[story time] The meeting that changed my life
When I look in the rearview mirror, I realize that my professional career is full of “butterfly effect” moments where a stroke of luck, a proactive move, an unexpected encounter, or a seemingly insignificant event had a huge impact on my career and my life.
Let me tell you about one of those moments.
It’s January 2012, I’m 24 and working as a consultant at a SEO agency (search engine optimization in French, which consists of optimizing a website’s visibility on search engines like Google). I’m sent on-site with a client (meaning I’ll work directly at the client’s premises).
I’m excited. The client runs one of the biggest French websites. They’ve never seriously worked on SEO, but the company policy has changed: SEO is now a strategic priority, and ambitions are high. This is exactly the kind of assignment I want to work on: a massive website, untapped potential, and the prospect of driving significant growth.
I’m not entering completely unknown territory. M. was hired a few months earlier as the “Search Marketing” director, and his mission is to build an SEO team. As it happens, M. is a former colleague; I joined my current position a few months before he left. We never actually worked together, but we know each other.
M. welcomes me and explains that we’ll need to set up a “content expansion” strategy. Millions of pieces of content are available but have never been indexed by search engines. However, there’s a more urgent issue: Google’s crawlers are no longer crawling the site. This is a major problem, and until it’s resolved, it’s impossible to get the site properly indexed.
So I dive into my analysis. We’re already a small team of about ten consultants, but the organization isn’t well established yet; everyone works a bit on their own without coordination. There is a SEO manager who should be taking the lead, but she joined several years ago, before the shift in ambition. She seems to be struggling with the reorganization and is not very cooperative.
Eventually, the most experienced SEO consultant puts together a 60-slide presentation, very technical, covering all the analyses and hypotheses. M. asks us to present this work to his boss, JC.
If I were an employee of the client, JC would be my n+3, a big shot I never had the chance to talk to. This is an important meeting. M. recently arrived, significant resources are being deployed to build a new team, and we need to make a good impression.
We gather in JC’s office. As I recall, there are four of us consultants facing him, accompanied by M. and the SEO manager.
JC kicks off the meeting and explains that he wants to hear about the initial results of the content expansion strategy that has just started.
I immediately realize that his request doesn’t quite match what we’re about to present.
The experienced consultant starts his presentation. After two or three slides, I notice that JC doesn’t really understand what he’s being told.
I take the initiative to intervene:
“JC, let me provide some context. You asked us about the results of the content expansion strategy. The answer is that it’s not working at all.”
I see a look of surprise on JC’s face and continue:
“It’s not working because search engine crawlers can’t get through the site. What we’re presenting today is the outcome of our analysis, our hypotheses, and what we plan to do to fix the problem.”
The experienced consultant picks up where he left off, but in reality, the meeting is over. My concise intervention gave JC the level of information he needed. In fact, he would end the meeting 15 minutes later, overwhelmed by technical details that were of no interest to him.
A few weeks later, M. calls me into his office.
He explains that the SEO manager has just resigned. That I impressed JC and they want me to replace her.
Needless to say, I’m flattered and thrilled by the opportunity. But at the time, I don’t quite understand. JC isn’t my direct contact at all, and I don’t see what I did to earn that respect.
It’s only later that I realize it was my brief intervention during that meeting that made a great impression on him.
I accept the offer and go on to be the SEO manager for that company for four years. Thanks to my work and my colleagues’, we achieve excellent results that are widely noticed in the SEO bubble.
These results earn me solid credibility which, after a sabbatical to travel the world, will allow me to start my own business that will never run out of clients during eight years of digital nomadism. Even before Covid and the rise of remote work, my good reputation was enough for companies to trust me with work even though they had never met me in person and I was on the other side of the world.
Without that meeting, my career and lifestyle might have taken a completely different path.
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