Initially, when I set the company up on my own, my main responsibilities were everything, as it was just me. I delivered work for clients, I pitched for new business, built and managed the website, and kept on top of accounts. Starting out on your own means you have to wear a lot of different hats, and some were definitely less comfortable than others.

Over time I was able to afford the hiring of new people and was more than relieved when I could take a few of those more uncomfortable hats off, which has helped the business to stabilise and grow. And while I’m grateful for the opportunity to have tried a lot of things I’d not tried before, I’m happy that we can now afford to employ the right people in the right roles that can do it far better than myself!

As the business has evolved, so too have my main responsibilities: to the point that it’s now quite tricky to give a definitive answer to this. As a rule I find myself doing what’s needed as and when, and learning as I go. My role is less integral to the day-to-day delivery of services and operations. I spend a lot of time facilitating - checking why a card payment isn’t working, adding a new starter to our HR software, etc - and making sure things run smoothly, quite mundane stuff actually!

I also explore ideas to keep the business moving and growing, involving the relevant people in these discussions and delegating as required.

Again, this has evolved to the point where it’s tricky to give a definitive answer. I used to be at my desk all day most days, with the time in between spent meeting clients at their premises. But now I’m hardly ever in the office for a whole day.

Some things I frequently find myself doing:
Responding to ad hoc requests from the team (everything from “take a look at this CV and tell me what you think” to “give me card details so I can subscribe to this SEO software tool”)
Attending important meetings, mainly to be present but also to cast an opinion if required
Delegating as much as possible: I’ve surrounded myself with people who are very good at what they do, so it makes sense that they do as much of it as possible

To use an engineering-adjacent analogy: I like to think of myself as the grease between the cogs of the Edge45 machine. I flow where I’m needed to keep things running. I’m no longer a cog doing the important work, but I can fix a cog that’s slowing down to keep the overall momentum from slowing down.
That said, my ultimate role and responsibility is to steer the business in a direction that allows it to grow. I am ultimately responsible for the decisions that will achieve this or hinder it.

The cause and effect. The fact that you have to identify a problem, analyse it, and design a solution. Then, you see results in realtime and have direct control over how things play out.

At the beginning you see an effect: a website isn’t doing well. Then you identify the cause: it’s because of all these factors that are missing, or which fall afoul of best practice.

Then, you enact a cause - “we’re going to change x, y and z on your site” - and you see an effect. Most of the time this is an uptick in rankings, traffic, revenue, and a happy customer. There is no better feeling than the sense of satisfaction and achievement this brings.

And on the times where the effect isn’t what you intended? You put your thinking cap on, and you’re back to the engineering stuff of figuring out the problem - It's win-win.

The biggest challenge for me is keeping clients and staff happy, and dealing with the things that always seem to happen at inopportune times (you know, Sod’s law!). An unhappy client is difficult because often the dissatisfaction is rooted in a lack of understanding of a discipline that’s more complex than they expect. Too many SEO agencies have and continue to sell snake oil, setting unrealistic expectations that businesses carry forward. We try to give full transparency in everything we do, but this doesn’t always resonate with our clients.

But also, I struggle with having less hands-on involvement as the company develops: there’s an increasing distance from things I enjoy most, and I have to reconcile that with scaling the business.

Also, I have incredibly high standards, which some people on my team would say are impossible to match. When it was just myself doing the work I had full control over whether these standards were met (they always were). As we grew I felt frustrated when things happened that didn't meet my own personal standards, and learning to adjust my expectations when things are good enough (even if they’re not my good enough) was tricky.

Any business owner knows how it feels as more moving parts come into play. Over time the machine becomes more complex, it’s harder to make it do what you want, to adjust it to do what we want (that is, the management team as a whole). But if you trust the process you slowly realise that this new machine you’re building is far more powerful than what you could do alone. And capable of achieving far greater things.
My vision hasn’t changed: it’s just contextualised differently within what we do now. I guess the concise answer for what I find challenging is this: balancing my ego, vanity, and pride with the real and evolving strength of the business.

I have learnt (with difficulty!) that sometimes ‘good is good enough’, particularly when you are trying to get something new off the ground. I’ve learnt that getting that idea to take flight in reality, even if initially imperfect, is better than remaining grounded on the runway waiting for perfect. Once in flight, you can come back and make those tweaks to achieve perfect.

This is an interesting question, because I fell into the SEO and Digital Marketing industry by accident. My university degree was a masters in Mechanical Engineering: not because I wanted to be an engineer, per se, but because I loved doing practical maths. I was always drawn to engineering questions, as a way to apply maths to real world applications.

When I finished my A-levels I didn’t want a hard stop on being able to practise that kind of maths so Mechanical Engineering seemed like a way to not only continue it, but to develop it also. A few years later when I graduated with 1st class honours, it only seemed right to give it a go as a career, but sadly, it wasn’t for me. It turned out there were lots of aspects I was no good at: the hands on stuff, machining components, fitting them together, etc.

I was still interested in numbers, though, so I pursued that by working for 2 of the Big 4 accounting firms: PwC and Ernst & Young. I hated that, too! I left Ernst & Young after a day, and PwC after 6 months!

At this point I went back home to York with my tail between my legs and a strong feeling I’d completely messed up my career. I’d tried the obvious courses of action and didn't like them. I’d burned bridges, and I’d turned my back on the education I’d invested so much of my time in. It felt pretty dire.

A friend invited me to work for her company that made props for events. I was her right hand, and did everything that needed to be done to keep that company going forwards. In highsight, this was a great training program for the day I decided to set my own business up. One day in 2006, she wanted me to learn about SEO, and handed me a book with the instruction to “learn that, because we need a website” and the internet is going to be big.

I loved it. I learned everything I could about SEO, and it hit so many of my criteria. There’s a need to understand a complex algorithm: how it works, what you have to do to make it work for you. It was like a puzzle for me to solve, with very tangible feedback letting you know you’d solved it. The #1 rankings I got for my friend’s business were direct proof of cause and effect.

At this point I was ready to get a specialism: something I could hold my head up and say “this is what I do, this is what I’m good at”. My friend wasn’t keen for me to stop being the right hand tending to various other aspects of the business, which led me to conclude that the best course of action was to join an SEO agency where I could view myself as an expert in one particular area. I put together a portfolio of my achievements, got a job in Harrogate with Web Marketing Group (WMG) as Technical SEO Analyst, and took to it right away.

I’d finally found something that appealed to me in the same way maths and engineering had all those years ago, and which needed the exact same skill set that I enjoyed and refined during my education. My friend clocked this, too: she told me that “the reason you’re really good at SEO is because of your engineering background. It uses the same skills, and it’s such fertile ground for how your head works.”

That’s actually what gave rise to the name Edge45®: I was trying to link SEO - (which sadly does in some circles have a shady, murky grubby reputation to it) - with Mechanical Engineering, which is prestigious, technical and requires excellence. Edge alludes to angular, straight things; the leading edge of a wing; to the fact that we’ll give you the edge. 45 is the optimum angle to project something to make it go as far as possible: this is what we promise our clients.

I’ve already mentioned the mathematical and engineering competencies that have served me well: analytical skills, problem solving, and so on.

But what makes SEO such an interesting industry is that there are no formal skills or qualifications. Google doesn't tell us the rules. There’s no degree to do. It’s an industry that attracts people from all walks of life, from post-graduates to people with no university education. There’s no single common denominator: just the desire to be in a space that moves very fast, and which is always changing.

I’ve learned over time that the only reliable skill or qualification is a desire to keep reading up on what’s going on in the industry, to experiment for yourself, and to learn as you go.
I look for people who are curious, who love reading, and, if I’m honest, who have a bit of ego. A desire to want to be the best translates to success in the SEO world.

I left school with 8 GCSEs A-A* and 3 A-Levels with one of my A’s in Maths with Mechanics. In 2003 I graduated with a 1st class honours Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Sheffield.

Straight from graduation, I got a job as a Design Engineer at Doyen Medipharm in Norwich, where I contributed to the designs of medical and pharmaceutical packaging machinery.

Two years on, I moved to Leicester in 2006 to work for a plastics manufacturing company called Nylacast, also as a Design Engineer. I designed machinery to manufacture various plastic types and products. I stayed here for 6 months only after realising I wasn’t enjoying working in the engineering field.

In 2006 I applied for graduate schemes with the big 4 accountancy firms, and was accepted by two. Ernst & Young, I stayed for one day. I couldn’t hack it. As mentioned earlier this is when I went back to York to work for my friend’s company, Event Prop Hire.
After that my PwC application was accepted, and I talked myself into believing it would be different this time. But I only managed 6 months - I just knew this wasn’t me and I could not pretend otherwise.

So in 2007 I returned to Event Prop Hire for the next few years, as outlined above, before applying for a Technical Account Analyst role at an agency called Web Marketing Group in (WMG) based in Harrogate in April 2012.

In 2013 I left WMG and moved to another agency called Search Laboratory, where my role was SEO Technical Account Manager.

A little tired of the constant 80 mile round trip commutes I was doing, I took another Technical Account Manager Role in a small agency based in my home town of York, but after a while, despite enjoying working at all of these agencies, I never quite felt aligned with their visions or structures. And so, after having already been doing a bit of work on a freelance basis during evenings and weekends, I took the plunge and launched my agency Edge45® in 2015 so I could practise SEO how I felt it should be, in my own vision, without hindrance, restriction or permissions.

My main goal is to scale Edge45® to a size where it becomes attractive to invest in, then to an even bigger size to where it becomes attractive to buy.

Aside from this business focus though, I find myself increasingly drawn to learning a new discipline and becoming an expert in something completely different. Something that’s niche, and will be a real passion to me. I want to stretch my brain again.

Reflecting on my journey to this point, it’s obvious that I like to create and I like to grow. I like to feel that I can effect change, and I feel a lot of that is getting diluted as Edge45® expands. So I want to find a way to do that again.

We’re all too soft these days. We give up too easily, we think everything should be easy and come to us on a plate. But it doesn’t work like that. You don’t get everywhere if you just bolt at the first sign of adversity and difficulty.
You’re going to struggle to get anywhere in life if you give up easily or have resilience. But, there is a balance here between having dialogue with yourself and learning to identify things that aren’t right for you. I left some roles quite soon after starting them, because they were dissonant with what I wanted to be doing and where I wanted to be going even though I didn’t know where that was.
So, my advice: persevere.

And to anyone considering studying mechanical engineering: the answer above is especially pertinent. In halls, you’re going to meet a load of people doing a bunch of different things. They’ll become your friends. You’ll quickly notice that some of them have very different study workloads.

When I went to my first welcome seminar, the speech was about how things were about to become a hell of a lot harder. For the first 2 years as mechanical engineering students, you’ll be in from 9-5 everyday. That’s about 38 hours a week. One of my friends did Politics, and he was in for just 9 hours a week!
But stick with it: this course opens the door to a lot of other industries. It gives you credit and kudos, particularly with a qualification from The University of Sheffield.

For anyone considering SEO, my advice is this: it’s an industry with a low barrier to entry. Anyone can try it from the comfort of their own home: you buy a WordPress theme, install it, read articles, and use your own website to try stuff and see how it goes.

If you’re interested in getting into this industry, we (and any SEO agency worth their salt) will snap your hand off if you approach them and say “I’ve got no experience but I really want to do this.” Getting the ready-made article is almost impossible these days, but if you’ve got the passion, the curiosity, the drive - you’ll go far.

John  MEng Mechanical Engineering (2006)
Research and Development Director  (Engineering and manufacturing)

Accepts questions from students about their career