SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to the Cut the Tie podcast. I am your host, Thomas Helfrick. I'm on a mission to help you cut the tie to whatever it is holding you back from success. And you got to define that success yourself. You don't, you're chasing someone else's dream. And today, Dream Chasing, the STO Ninja, Steven Schneider. How are you? I'm great. Thanks for having me. Excited. Do you think uh I'm a Gen Xer? You look millennial is in age. Do you guys admittedly? We we were like, we grew up with like, man, a ninja movie came out. You're like, I wanted to have a throwing star, numchucks, Chuck Norris, right? Does that not resonate downstream? I don't have no idea. We talk about ninjas all the time, but no one knows what they are anymore.

SPEAKER_01: 0:40

I was more the action sports guy. So I was always the like skateboarding, motocross, biking, kind of like, you know, Travis Pastrana was more of my hero. Um, yeah, that's so, I mean, but ninjas are awesome. Like, who doesn't like ninjas? Come on.

SPEAKER_00: 0:54

I write little camel toe shoes. Hell yeah, I love it. Be comfortable. Like, why you gotta split up the big toe like that? Like when we I don't know. I I think we should be still toed wild beyond me. I think it'd be more effective. Just up a building, steel toed. Steel toed ninjas like think when he walks around, but man, so cool. That's not the point of the show. Um, Steven, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and what it is you do?

SPEAKER_01: 1:17

Yeah, I am co-founder and CEO of Trio SEO. I'm a big SEO guy, just pretty much have been eating, sleeping, breathing that since college, kind of accidentally fell into that. And um, yeah, I mean, I just I really think that it's one of the more compounding growth strategies out there, and that people who have patience can really reap the benefits of it. So I can talk your year offer for hours on it. I study it, I you know, I'm an entrepreneur first and foremost, and I've been building businesses on the backbone of SEO for about a decade.

SPEAKER_00: 1:50

That's I mean, that's really impressive. Um, I think I've already heard it, but I'll let you articulate it. You you know, there's as you know, it's an incredibly very noisy space you're in from a service provider. Uh and and you have labor arbitrage and now you have AI challenges uh as well. And so tell me why you. What's the unique, unique piece?

SPEAKER_01: 2:10

Yeah, I think most of the conversations I have with agency owners or other you know, clients, whatever it may be, is that we have been there and done that. And so when you're working with us, it's a very hands-on approach. Like we treat all of our clients' websites and businesses almost as if they're our own. And because of the fact that we have built, you know, seven-figure, eight-figure companies of our own, my partners exited theirs in 2019. Like we know what it takes to succeed with SEO, but we also know that once you have the traffic, which is kind of like what SEOs do best, you have to pull in other levers and you have to be able to convert that traffic into paying customers or it's useless. And so many SEO agencies will kind of stop once they get the traffic because that's what you hire them to do. And we kind of take it a couple of steps further, whether regardless of whether you're asking me to do it or not. It's kind of a bad habit I can't break. So we step in there and we kind of help them tinker with lead magnets or lead or anything that can essentially help make you more money is kind of what our specialty is once you have the traffic.

SPEAKER_00: 3:19

I'd love to hear that because uh you know, we were talking off camera as I coach entrepreneurs and businesses on why their lead gen's broken or give them an assessment. Almost always they're doing one or two things thinking it should work. So they're doing SEO and they're doing DM, but their brand's messed up and other things. But a big part behind that is they don't really articulate through their brand and through their content the single top-of-line desperate problem they solve. And then your SEO is the sub-searched things that are people around that. It's the symptoms, it's the stuff they're looking for that's around that problem. Fair to say, in today's AI world or not, that is still at the core. You need to solve a problem and get really good at communicating that. Now, we're not talking about big companies because it's it's a different game when you're Nike because you can have 50 things going on, right? When you're uh even a hundred million dollar business, like an up and you're solving something, you're still around a core problem. Fair enough.

SPEAKER_01: 4:11

Yeah, I mean, 100%. I think that many people are always trying to trick the algorithm. They're trying to hack the most recent code on Google or Chat GPT and you know, stuff keywords like they did back in the day, or whatever the hack was as it evolves. And at the end of the day, like you're writing content and a website for a human. Like people give you money, robots don't give you money. And if you can't connect with the customer profile that you're actually trying to seek out, you've already lost the race. And I think that like that's the most important part is that people who are good at SEO keep that top of mind and remember that everything should be conversationally formatted. You're speaking to their pain points, you're addressing their concerns, and you're giving them the solution that you can offer at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_00: 4:58

I I will speak from this. We don't do any SEO, so you should your ears should perk up because uh it took us forever just to say, hey, we do lead generation really well, but we don't but we don't fit like in the typical category because we're not looking at just SEO, we're not looking at like, you know, copilot, we're not looking at DM messages, we're looking at the holistic piece. So we still have trouble, that's what we solve, but that's anyway. So I it's probably a good conversation to have offline. But the truth is it's difficult. I guess I'm getting out to that people should realize you've got to get around a centralized idea that's gonna work. So when people come in there, you're you're hey, take this, you know, watch this free video or set up time with us to get this free assessment or whatever your lead magnet is, it has to be on point. And then clearly, like for us, we do an assessment. But the recommendations are always gonna be something around coaching, us doing it for you, or some kind of intensive workshop. Because in in those three, we can solve it. So SEO's gotta play into that because they gotta, it's a trust building exercise for you guys as well. They read it, they get another one, they're like, I like these guys, and then they buy. Um, before we keep going, so I appreciate that because it's real this is really close. So I'm abusing my my power, my own show here to to drive it. Can you give someone a single link to stock you while we're talking about this a bit so they can you know check you out in the me in the background?

SPEAKER_01: 6:10

Of course. Yeah, uh LinkedIn forward slash schneis. It's s c and is a Nancy E-I-S. That's my LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_00: 6:20

That's a good one. Um let's just start with you a bit. Um you before we get into the kind of the uh I w I want to I'm gonna come I'm gonna tease everyone. We're gonna come back to AI SEO at the end of this. So you gotta listen because you're not gonna know when I'm gonna bring it in. But first and foremost, I want you to define success though on your own terms.

SPEAKER_01: 6:39

Waking up every day happy and getting to do what you get to do for the joy of it. I like that's pretty simple.

SPEAKER_00: 6:49

Captain of your own calendar.

SPEAKER_01: 6:51

Exactly. I mean, I when I was in college and my friend introduced me to SEO, you know, he kind of opened the playbook for me. He was already making 10, 15 grand a month in college, and I quickly forgot everything I had planned post-college and just really dove into that and tried every single day to make something happen before I graduated in order to avoid getting a quote unquote real job. And that's been my game plan ever since then. Like, I don't think that my job is still a real job at this point. Like, I know I run an agency and we have clients and all sorts of stuff, but a real job to me is commuting to work and being miserable and corporate. And as long as you can wake up just happy to work with people, then you're living a dream.

SPEAKER_00: 7:37

And then that journey, you know, you've been doing it, you fell into it. So let's talk about your journey a little bit, uh, and and maybe introduce the tie you had to cut to get there.

SPEAKER_01: 7:47

Yeah. So I was I was working on a class project um with a friend of mine, and he like he had like a team slide, and his bullet points were that he was a business owner. And I kind of jokingly mentioned to him after the presentation, I was like, what do you have on the side? Like he probably like I figured he was maybe selling textbooks or doing like flipping on eBay. And he kind of showed me that he was had, you know, he had a couple of websites and these were blogs back in the like Amazon affiliate Wild West era, and he was using SEO to write and create product descriptions and um product review blogs, and then driving traffic from Google to Amazon and getting commissions based on that. And so that just blew my mind and the fact that that would even become a thing. And then he kind of showed me a little bit more about how the sites made money on a month-by-month basis, but then you could also flip the websites similar to real estate and sell the site for a 30 to 40x multiple of whatever the monthly revenue and profit was. So I kind of saw that opportunity and like he showed me a site that he owned that was making five grand a month and that was valued at$150,000. And I just became a sponge. Like every single thing that he told me, I was like, give me more. What's the next step? He gave me a site, I started building it. Like I it was literally all I did in college. And then we had a couple sites. We merged with our portfolio with his other business partner. Took us about three years. We had 40 sites. Um, we were publishing like 300 articles a month at scale. We scaled that to 1.4 ARR total across all sites, um, just strictly all SEO, just 100% content. So, I mean, I know the play, um, I know the results, and it just it was an addiction. I just straight up addicted to success of that, right?

SPEAKER_00: 9:36

Yeah, oh, and it it's amazing too. I uh I remember I do I remember this party, I don't know why. So I was at some random, but this is like 1999, just to be put it in perspective, right? This is like dot com. I'm at this guy's party because he's just exited. It was part of AOL thing, uh whatever it was. And he he just gotten bought out or did a secondary, or they I don't know the time. He had a like he was like 30, and the joke was he he couldn't find a job out of college, so he went to go work for AOL, and now he's like, you know, it was worth a hundred million. So we're I'm at this party, I have no idea what's going on, right? And I see all these web, these pages up, and it's just that they're porn sites. I'm like, what? That's interesting, yeah. And they're like, oh, we run a whole porn net site network, and it's just we're just basically making money off of the the search term, like just we SEO way back in the 90s. And these guys, that's our next thing is that we just make money and these things run, we don't do anything with them. I'm like, and I was like, I'm not done. So my the I think of this like search engine, this optimization was like around for porn, clearly for 10 years.

SPEAKER_01: 10:33

Yeah, it's funny enough you say that. My first site that I bought in college was a um adult toy review website, and that was like my first like money-making website. I remember in college, we bought it and scaled it to like four grand a month, and I just remember in college, I was just like, I'm rich. Like, I can do anything with four bridge and wrench. Like, who's so I yeah, exactly. I got that little taste, and then I just kind of knew that like it was a numbers game and just kind of put my head down into the rest.

SPEAKER_00: 11:03

Yeah, well, in in uh in this journey too, right? You you you got a big one coming at your at you now, which is this this this this uh as AI gets better and outsourced labor gets more expensive, AI becomes much more attractive. At some point, AI does take over a lot of the things technically, and it will actually know the technicalities behind it because of how AI will work with agent to agent. Is is this like right now you're like, shit, what do I do?

SPEAKER_01: 11:34

No, it's the opposite. We're we're leaning into it. I mean, our agency is still a 100% human-written, human-edited content. Like we we don't dabble in AI when it comes to content generation. We look at it more as a tool and an efficiency standpoint. But there's so much overlap between SEO and how to rank in Chat GPT or Perplexity or all these other LLMs that quite honestly, I think that people like us who know how to do SEO really well are going to be selling pickaxes during a gold rush when people are magically being like, oh shit, I need to rank in chat GPT. How do I do this? I mean, it's very similar to like you saw back in 1999 when people were like, What's this thing called Google? Like I can rank on the first page of Google and drive customers? Like, how do I do that? Anywhere and buy from me? Well, crazy. Exactly. And so it's we're flash forward 25 years and replace Google with Chat GPT, and here we are.

SPEAKER_00: 12:35

Yeah, I and I agree with you. I think I mean it as long as humans are gonna be involved, gonna be there. You're yeah, there's gonna be an involved on the other side. Uh, you may have some agent-to-agent stuff, but that'll be so complex at that point people will still be involved on the other side of those, and it probably won't matter. Uh on your own, in your own journey though, have you had like a major, you know, metaphoric tie to cut?

SPEAKER_01: 12:57

Um yeah, I think the the biggest thing is just like wrestling with patience and knowing that like success doesn't happen overnight and it's not something you can capture in a bottle and replicate. Like it's just anybody who has success knows that it's such a grind and it's such a you know kick in the knees for hours and days and years, and you kind of magically blink and you're like, oh, we're here. So um yeah, I think that's mine for sure.

SPEAKER_00: 13:28

The the the patients needed in youth that does not exist at all. Um and to be fair, right? Like, you know, you're you've grown up, you're you know, you're still you're not young, but my point is like the the group the generation app next after you, the disease are really in trouble because they live in this aston gratification. There was a time period when you didn't have technology, very short, right? That new group, like they have no knowledge, non non-instant gratification. And so the patience piece gets harder and harder each generation or it changes. Uh, and and I think that's huge of you to just if you recognize it, you're ahead. So I mean, because uh most people don't realize they need to be patient, and success doesn't show up, it's one percent, and all of a sudden you look back and you got 120. Like, oh exactly, right? Like it. Um, you know, uh on your own way though, do you actually remember a moment though when you thought, I gotta I gotta be more patient?

SPEAKER_01: 14:16

Did something happen or yeah, I so I just left my first company, the one that I mentioned, and um I took like a year off and was just trying to like figure out what was next. And then things just weren't really lining up. I was gonna go back into the workforce, kind of scrap the entrepreneurship stuff. And then I lasted like six months at a startup and was just like, this is not me, this isn't my identity. Like, I'll die before I work another day in this environment. And I kind of just quit and realized that like gotta start over. And you just have to be patient and know that it just is gonna take a couple of years to get back to where I want to be. But if I can do that and kind of wake up happy and know that it's fulfilling and rewarding, like it's worth it. And I think that like that was kind of where that shift came to life was that okay, like let's think through this and play a five-year game instead of a five-month game and see what can happen at the end of five years, and then we'll reassess.

SPEAKER_00: 15:14

You know, and it when you identify, you got to go to the how part of yeah. Talk to me about how you did that, and because that that is a change in mindset behavior. What did you do?

SPEAKER_01: 15:24

Yeah, so I I kind of like rediscovered LinkedIn 2.0 is kind of as I call it. Like people are now creating content. I, you know, I've been publishing daily content for two and a half years, and that was where I was kind of like, okay, if I can just post daily on this thing, build my personal brand, like good things will come. Like I don't know what it is, I'm not looking for anything, but something's gonna fall on my lap if I can just be consistent. And with LinkedIn, I gave myself a three-year bet where I was like, okay, I'm gonna do this every day for three years. And if I don't have anything happen at the end of that timeline, we'll reassess. Um, funny enough, I met my new business partners from LinkedIn, just a small networking coffee chat. And six months later, we formed the agency. And I've met many friends, networked, I mean, business opportunities, you name it, like the power of consistency and patience has reinforced a lot of what I do today. And so like I have every reason to kind of double down in that arena.

SPEAKER_00: 16:23

It sounds like you too also took a step the growth of bringing somebody else um on board with you to grow it. Did that help the patience piece? And did you have to do it all? Or how did that affect that that transition?

SPEAKER_01: 16:37

Yeah, I just threw a lot of trial and error, I realized that I'm not a solarpreneur. Like I'm just not built for that. Like I'm risk adverse. Um, I need someone to hold my hand and scary times. Like I'll fully lean into that. And having partners to bounce ideas off of, or just kind of like talk me through situations that I don't want to do alone, or that I maybe they have more expertise in some some areas. Like I think that I'm graciously looking for that. And that's thankfully what I found by working with them. And that was another thing too, where I was like, okay, like let's see what this can what this can lead to. And everyone knows that when you form a partnership and business, you're essentially marrying that person for the for foreseeable future. So um, I'm glad that you know we're not divorced at this rate.

SPEAKER_00: 17:21

Actually, partnerships last longer than marriages by all math and statistics. Yeah. Uh what's been out or how do you measure the impact, you know, through customers, through your personal life, friends, family? How do you measure the impact of this?

SPEAKER_01: 17:33

Yeah, I mean, we're we've always kind of assessed a slow growth mentality. Like we don't want to distort the quality of our current clients and the systems and break the team. And so, you know, as long as we're looking back year over year growth and that's up and to the right, and our clients are with us, like LTV is growing for clients, retention's up. Like we kind of have internal metrics that we look as like, you know, KPIs and a success. But I think that as long as the team, the culture is growing as well, like people are happy, like we haven't had one person leave as a result of like, hey, I hate this place. Like if anything, we're getting internal referrals. I think that you know, qualitative versus quantitative data is something that we think about. And how do we make sure that that's kind of always going to be trending in the right direction? What's what are you most grateful for? Being lucky. I think like I think that there's a a fine balance in entrepreneurship between luck and hard work. And I think that some people define luck as the ability to spot opportunities and act on them. And I also look at luck as a definition of being at the right place at the right time and knowing when to act on it. And I think that similar like with my first business, like you can't run the affiliate marketing playbook on SEO now. It just doesn't work. So like that was a good source of luck. Right now, you know, I I met my partners and that was a good right place, right time opportunity. So I think that as long as I can be aware of what's going on and then be like, oh, this is a good gut feeling. I can't let this pass up. Um, that's been really a good fortunate play in my life, I'd say.

SPEAKER_00: 19:08

Uh what's uh what's your tie today that you're kind of afraid to cut?

SPEAKER_01: 19:16

I think the transition from or the transition into like forming a family and stepping away from entrepreneurship in the coming years. Like I don't have any kids yet, like I'm still super focused on my career. That's definitely something I want. And I think that's something we're gonna lean toward in the future with my wife. But there's gonna be a massive shift in working 10, 12 hours a day on the business, and like that's my baby compared to having a legitimate baby. So it'll be fun to kind of see the balance and shift and knowing that there's a whole sense of um what feeling rewarding hacks are like nowadays.

SPEAKER_00: 19:50

It it's interesting. So knowing that knowing that you're gonna need time for her and the kids and in and as those are I mean, those are some of the meanings of life, right? You'll you'll change the business model to set up where you're like, hey, right now I go whatever run or do this, and like, oh, that time's gonna get filled, but until you can make that time happen, it'll it'll move you when you're like, all right, we're gonna have kids. I gotta, I'm, I'm working too many hours. So it's fun now, but it won't be fun when there's no sleep. Right. Uh, what advice do you give to to uh uh let's say so to yourself, basically, to a listener who's like, oh, I'm I am that guy.

SPEAKER_01: 20:27

That's a good question. I think that the one thing I always tell people is you have to find a place where you can experiment with zero repercussions and test a lot, refine your skill set, and find a place where you can create some case studies or some legitimate data that gives you social proof and trust moving forward. Like if you're thinking about diving into entrepreneurship and SEO, but you've never built a website, like that's probably step number one. So I think that you have to kind of um you know be afraid to don't be afraid to dabble in your own little projects before you present them to clients or try to even get clients from that sense.

SPEAKER_00: 21:11

If um if you had to say uh the worst business advice you've ever gotten, not the best, the worst what was um to push through being tired.

SPEAKER_01: 21:27

I think that like that's anybody who says like grind culture, work 15 hours a day, like I don't know, your brain just needs rest.

SPEAKER_00: 21:35

I mean, there's a reason they built computers in the way, let's just restart that thing. Power down for a minute and come back. Um who gives you advice? I'm sorry, not advice, right? Who gives you inspiration?

SPEAKER_01: 21:48

Yeah, my my mentors, my business partners, uh Connor Gillivan, Nathan Hirsch, those guys are awesome, super successful entrepreneurs, and I love work with them.

SPEAKER_00: 21:56

Yeah, that's nice that your partners are your mentors, so that way they're yeah, they're pulling you forward and you're they see you grow too, and that's fantastic. Yeah, do you have a book? Do you have like the the book that any inspiring entrepreneur should read?

SPEAKER_01: 22:09

Yeah, I'm reading um The Challenger right now. It's kind of more of a sales-focused book, but um, I'm just like so deep in the sales process of like mastering sales right now that it's like all I think about on top of SEO. It's kind of like an extension of that.

SPEAKER_00: 22:22

Yeah, that is uh for people listening to that is like riding, reading learning to ride a bike, you'll always get to be able to do it. You'll do it better than where you ride it. But once you learn it, it's a it's a really good scroll to have. You will not be afraid to use uh to ride the bike, so to speak. If if you had to start over today, you know, what part of your timeline do you go back to and what would you do differently?

SPEAKER_01: 22:43

Um you know, I don't think I would change anything, honestly. I know that's a super cliche answer, but you know, I think that where I'm at right now, like I'm so happy with just the trajectory of what the future looks like that I'd be afraid that if I went back, it would change anything. I'd say if I went back, I'd probably just go buy more Bitcoin in like 2012. It's just chill on that. But aside from that, like everything else would stay the same.

SPEAKER_00: 23:06

I would I would have dumped the entire 401k into it, no doubt. Oh, 100%. Right. People are like, people actually, most people don't say I wouldn't change anything. I think one guy said, I wish I would have ordered like a black coffee instead of a latte. That was like one answer. I'm like, he's like, but I'm gonna correct that right after this. I'm like, that's hilarious. I like that. That's a great answer. Um, if there's a question I should have asked you today and I didn't, what would that question have been?

SPEAKER_01: 23:29

Nothing comes to mind. I mean, your questions are solid. I think that you know people can always reach out to me if there's any questions they have too. Um, I love networking, I love talking to people, I love being a mentor if that makes sense. So yeah, appreciate you.

SPEAKER_00: 23:42

Well, do it do a shameless plug. Who should who should get a hold of you and how do you want them to do that?

SPEAKER_01: 23:47

Yeah, I love connecting with B2B CMOs or founders. That's kind of like our niche and we're most people that we help nowadays. Anyone who has an established business is looking to rank in Google and Chat GBT and set themselves up for success in the future. But um, anybody who's also an aspiring entrepreneur or getting in early stages, um, anything who relates to me, you know, that's great. Reach me on LinkedIn, DM Trio SEO.com. You can always just Google my name or one form or the other. If you can't find me, I'm doing my job wrong.

SPEAKER_00: 24:19

All right, before we leave, how do you get ranked on these LLMs?

SPEAKER_01: 24:25

Uh really, really quality content that's conversationally written. Um, make sure it's clear, concise, and you have a lot of authority on your website. Authority is everything.

SPEAKER_00: 24:35

And what do you mean authority? Is it backlinks? Is it just lots of backlinks?

unknown: 24:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 24:40

That's good to know. So backlinks are back.

SPEAKER_01: 24:43

Yep. Never left. Just make sure they're not spammy.

SPEAKER_00: 24:46

Quality over squat over quantity. So it's better be better to have like one from Forbes, one from Entrepreneur, and one from uh Coca-Cola talking about you than it would be to have 3,000 from India. 100%. Gotcha. That's good. Quality. Nothing's changed. Quality is over quantity, always works. For sure. Yep. That's perfect. Thank you so much for coming on, Stephen. I appreciate it. Of course. Anyone who made it to this point in the show, you rock. And if you are uh an entrepreneur, go out there, go cut a tie to something holding you back. If you're trying to become one, that is the tie to cut. So go do it. Define your own success. Otherwise, you're chasing someone else's dream. Thanks for listening.