AGENT Interview Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder, Moz

AGENT Interview Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder, Moz AGENT Interview: Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder, Moz ALTHOUGH he has become synonymous with terms as SEO and content marketing, Rand Fishkin, co-founder, Moz, is as likely in conversation to talk about personal integrity, core values and other more fundamentally human concerns, as he is about the fine detail of the online business world.However, he is also pragmatic, with a focused understanding of the line that he walks between his ongoing mission, stated on  Moz.com, of ‘Making the Web a Better Place, and loving every second of it’ and making a successful business.Rand and his mother Gillian founded the company in 2004 out of the successful SEOmoz blog hed created at Gillian’s small business marketing firm where, in 2000, he went to work full-time after dropping out of the University of Washington. He was CEO by 2007, and over the next six years grew Moz from seven employees to 134; revenues from $800,000 to $29.3m; and traffic vaulted to 30m annual visitors. Rand also raised two rounds of funding ($1.1m in 2007 and $18.1m in 2 012), led three acquisitions, and in 2013, rebranded the company to Moz, moving away from SEO tools to broader web marketing software.Despite the company’s origins, he has no illusions about Moz being a family business, especially when its workforce grew beyond 70 employees. “For a long time, Moz felt like a fairly functional version of a family. But as you scale, that becomes different. I might know most people’s names, but I dont know a lot about them. There are so many folks that I dont get to work with closely, or almost never get to work with at all, so internally, it’s a different type of organisation. Externally, its still the case that I want to bring the values that I have, and the love that I have for this industry, and the passion that I have for learning and sharing, wherever I go. I dont know if that’s necessarily a family kind of relationship, but you might view it that way.”However, there is a palpable sense of  integrity and thoughtfulness underpinning Ra nd’s every utterance. For those unfamiliar with Moz, you can get a taster of how important this in the acronym TAGFEE, which not only defines and reflects the core values of the company, but also serves as its differentiator in the marketing field, and establishes a benchmark for the quality of all of the work done at Moz.TAGFEE stands for Transparent, Authentic, Generous, Fun, Empathetic, and Exceptional. This is no mere funky acronym. It’s a set of forensically considered tenets, which are laid down in a company document ‘What We Believe and Why’, available on Rand’s blog. As the comments under the document indicate, it’s as much a way of life as a business ethos.“Like a lot of folks, I think I am not inspired to work purely for money,” Rand says. “If that were the case, I would pursue the most financially rewarding job I could possibly do. If I wanted to stay in technology, that would mean, probably going to Microsoft and seeing if I can get up to VP level and m ake three quarters of a million dollars a year and have stock options and all that kind of stuff. Or it might be go into the financial industry in the States, which is, umm, awful, but you do make an awful lot of money.“I would not be interested or inspired or passionate about pursuing a purely financial plane. So in the beginning, I said, ‘Hey, we’re building our own thing here’, and it was about a set of values that represented who we were as people and who we wanted to work with, and how we wanted to work, and then making the determination that if those values came into conflict with making more money, we would stick to our values, and sacrifice whatever revenue we thought there was.It certainly helped to find out that Jim Collins had done a bunch of research in his books Good To Great and Built to Last, about companies that are very successful over the long term, and found that a huge part of that success stemmed from a set of strongly correlated factors. One of these wa s that the businesses had core values and embodied those through their actions and would sacrifice money making in the short term to live up to those values. Knowing this helped to put our minds at ease, that this was probably the right thing to do for the company as well, even if it didnt feel right short-term.”Image Source: Rand Fishkin“I wanted to solve a problem…”ALL these  years on from the initial foundation of SEOmoz and its rebrand and spectacular levels of popularity, there is nothing to indicate that these values have shifted even slightly. Early on, Rand was so driven in his mission to make transparent the workings of search engines that he admits he “didnt really consider the risks or benefits” the business wisdom of his strategy.“I wanted to solve a problem, and wanted to make the information available, because to me it felt that the silence of the search engines was unfair, and rewarded all the wrong kinds of people and behaviours, particularly scammers w ho had no qualms about harming their clients. It really bothered me that Google claimed to be such a transparent company, and to value transparency so much, but on the biggest and most important issueâ€"how their search engine  works, and how small and medium business and organisations of all kinds, and bloggers, and press, could earn rankings and traffic from themâ€"they were silent. That frustrated me immensely, so in the beginning, I just didn’t consider the risks or benefits of sharing this information.”TAGFEE and the Moz approach remains as relevant as ever, and  even after stepping down as CEO in 2014 and functioning today as a contributor and chairman of the company’s board of directors.He sees today’s business environment as a place of considerable challenge, especially for medium-sized to large firms. Although very small businesses can perhaps survive the whims of audiences and markets who are more actively searching online, Rand insists that complacency is not an o ption for larger businesses (between several hundred and two thousand employees).“Ive spoken to many mid-size and large businesses who have founders and executives who believe that the way they built their business is the same way they’re going to keep growing it, and the same way they’re going to maintain their success, and that is often not the case.”“I see many folks ignoring marketing and sales channels and brand-building and awareness channels, just because they’re not comfortable with them. But I think for a mid-size business that’s trying to scale, or a larger business that’s trying to grow, you need to be very cautious that the things you believe about your audience remain true today. So, if you are saying ‘Hey, I know my audience. They watch television, and they read magazines, and what they read on the Internet is just Facebook, and I have that demographic’, well… I would say that you’ve gotta be careful about that. Your audience is probably also se arching. Theyre probably also consuming content. They probably have influencers, like individuals, channels or organisations that they pay attention to, and that have an outsized influence on their beliefs and on their actions. They may be going over to other social networks, like Twitter, and LinkedIn, and SnapChat as that is getting a little bigger now, and Pinterest. Youve got to be careful about staying on top of your audience as they shift and change their behaviours, and not just assume that it’s always going to be the way it was.”Image Source: Rand Fishkin“Change is more and more frequent, and it will be harder to catch up…”THE  pace of change in technology and how these new developments are being utilised by an ever more curious audience/marketplace poses the most significant challenges for  business, he says.“Social media was moving fairly quickly anyway, but today it’s moving at an incredibly fast clip. New networks are overtaking old ones faster than the old ones overtook their predecessors. We also have to consider the changes in ad platforms and formats and acceptable criteria in how these platforms work, as well as the algorithmic feeds that now nearly every platform has.“So in this time of massive change, and change that is more and more frequent, it will be harder and harder to catch up. I think that for the foreseeable future, we will probably be chasing an ever increasing accelerating pace of change in our industries. There will always be businesses and individuals and organisations that do a great job of keeping pace with these changes, and they will benefit tremendously. Then there will be those that fall behind, and dont benefit.While  Rand is reasonably enthusiastic about the extent to which more businesses and organisations are embracing a more open-sourced and altruistic approach, he remains apprehensive about the persistence of ‘old ways’ in the business world.“It’s true that there are more businesses and organi sations, of all kinds, who are embracing a more altruistic way. This is part of a generational shift, but I see that cultural shift happening among older professionals as well: its not purely among younger professionals. And this can drive a lot of organisational change. But there are also plenty of businesses caught up in the old ways of doing things, and not being particularly quiet about it, and I think there are a lot of businesses who, once they get sizeable, have a very, very hard time maintaining their altruism. So, I see altruism, but I also see bad behaviourâ€"sort of like a bifurcated system.”Rand is currently working on a new project on event safety in the web marketing and technology communities, as well as working on his first book (his previous two works The Art of SEO, and Inbound Marketing and SEO, having been co-authored). When we spoke, it was within days of Rand having delivered a first draft of four chapters to his publisher, who had decided that the book shoul d be taken in a different direction. But he was unswayed. “No, its really fun and enjoyable for me,” he says of the project, a rough draft of which will b e completed by the end of the year.One wonders where Rand  finds the time for a private life. He does insist on the need for demarcation  between the personal and the professional. He has had to make sacrifices, such as choosing  not to have children so he could invest wholeheartedly in all of his work in the internet marketing sphere. This has been rewarding but not without frustrations, he admits. However, he and his wife, Geraldine DeRuiterâ€"whom he married in 2008â€"have led a public relationship (for instance, he proposed publicly and they later appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show) that somehow has enabled them to retain a happy degree of privacy too.“Everyone has a private life, and Geraldine and I do too, and it’s great that we have not had a big challenge in terms of keeping the professional divided from the person al: being transparent about all the things we want to be, while not having too much trouble about people digging into our personal lives… at least hopefully! Knock on wood, you know?”Image Source: Rand Fishkin“Don’t start a business with no prior experience!”ASKED  about what he would advise young startups setting out in the business world for the first time in today’s business environment, Rand surprises by not advocating plunging into the deep end. In fact, he advises quite the opposite.“Dont do what I did. Dont start a business with no prior experience. If you want to start a company in a particular sector, go spend a year or two at one or two or three companies in that space. And I dont care if that means you getting hired as an intern, or working at the front desk as a receptionist. It’s just essential that you have some of that exposure, because you learn what you like and dont like, and what works and what doesnt work, and the relationships and experience that you build are just priceless. I really regretted and felt the pain of having to learn everything for absolutely the first time, never having seen it done anywhere before. Folks say that has its advantages, but that path has been real painful for me!The second thing I would say is, learn how to code. It doesnt matter what business you are entering, because the power of doing that means you can get work done faster and more efficiently, no matter what your job is. And there is an amazing set of jobs open to you for that, and founding your own company will be far easier if you can do it.“The third thing I would say is, you should work on self awareness; know what makes you happy and what makes you unhappy. Know what youre good at, what gives you energy, and when you wake up in the morning all you want to do is do more of that work, versus the things that youre good at but hate doing. I think lots of people can easily identify, ‘oh I love doing this and I hate doing this’, but wh at about the things that you are good at? What brings you energy and gets you out of bed and makes you want to keep doing it and the more you do it the more you want to do it? And what things are you good at that detract energy from you, but you might not even know that you hate them, or even hate them at all. Getting that self-awareness is critical. You have to also be self-aware about long-term goals. Why do you want to start a business? What do you hope that it will achieve? What will make you happy about it? What do you want to learn from that process? 90 percent of businesses are going to fail, so knowing that youre probably going to fail how will that make you feel and will you be okay with it, and will it have been a worthwhile experience even if you do, because chances are, thats whats going to happen. And I think if you go in with your eyes open, then it can work out pretty well.”