Computers first. Then the family shop.
I was a kid who was fascinated by computers. Around sixteen or seventeen I started writing code in earnest. A friend and I built a text-based multiplayer game — a MUD, if you were around for those — and I lived in that world for a while. Then I drifted. Life does that.
I came back when my father needed help running the company. He had been in the trade for thirty years. People who knew him will tell you he was one of the most trusted electricians in the area. The crew was the kind you cannot hire twice. That was never the problem.
The problem was that nobody could find them. No website. Five reviews on Google. We were not ranking. For a long time the Yellow Pages and the Verizon book were how a shop advertised. Then the internet happened, almost overnight. The companies that lived on a computer all day adapted. The ones still out in the field, running from job to job, did not have the hours. I would not say they got left behind so much as the other guys got a huge head start. It buried a lot of good shops that simply were not tech-savvy.
Then the hard question: who do you hire to fix that? Who treats your listings, your pages, your reviews like it is their company on the line? Owners already know this from hiring. Care is higher when it is yours. That is not a knock on employees. It is just how it goes.
I was raised to do the right thing when nobody is looking. I am not going to ask you to take that on faith. Every hour, every change, every weaker page we work that week shows up in a report. You see what you are getting for the dollar. Search movement, what improved, what did not. If a page is still lagging, the next week’s work is written down before we start it.
