updates and whatnot. So I accidentally stepped away from the company on good terms. Still love those guys. And, um, that was kind of when I was trying to figure out what was next, and I just kind of randomly stumbled onto LinkedIn and met my partners just through a cold call networking, just kind of coffee call setup. And we hit it off and figured out there was something there. And flash forward about 6 to 9 months, we started Trio.

So you, you, you had an unexpected interruption. You had something that was working. And then you had something beyond your control come in and disrupt that. So you had the opportunity to kind of take a fresh look at the lay of the land. Why, why did you land where you did with Trio? What was, what was intentional about doing it differently?

There was no plan. I wish I had some crazy answer to that.

I like that.

Yeah, I went and got a real job. You know, I took a year off for my first business and kind of coasted around and figured out what to do. Tried a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Nothing really stuck. And so I just said, okay, time to go into the career path and sell my soul to corporate for the next 30, 40 years. And I absolutely hated every single second of it and just said, you know, I'm an entrepreneur thick and through and I'll figure it out.

You're officially unhireable.

Yeah. Yeah. So I quit on the spot and said, I'll figure it out. And I just started consulting and kind of figuring, you know, what would land essentially. And then I was already talking to my now partners at that time, and they had just come off of an exit and they were kind of, you know, starting some new sites or new websites and new companies and whatnot. I just said, hey, like, I'm, I'm back in entrepreneurship mode. I'm doing this thing. I don't know what's going to happen, but like, if there's any capacity to work together, I'd love to explore that. And they said, you know, we don't have any intention of starting a new company, but if you come to us with an idea, we'll happily explore it. And so I just said, you know, why don't you guys have an SEO agency? It's a natural fit. They also have a wealth of experience in SEO and they said, oh, we have it all planned out. We just don't want to be the operator and the CEO. And so I kind of, you know, suggested myself and said, well, I can, I already know the system. I know how to manage all this because I used to manage my own websites. And so I said, I can bolt on my old system from my first company. And if you guys can find some beta clients, all we have to do is figure out the client ops side of things, but everything else is the same. And so we did that and had a good beta round and found 3 or 4 people that were willing to give us some money to test that out for them. And some of those people are still with us today and we haven't looked back since.

So what, what is different with Trio than, than the previous agency? Like from your perspective?

Yeah, so the main one is that it's not any— the first company wasn't an agency. Um, I owned all the sites, so it was just like us, you know, trying to figure out how to build content sites. And we purely went after listicle style formats, so affiliate Amazon, like best of articles, right? Um, nowadays we're doing like real authentic SEO, so we're, you know, we're looking at sales pages and landing pages and technical SEO. Um, back then it was more or less a right place, right time content cash cow, I guess you can call it. Yeah. Just publish article, wait for article to rank, make money. Nowadays it's very strategic. You know, we're looking at how to look at conversion rate optimization, user experience, pretty much the entire arsenal of SEO that contributes towards success.

That's interesting. So, okay, because you're throwing out terms there that in my mind don't have anything to do with SEO, but that could just be my ignorance. Um, when, when you're talking about landing pages, sales funnels, conversion rates, that seems to be more in the purview of what I would categorize as marketing. Um, is, is it really SEO or is it SEO plus?

It's SEO plus, but I think that what we've learned is that if we just do SEO, people have a false expectation around SEO being the silver bullet to all of their problems in their business. And that's never the case. Like, I can, I can grow your site like crazy and bring you all of the right traffic, bottom of the funnel, high intent. But if your website looks like it was built in 2004, it's never going to convert. And so we have to, as partners for them, put on our entrepreneurial hats and say, hey, you know, you don't have a good funnel here, I would suggest doing this. And no, we're not going to actually do the work for them, but, you know, we'll kind of guide them in the right direction. So we kind of like to come in almost as like a fractional partner from that sense, right? Um, and kind of help show them the way and say, hey, look at this, like, look at this, like, what would you do if you were you know, them, or I'll, I'll pull up their competitor's site and I'll say, do you see how nice this is? Like, do you get that nice happy feeling in your heart when you look at their website? And I quickly pull up theirs and I said, see how gloomy and awkward all this is? And I was like, that's why no one's converting. I was like, I just 5x your site, right? And conversion hasn't changed. So let's figure that out next. So that's kind of how we look at it.

Yeah, because traffic without something behind it is really a waste of time, right? I mean, that's—

yeah, and it's a waste of our time too, because if they're not happy, they're not going to cancel, you know, it's just what's the point.

So, um, who is it that you— I mean, the way you have this design sounds like it might be fairly targeted to a specific type of customer. Like, who is it that you is your ideal?

Yeah, B2B service providers and SaaS companies are typically our bread and butter. Industries are kind of agnostic in that sense. Like, you know, it's kind of a— we let our own audit process do a lot of the due diligence to ensure that there's, you know, strategy fit from our sense. We really like building tools that can act as lead converters and kind of help push people toward, you know, the sales team. And so we kind of go into it seeing like, is there opportunity to create a calculator that already has search demand behind it? And then we can get traffic to that tool and then build the tool and then kind of push people in that format. So a lot of the more successful clients that we work with have those tools in place, and then we can just funnel traffic to one sort of like lead mechanic, and then everyone's happy.

Yeah, I think it was Neil Patel. When, when I was reading a lot of his stuff, he was talking about that tool element, and I don't remember exactly when he did it or what he did, but it was around an SEO, uh, thing. But, but like that anchor content, that, that is, is a tool, a free tool, is extremely powerful if you can figure it out. But it, I guess, well, I don't know. Uh, do you find, do you find cases where that tool, free tool model doesn't work? Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now.

I think doesn't work is difficult to answer because there's times where there might not be a tool that already has preexisting demand. So we go to our SEO, you know, like Ahrefs or Semrush, and we look at stuff like that, something might not exist there. But then what to do is say we go to the client and they know their business better than we know the business. And we say, hey, what do you on your sales calls feel like would absolutely just crush? Like, what do you think people would get value out of? And so like, we have a client right now who's, um, they help people hire fractional executive assistants and higher level executive assistants. And so he's helping us kind of formulate the logic behind a quiz, like figure out what's best for you. And so he can essentially use that quiz as leverage to help funnel in and qualify people. And we can also promote it within his blog and get people that way. So if there's not a true fit based on what we can see in the market, then we'll just come to them and say, hey, what would work best? And then we can kind of start tinkering with ideas from there.

So I'm curious, from, from the— you, you said admittedly you're the operations guy. Um, how did you guys come up with how you price your service?

Um, a lot of it has to do with just competitive nature. I mean, we know that we're on the higher side, but we also come with a lot of value. I mean, we're creating these tools, we're creating all the lead mechanics. Um, we're also human written at the end of the day. And so we're not using AI to kind of cheat and cut corners from that sense. So we kind of are in that premium luxury price category, but, um, that also helps kind of separate us from the pack in terms of the clients that we work with, because we've learned that if you're constantly in a race to the bottom, those sort of clients are typically a little more challenging to work with. And so we try and be picky about that.

Do, do you find that prospect— prospects that come to you are primarily shopping your competitors? I mean, and that, and that's what's anchoring the price, or I mean, in other words, do they come to you saying, I need an SEO solution, or, or do they present with a different symptom?

No, it's usually SEO, either in the form of, hey, I'm switching from an SEO, or, um, I'm looking to start SEO and I know that it's, you know, important to my marketing strategy. I have a long-term vision. We have like this red flag and green flag internal document that we've kind of just come to know where it's if somebody is a good kind of client to work with. We don't want people who are trying to test SEO or look at it as a short-term, you know, way to get leads. And so we like to work with people who kind of have that mindset already in place where they can say, hey, you know, I'm looking to work with someone for 6 to 12 months and I know that you guys are going to crush it for us and lead the charge and I'll get out of your way and just kind of let you do what you do best.

What, what would you say, uh, I'm going to pivot a minute. We've had, uh, SEO folks on the show. I'd like to get your perspective on how search is, is changing and how it's not changing and how that impacts what, what businesses need to be doing.

Yeah. So the biggest change is that it's harder than ever to get to the top of the list. And even if you get to the top of Google, you're going to be cut out by Google itself. Trying to offer AI overviews and snippets and all that sort of stuff. Uh, anything in between that is going to be, you know, images and YouTube links. And so, I mean, what is a true organic SEO ranking is not what it used to be 10, 15+ years ago. That's just the inherent truth about that. Um, the other, the other kind of coin flip on that is that you're going to get traffic from ChatGPT, you're going to get traffic from Perplexity. And all these other places that are popping up. So there is a massive opportunity if you kind of position yourself to be that authoritative figure over the next 10 to 15 years and kind of look at it as a turning of the chapters, so to speak. Um, and so that's kind of going to be the main thing, but it kind of, it kind of goes back to engagement. I think that attention is so scarce and it's quickly becoming a very valuable resource at the end of the day. And so you have to figure out ways to hook people in and give them value and work them through the funnel. So, you know, people aren't going to just automatically want to book a demo or book a 45-minute Calendly link. Like no one wants to do that. So you kind of have to figure out ways to start the conversation elsewhere in the format of these tools that I kind of mentioned and then try and nurture them from there on out.

Yeah, I think I'm thinking back about how, you know, at the advent of digital and search and content marketing in general, the, the idea, and you look like you may be too young to have experienced this yourself, but, you know, for, for us that had marketed before digital, um, you know, the, the reframe and the flip really was outbound marketing to people switched with the advent of digital to inbound, where outbound became less and less effective because people did not want to buy that way anymore. The power shifted to the consumer where they'd reach out to you if they wanted you, right? So it was then all about giving them the reason to call you, right? To reach out to you. And it's odd to me, like when I think about like how I searched back then, I feel like I was more— maybe not intentional is not the word, but I would spend more time researching something. You mentioned that time is a scarcity now, and that tracks with the way I look at things for my own self and business. Like, I'm looking for a quicker answer than going through and doing my my own research. Um, is that what you're describing?

Yeah, I think it's a little bit of that. I think it's also that, you know, there's so many options nowadays, and so you kind of have to quickly grab somebody and hook them in and try to give them something that's unique out there. Uh, the other kind of, you know, point is that, um, when it comes to just how you're perceived in the space and kind of amongst your competitors, it's really hard to make that impact. And so if you look at like, how do you become an authority in a space? How do you look at the trust that you're giving off in the space, whether that's in Google's point of view or your customer's point of view? And so your customers are going to rip you apart in a millisecond, just inherently mentally looking at, you know, the layout of your website and the logos you have on your website and the flow of it and the flunkiness. And so part of all of that comes into SEO as we know it nowadays. And looking at the, the kind of Bible of EAT from Google, you know, the experience, the expertise, the authoritativeness, and the trustworthiness— it's like, how is that all built into the user experience at the end of the day? And so that's kind of what I mean by the attention, is that people are making these micro decisions so quickly because they're so exposed to every other competitor at the same time. So you really have to kind of, you know, level up your entire marketing strategy as a whole.

Yeah, because I mean, if you think about like where SEO began and what you described with EAT, I mean, that's not the same thing. I mean, it used to be, you know, really how could you get to the top of the search based upon the intent of the search. But EAT is really more— it sounds more like marketing, right? It's like, you know, going to the user experience.

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What would you say? This is kind of an out of left field question. What would you say to somebody that would say SEO is not about creativity, that it's a technical thing, that it's If you look at marketing, there's the, there's the, uh, nuts and bolts, uh, and then there's the creative aspect of it. What would you just say to say to someone that said, you know, SEO isn't about creativity?

I strongly disagree. For once, I would start there. Um, I think the main thing is, is that if you look at a website, websites are all art and there are going to be technical components where, you know, the, the fundamentals, like, you know, your technical schema and the linking and the, you know, I could ramble on in that, but, you know, there's, there's always going to be the way that your copy is written or the headings that you use or how your navigation is formatted or the pictures that you use and maybe the alt text that's in there. Like, all of that is subjective at the end of the day. Like, there's no— there's a checklist of things you should have, but how they're portrayed and how they're designed in the layout, that's totally art. And so I think that that's one component, but then you also look at strategy, you know, strategy is at its definition, just balancing of scarce resources. And so if I have 100 articles or 100 opportunities that I have to look at for a client, me making that decision relative to their goals and their business and how I think about all that sort of stuff, that's art too. Like I could line up 10 strategists and we'd all have 10 different strategies. And so that's kind of how I look at the art form of SEO is that it really comes down to knowing your stuff and having to just touch hundreds of websites and hundreds of different strategies. Because you're going to look back and be like, oh, I remember when we did this that way back then and probably shouldn't do that again. So let's do it this way. And then you kind of just have to have that firsthand experience.

I, I, uh, I love Rory Sutherland. Have you read his book Alchemy?

No, but it's on my list.

I've heard great things about it. Uh, the thing that struck me about it, and it's, it's a theme that he's not the only one that touched on— there's another book that I read called Predictably Unpredictable— and, and this idea that We want humans to behave in a rational way and follow a predictable pattern, but they don't. And it seems like there's this thought that LLMs and AI in general is going to somehow wrangle that human cat and make it predictable. Like if we throw enough CPUs at it, we'll figure out the pattern. What do you think? I mean, like, is, is that a pipe dream, or can it help you in predicting people's behavior?

Maybe to some degree. Like, maybe there's always going to be some statistical kind of, you know, um, baseline that we can try and put it within, but, um, I don't think so. I think that that's kind of the, the, the, the beauty behind the human aspect of all of it is that SEO is not perfect because search queries change over and over again. And even though we're going after a set of keywords or pages or however you wanna look at it, we've seen from a lot of data that there's many ways to skin a cat in terms of arriving at the same piece of content. Whether that's going to be 2 words or 100 words in a prompt on ChatGPT. And so I think that especially as voice becomes more integrated into things, I think that will really change the game, and especially how people start to talk to their GPT searches as if they're talking to you and I right now. Um, that will massively open up a lot of variability into that entire conversation.

Well, yeah, and I guess what you're speaking to is that the reality is that it's not a static target. Like, you know, the technology changes, therefore people's interactions with it change and their behavior change. So like, it's not like there's one target that you can keep aiming at. It keeps moving.

Exactly. And I think that the other thing too is that You know, you can look at even Google right now and some keywords are just kind of like a catch grab based on guesses. You know, if you look at something like a, um, like a big term like podcast, like it doesn't know if you're looking for the top podcasts. It doesn't know if you're looking to start a podcast. It doesn't know if you're looking to what you're supposed to do. And so it's just trying to predict its best guess on what people have done in the past. But again, someone could just try to spell the word podcast and like that definition is going to be up there as well. Or what is the key, like, what's it mean? So based on just how people engage with tech, I think is going to help shape it, but it's never going to be perfect.

Yeah, I find myself making my prompts to GPT shorter and shorter. It's like, I, I, I started out with these uber long prompts to try and make sure I got a directed answer or the answer that I wanted. But now it's, you know, I'll come up with like 5 or 6 word prompts and I just expect it to know what I'm thinking. I've had a couple of AI people on here that have said that, talked about, and I hadn't really considered this, and I'd like to get your opinion on it. Like all algorithms, LLMs want you to engage with them because that's the measure of success. And so there is a feedback loop built into it that gives you the answer that it thinks that you want. And I'm fascinated about, like, when you're talking about something like what you do, how that could be a real challenge if the algorithm is trying to predict what the user wants to hear. I mean, can you opine on that?

Yeah, I think that the LLM space and how it overlaps with SEO is so new that we're all just— we're back to square one. It's like we're in SEO in 2000, 2001, and we're just trying to drum up all these experiments. And so what we're trying to do, at least in our content now, is add in a lot of the forward-thinking ways that we use prompts and trying to reverse engineer that in content. So if you're reading an article around, um, you know, the top 10 best podcasts for, uh, SEOs, for example. Like, at the top of the article, it might make sense to say, if you're an SEO strategist with 10+ years experience looking for blah blah blah blah blah, that could overlap with how somebody is now using that prompt. And so what we're trying to do is almost reverse engineer, like I said, a lot of that into the content so that when the LLMs go to scan that content, there is overlap into that Venn diagram of sorts. And so yeah, it's a, it's an interesting puzzle because it's, it's not easy to solve, nor is there very concrete ways to get those answers as of yet. So, um, it's just kind of like, oh, I wonder if this would work, and then we kind of just wait and see. And if not, it's like, okay, let's try this. And so we're just very gung-ho about trying to figure out what's there.

Yeah.

And I think what, as a consumer of, I'll use the broad term, marketing services, I think that's one, frankly, where a lot of marketers in the last 10 years got really lazy is that, oh yeah, we can solve that. Like, we figured that out. We cracked that nut. Right? And if you just follow this recipe, you're going to get results, which I don't know where that became not true, but it's 100% not true, which makes scaling from an agency standpoint really difficult because like I don't have a predictable recipe that I can sell donuts. Like I don't have that. Is that your experience?

Um, I have a very, very strong repeatable process that over time has driven results. Um, the main thing that we look at is where the starting point is for everyone's website. So every new client that comes along gets an audit, um, and the starting authority, or what's called the domain rating of someone's website, is kind of what tells us the upward trajectory from that point forward.

So if it's a brand new site, Let me, let me interrupt you real quick. Are you using, would this be a similar methodology of Ahrefs or Semrush as far as what they would say would be domain authority?

Right. Yeah.

Okay.

All right. Yeah. So we can kind of look at that and know what the competitive landscape is from there. So if somebody had just started their website yesterday and they came to us and say, hey, I'm looking for SEO services, we would probably just turn them down and say, hey, it's just not going to work. Like, we're not going to take your money for 5 years to help you get to where you want to go if your competitors are massive, massive authoritative sites. But on the other side of it, if a website come along for a strong website and they have a domain rating of 60, 70 coming along and they have zero SEO on quote unquote, like no content, never really pay attention to it, kind of have this off PR, we can just look at this and say, yeah, it's gonna be a clear win. Like, let's just go crush this. And so The process from that point forward is highly systemized and very repeatable and scalable from that point of view. But the landscape to which the starting point is, is always gonna be different.

Well, I think I heard something, I don't know if you intended to say it, but like if in defining your target market, you're looking for someone with a high domain authority, that they really haven't, uh, utilized it well.

Yeah, or at least like a high enough— yeah, or a high enough domain authority where we can just kind of like jump it up and go from there. Like, we don't want to have this massive gap in our strategy.

So, okay, uh, I'm going to pivot back to the old agency. Is there a way— you, you said black swan, which by definition is unpredictable, um, except that, you know, they're going to happen at some point, right? Like, you know, is there anything that you could have done or should have done in retrospect when looking backwards? Is there something that you wish you had done differently?

So we— yeah, so we got hit by 3 black swan events in 30 days. So the main one was COVID. That was in March of 2021. Everyone knows the economy just kind of went to shambles. Uh, in that same time frame, Amazon had put out a public announcement that they are cutting all of their affiliate commissions by about 40 to 50% overnight, um, which was just completely out of our control, that we couldn't have done that. And then the other one was the Google algorithm update, which was specifically targeting affiliate websites. And so since we had enough sites, it was kind of, you know, distributed pretty well. Like some sites went up, some sites went down. Um, portfolio kind of balanced itself out, but just the kind of overall landscape. But, uh, to your question, like we were already doing certain things, like we were kind of leaning more toward e-commerce. We were using our traffic to kind of drive traffic to our own e-commerce websites and brands and kind of using the affiliate model as a, instead of, we'll send the traffic to Amazon, we'll just send it to our own dropshipping company. And so we started to do that, but it wasn't going to be a quick path. Like we thought we had maybe a 5-year timeline to get that figured out because we knew that the game we were playing was not a forever sustainable game. We should know that the 5-year runway had turned into like 2 years or less. So we had tried to front run a lot of that, but it just happened sooner than we could.

Yeah, I think, I think my experience and not that I've experienced this in my business, just observing other businesses, is that if it's easy and you're making money, understand that is not going to last because that's the nature of a competitive market is people are going to fill that gap. And, you know, I think not that you shouldn't, you know, make hay while it rains, or harvest time. I don't know what the analogy, you know, the metaphor is there, but like, you absolutely have to take advantage of it. Um, like, you're probably going to find something similar with the advent of new technology, and you're going to find this niche, and it's like, oh, this works. Um, but you can't, you can't stay there. The, the, the I don't remember who said it, um, somebody successful said, if you're not busy disrupting your company, someone else is working on disrupting your company, right? Like, you can't just stand still. Um, so it sounds like you knew that, like you knew this is too good to be true, but the, the time frame was not what you thought it was going to be. Is that accurate?

Oh, 100%. Yeah, we, we scaled for I mean, it wasn't like we had played this game for a long time. We were— we scaled to 7 figures within 3 years, just hammering down on content. And at that rate, we kind of just saw how quickly we were able to grow. And that was kind of what triggered the alarms is that like, hey, this is not normal. Like, we should probably figure this out pretty quickly. And so at that rate, we just had so much content at our fingertips and so much traffic amongst the portfolio. And we knew what products were more expensive because we knew all the affiliate relationships. We knew what traffic, you know, products were getting more traffic than the other ones. We're like, okay, well, that one's probably really popular. Let's go see if we can find a supplier. Um, so we had definitely started to go down that path, but, um, like I said, it just, it changed so quickly and all the things happened at once that it really kind of made us just rethink things, um, and just kind of really shook the company. And so for that reason, I was just like, okay, I think it's time for me to de-risk and figure out what's next and, um, set my sights on something new.

Well, and you said you had partners. The fact that you're still speaking, uh, is a testament to something. What would you attribute it to be? Because a lot of times, uh, partnerships, even, even if they survive or they don't survive, there's a lot of animosity and bad feelings. So like, what, what, what was it? Why was it successful for you?

I think it was because we were just such good friends before that all happened that like the business side of things was more or less a cherry on top. And like, I, I still talk to like one of my partners like weekly, like he and I are still like best friends and go golfing once a week as much as we can. And So when that happened, it wasn't like it sucked. Like, it was awkward for, you know, a couple months, but it wasn't like it was the end of the world. Like, none of us, either of us wanted that to happen. Like, that wasn't the goal. And it wasn't like it was messy, or it wasn't like a divorce. It was like me, I came to him and just like, hey, this isn't working out. And he's just like, yeah, I know. And I was like, okay, I think I'm gonna go do something else. And, um, the arrangement that we had kind of within the like internal legal side of it was pretty you know, we wanted the best for all parties involved, and that was how it was from day one. And so it wasn't like we were— like, even today with my current partners, it's like we don't want to screw anybody over. That's not our intent. Like, we only want to do business with people that have good intentions. And I think you kind of have to trust your gut when you go into business with other people. And it's like, if you get the sense that this person is acting weird or has weird tendencies, like, you kind of have to just sense that out. Um, but like I said, we were such good friends in college before that, and it wasn't like it was— we started making money together and we're like, oh, we went from making, you know, $2,000 a month to making $100,000 a month. It was just like it just scaled up, and it wasn't like it was anything that was really, you know, hostile.

Yeah, you, you, you mentioned— I— you didn't use this word, but as you were describing the relationship, it's I would call it equally yoked, like, you know, having the same values, having the same desires. That's key to have partners because if you're not, then when, you know, it's not even necessarily when things go bad, when things go good, sometimes that causes problems because all of those misalignments start to show up. It's like, well, I want to take all this money out of the company, and I— or, you know, whatever that looks like. Um, how do people find out more about Trio SEO and Stephen Schneider if they want to learn more?

Google. I always joke that if you can't find me, I'm doing my job wrong. But, uh, yeah, I'm always on LinkedIn. I post daily content, so you can just look us up, Trio SEO. Uh, you can find me through that way. Um, you know, first name, last name. Um, it's always good. Yeah. So one way or another, you'll be able to track me down. I guarantee it.

Perfect. Listeners will have those links in the show notes. Stephen, thank you very much for your time and your candor and your experience here. I appreciate it. Um, listeners, if you like what you've heard, please share the podcast, rate the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, shoot us a message, tell us what you want to hear, and we'll get rid of Stephen. Until next time, TTFN.