I Got Laid Off With a One Year Old at Home. So I Started an Agency.

In May 2022 I was working in SEO for a tech company. Good role, good people, no reason to think anything was about to change. Then they laid off a big chunk of staff and I was one of them.

I called a good mate that afternoon and talked it through. He listened and then said: "You should start your own SEO agency. I'll be your first client."

That was the whole plan. A phone call and a mate backing me. I had a one year old at home. Looking back, that is a wild time to start a business. But at the time you just move.

I knew straight away I needed more clients so I started calling people. Previous colleagues, mates who ran businesses, anyone I thought might need help with SEO or Google Ads. My first client was the mate who told me to do it. He introduced me to someone who needed a one-off fix on their Google Ads conversion tracking. That person worked closely with a company whose marketing team needed ongoing help. One introduction led to another. A lot of those early clients are still with me today.

What I was not prepared for was doing everything myself. At a tech company you have a full team around you. Specialists, strategists, people who handle the parts you are not across that day. As a one man band you are doing all of it. The strategy, the execution, the reporting, the client calls, the admin. Getting results without any backup was a shock to the system.

The doubt did not just visit once. It lived with me for most of the first two years. What am I doing here. Should I just go back and work for someone else. My wife Candice would back me up on that. There were plenty of conversations at home that went in circles. A lot of people told me early on that time is the best thing you have in business. The more years you get through the better it gets. I held onto that and we just kept going. It turned out to be true.

Coming from agency and tech company roles I was used to having people around me. When it was just me I kept pushing harder instead of thinking about how to work smarter. I did not have money to hire anyone so the answer for a long time was just keep going. That works until it does not.

The shift that changed things was not one moment, it was a decision about how the business should operate. I built SEO Growth into a productised service. We have a dashboard, a structured way of onboarding clients, running campaigns, and reporting results. I did that deliberately so I am not chasing access, clients are not sitting in unnecessary meetings, and I have as much time as possible to actually think about what is going to work for each campaign. That structure is what allows us to grow without everything falling apart.

We have around 30 clients now and a growing team. We focus on SEO and Google Ads and nothing else. The whole business is built around getting clients more sales and leads, not just traffic numbers going up. It is very different to what I imagined when I started. Back then I was just trying to survive.

The thing I wish someone had told me is that you cannot take everything personally. I was very heart driven early on. A client leaving felt like a failure. A hard conversation felt like a crisis. It drove anxiety I did not need to carry. What I know now is that clients come and go, you focus on the wins, and it is not personal. You cannot wear every outcome and overthink every decision. That is not a way to run a business or live a life.

What comes next is more of the same, done better. I want to keep growing at a steady rate, not chasing headcount for the sake of it, not taking on more than we can handle well. What I like about SEO Growth is that we only do two things. Clients are not getting handed off to different departments or feeling like a number. They get direct access and a team that actually cares about their results. That is what I want to protect as we grow.

---

SEO Growth is a Sydney-based SEO and Google Ads agency. seogrowth.com.au