We were lucky to catch up with Mike Munter recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Mike thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Any thoughts about whether to ask friends and family to support your business. What’s okay in your view?
When I first launched my brand new SEO/ORM business in 2011, I emailed all of my friends to announce it. I told them what I was doing and asked if anyone knew someone they could refer to me. One of the responses turned into my first paying client – a P90X coach who wanted to generate inbound leads from Google.
And while I’ve gotten a few other leads from friends, I don’t ask for them anymore and frankly it makes me a little uncomfortable. I don’t like mixing business with friends. These days, I’d prefer to give a one-off 15 minute consult and perhaps refer them to a colleague, rather than take the business myself.
Mike, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
In May 2007, I got laid off from a position I held working at the Rose Garden Arena In Portland, Oregon. I figured I’d take the summer off and then get on to the next thing. The problem was, I had no idea what the next thing was. All I knew was that I didn’t want to push someone else’s product again and I didn’t want to work in corporate America.
For 3 1/2 years, I didn’t work at all. I explored several things, but nothing came of it.
Finally, at the end of 2010, I got an idea. I wondered how Google ranked websites. I put an ad on Craigslist asking to pay someone to train me on how to do this. I didn’t even know their was a whole industry around it – search engine optimization. I hired a guy, trained with him every day for 3 months, then got my website up and sent out the email to friends which I mentioned in the earlier question.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
When I started out as an entrepreneur, I had to figure out how to discipline myself in terms of working hours. I had to learn how to set limits. I’d come from a background of working in professional sports and before that in the computer industry. In both, I worked long hours and revolved my life around work.
So, when I started my own thing, I had to “unlearn” driving myself so hard. When I started, I only had a few clients and I was so eager to prove myself, I was falling into the familiar habits of working long hours and then thinking about it as I went to bed. I was obsessed with proving myself.
I think that drive is a good thing to a point, but then it starts to turn on its ear when it’s interfering with normal life. It took a few years, but I finally learned how to dial it back and let myself off the hook.
The watershed moment came when I had an IVF clinic as a client. I was overworking myself, trying to get them results. I finally said, “Enough. They’re only paying me a few hundred a month.” By that time, I was talking to others in my industry and learned that my per hour rate was way out of whack. So, I set a boundary and stopped working when the time commitment was reached.
I thought the client would be upset. A week passed and nothing happened. So, I decided to dial back my time commitment even more.
The next week, out of the blue, I get an email from the owner of the clinic: “Mike, we just wanted to thank you for the all work you’re doing; we’ve seen a real improvement in our SEO.”
Wow. That was quite a change. It taught me to work smarter, not harder. And to not beat myself up so much trying to overdeliver.
Let’s move on to buying businesses – can you talk to us about your experience with business acquisitions?
I’m actually going to share a story of not buying a business.
During my “mid-life crisis,” I got pretty far down the road to buying a pet grooming franchise, called Aussie Pet Mobile. They swore the mobile pet grooming business was about to explode and provided projected numbers from other franchisees to back up these claims.
I spent weeks crunching financials and talking to company execs. It looked good. I think the buy-in was about 200k which would’ve gotten me all the marketing support to get going, plus leases on 3 branded Sprinter vans. I would’ve had to cash in my IRA to buy it.
I booked a flight to California to meet the president and sign the papers. On the day of the scheduled flight, I woke up and felt a strong “No” in my gut. It was so powerful, I had to listen. I cancelled the flight, notified them I wasn’t coming and never heard from them again.
To this day, I’ve never seen an Aussie Pet Mobile van on the road, nor have I heard their ads. I think that business would’ve been a disaster and I’m glad I listened to my gut.
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