Welcome to Vancouver: Ah Tabarnak - Part 2

Brace for impact. From a positive meeting with Rob Morrow & the kind and thoughtful Stan Sprenger from Tremblant Central Reservations, the SEO job-hunting process will take longer than I thought.

First SEO Meeting

It was a typical spring morning in Vancouver. There was a drizzle of rain coming down as I walked towards the bus stop to make a relatively long commute all the way to North Vancouver to meet with Rob Morrow and Stan Sprenger. It was peaceful and full of hope. I was on my way to the very first SEO meeting of my career with a promising company and a future as an Internet marketing specialist in tourism in Canada. Regardless of how badly I wanted this to go well, I did not have such high expectations. I was already quite happy that I made this much progress and that I was about to sit down on an SEO-related meeting and speak english for an hour or 2. When you think about it, that in itself was cause for celebration. It was a longtime coming just to get to that point. If I can have one meeting to talk about SEO stuff, then there is a good chance I can have a hundred. I was prepared. I knew what I would do in terms of SEO to get more traffic to their websites. At that point, it was all about building confidence, I figured. I got out of the bus and walked towards the sea bus station. That was, yet again, a first for me. It was so incredibility exhilarating to have a boat ride as part of this commute. So, I took the sea bus from downtown Vancouver towards North Vancouver with excitement.

Upon arrival to Tremblant Central Reservations offices on Lonsdale Street, I was greeted by Rob Morrow and he introduced me to some people on the team. He was very kind and polite. I was imagining a bigger office and more people somehow. I might have counted like 8 over all. It was a small team. I had been reading about Intrawest for so long, I had plenty of time to fantasize about what working for them would be like. Tremblant Central Reservations had jus been purchased by Intrawest a mere few months prior, so they were still operating independently. Right from the get go, I saw myself in a position to face the dire reality of business out west head on. And I had not met Stan Sprenger yet! Rob & I sat down in a conference room and we started chatting about what I have been through and what brought me to Vancouver including the latest on the SEO front. I must have brought all my Internet marketing books with me as well, just so we have numerous talking points if we needed to. That was just a meeting. I was not applying on a job, since the job itself did not exist.

Stan Sprenger

Oh yes, that guy. I believe he deserves his own paragraph in my story. He would probably be disappointed if I had not developed in great length on his character, even if I paint him as a bad guy, because that would not be completely accurate. Don’t you worry, he will come back, again and again in the story. This is merely the beginning. So, Stan Sprenger got in the conference room and he basically took over the meeting. For those who know Stan, saying he took over the meeting is a gross understatement. I am not sure exactly what happened from that point on but I had to turn on the gears, and fast. As such, I believe my internal transmission has never quite fully recovered from this turbo acceleration years ago. Stan was starting to ask questions at the speed of light and I very quickly realized that I’d better have good answers ready to go in split seconds, otherwise I would lose his attention & interest. I have always thought of myself of being hyperactive, allegedly ADHD, but this guy was just like me but on steroids. History has demonstrated that the best analogy to describe Stan’s style of meeting, besides the insane button on a Tesla, is a tennis match from hell. There are balls coming at you from all over the place. You need to play this game with 2 rackets, one in each hand just to catch up with him. And you’d better be impressive, otherwise you are history. Long story short, I did my best for the length of time of the meeting while Rob was silently observing my surviving skills. By the end of the meeting, I was exhausted and I did not even know if I did well or not. I was still breathing. I just wanted to complete this experience while leaving somewhat a positive impression for future potential opportunities. Since they did not have any Internet Marketing position at that moment, they simply said, please go get some SEO work experience somewhere else and get back to us at some point. That all sounded quite reasonable.

Nouveau Monde Expeditions en Rivières (New World Rafting)

By the end of the meeting, when Stan toned things down about half a notch, because this is as much as he can do, he did share something that struck me. I realized I had already met him when I was a kid. At the age of 12, my brother and I started organizing rafting expeditions in our private high school, Ecole Secondaire Saint-Sacrement in Terrebonne, Quebec. We had previously visited a boat show in Montreal, where lots of rafting companies showcase their products and services, and they had convinced us to organize group rafting trips in our school, as a way to make a few bucks. During the negotiation process with these companies, one in particular, New World Rafting Expeditions, was managed by english-speaking folks. It was quite challenging talking to these guys, as teenagers not speaking english at all. As a result, we ended working with another rafting company, but I find it delightful nonetheless that our path crossed before. My love - hate relationship with Stan had some history we can’t overlook.

Job hunting

Following the initial meeting with Trembant Central Reservations, it became clear to me that finding a job in SEO in Vancouver will be a long process. I had already met with those most likely to be the first to jump on that internet marketing bandwagon and they were not quite ready. If the turbo-entrepreneur Stan Sprenger with all his visionary skills does not see an immediate need for SEO, who (the hell) else I thought? So, in the months that followed, I walked daily from the Jericho Beach Hostel to Éducacentre, which, at the time, was located at the corner of Laurel Street and 7th Avenue to work on finding a job. It was quite a trek, and I spent every day collecting info and building excel spreadsheets of contact names and emails of absolutely EVERYONE in the travel & tourism industry in Vancouver, Squamish & Whistler. I must have had a few thousand businesses to introduce myself to. There was no stone that was left unturned in this process. So yeah, I sent thousands of emails asking for a SEO meeting and used this as my entry line:

There are more pages on the internet than human beings on this planet. If you want to be seen online, I recommend you keep on reading my resume.

When I was done going through my list of contacts, I would do it again, and I would do it again, and again, relentlessly. I put extra effort on those people at Intrawest, other than Stan & Rob, to see if there would be any opportunity in that direction. I was still committed to my goal of working for Intrawest, but I needed to open up the pool of businesses in order to increase my chances of success. Don’t get me wrong, there were many times I felt discouraged. I figured that someone, somewhere will eventually give me the light of day and give me a chance. They can’t ignore me forever. That was my hypothesis. In other words, failure only happens when you stop. If you keep going forever, your chance of success is 100%. That was my mindset.

Shawshank Redemption

Do you remember Andy Dufresne from the movie Shawshank Redemption? He was sending 1 letter a week to the organization responsible for attributing funds for his library project. He said the same thing: they can’t ignore me forever. Maybe this is where I got the idea from.

Here is to refresh your memory:

And that one:

Of course the character Andy Dufresne played by Tim Robbins is fictional, whereas on the other hand, I am quite real. I sent personalized emails, one after another after another, until I get something done. Don’t hold your breath, we are not quite there just yet.

Tourism Vancouver

One organization that intrigued me in this SEO job-hunting process was Tourism Vancouver, because every time I was sending them an email, they replied to me with a letter to my P.O. Box mailing address on West 10th, saying: thank you for your inquiry, but we do not have any SEO position for you at the moment. Just for kicks, I kept sending them more and more emails just to see how many letters I would be getting back. Sure enough, they never figured out that it was the same guy asking for the same thing over and over again. Insanity? Perhaps, but I did receive a total of 8 letters in 6 months from Tourism Vancouver. You would think they would clue in at some point and stop sending me those letters. I got it first.

PitaPit

June 2000. A total of 4 months have gone by without a real job and my EI is coming to an end. I had no choice but to get any job at that point. I found a sandwich maker position at PitaPit on Granville Street and I had the night shift, mostly on weekends. When I was speaking to customers, most of them completely drunk from their night out, I was asking them what kind of veggies they wanted in their sandwich. I did not know how to pronounce sprouts, and kept saying sproots instead. Every time, they were looking at me funny. I did not know what I did wrong. I never liked that stuff anyway, no wonder I did not know how to pronounce it properly. I was not making enough money to pay for a cab back to the hostel at 4am after my shift, so I walked, every single time.

RSVP Hawaii

July 2000. After all this time sending emails to every travel & tourism organizations in the Vancouver Coast and Mountains region, I finally got something. It was about time. I got an email from Karen Kernaghan from an organization called RSVPHawaii.com (No longer in business) located in Downtown Vancouver. It was a small hotel booking company for all Hawaiian islands and she needed an online marketing manager. Drum roll please, I have a job. I was euphoric. Finally, we are getting some traction.

I was so motivated to work for her. I did not know anything about Hawaii as I had never been there. It was exotic and fun to learn about that part of the world. I must have revamped her entire website in 3 days. She was amazed about everything I could do in such a short time and the expectations from my presence were high. Nevertheless, this company was small and after only a month working there, she had to let me go. Her dad died during that month as well, which did not help the process. I think hiring me was more wishful thinking than anything else. I could not produce the level of accrued sales in such a short time. Therefore, it would be a fair assessment to say that her expectations were not reasonable. I remember the sad walk back to the hostel on my last day. I made a stop at the liquor store, got some wine, and spent the night reflecting on my next steps sitting on my favourite bench near the beach overlooking the Vancouver skyline.

E-Commerce Contest: Translate-it.bc.ca

After the downfall of my first job attempt in Vancouver, I was back to Éducacentre to continue on the same job-hunting process I was used to. Upon my return, I talked to the woman in charge there and she informed me that there is a new e-commerce contest for French-speaking entrepreneurs and that I should participate. The contest itself was to write an e-commerce business plan for a new business. That sounded interesting. The only problem was that the deadline for writing the business plan was the next day. I looked at the woman and I said: how am I supposed to pull this off in 24 hours? She said: Alex, you can do this. So, I started to work, fast, putting all the pieces together. I worked almost non-stop for 24 hours and delivered the business plan the next day. It was obviously related to SEO, from everything I had been reading and implementing thus far. The angle of the business was the necessity to translate websites for SEO purposes from the understanding that the english language corresponded to only 35% of the total online users population at that time. It now sits at 52%, but the objective remains. Translating content in multiple languages offers tremendous opportunities for accrued organic search traffic.

The e-commerce business plan was well received by the judges and I won the contest, which came with a $2,000 prize to build a website. So, I did. I called it translate-it.bc.ca. It was all made in flash, you know, that fad that was popular in 2000 for about 30 minutes until they realized its content is non-indexable? It was probably counter intuitive for me to do this, but it looked pretty cool. There was a ceremony for the winner at a Downtown Vancouver hotel with cameras & reporters from the French CBC as well as influential figures in the French community including Société de Développement Économique de la Colombie-Britannique, Éducacentre and Chambre de commerce franco-colombienne. I was on CBC news that day. My brother saw me on the news in Montreal and all he could say was: dude WTF.

Up Next: Welcome to Vancouver: The Big Break - Part 3

There are some good news in the horizon, at Intrawest.