About Stephen

I have an intimate understanding of the challenges and obstacles faced by small business owners because I come from a family of hard-working entrepreneurs.

My grandfather (Pop) immigrated to the United States from Greece in the early 1920s. He worked as a dishwasher in a small Canton, Ohio restaurant until he had saved enough money to open his own place. He named his first restaurant “The Ideal.” Pop’s business savvy and discipline would make any corporate executive envious. He managed to keep his restaurant afloat through the Great Depression by selling soup-and-sandwich combos for a nickel. How’s that for a value menu? Pop’s business plan was simple, “No matter how bad the economy gets…just remember…everyone’s got to eat.”

And he was right. Pop went on to open a larger restaurant called “The Colonial,” which is still fondly remembered in Canton to this day. He passed down his unwavering work ethic to his son and three daughters, and then later to his ten grandchildren.

My mother, one of Pop’s daughters, owned a successful bakery and catering business for 14 years in North Canton until her health deteriorated and she was forced to close it. Former customers still rave about her elegant wedding cakes, pies, and decadent desserts. Her designs were unlike anything ever seen before, or since.

Three of my uncles owned amazingly popular restaurants, and two of my cousins currently own a gourmet chocolate company that consistently sells out its inventory on Home Shopping Network (HSN).

I too have owned several businesses…four to be exact. One of which made me a multi-millionaire by the time I was 28 years old. It was a dot com named Fortified Nutrition. Fortified was a great idea, but was on a collision course with terrible timing. My management team and I quickly built the company up to a valuation of $10 million. Fortified enjoyed significant success as a result of its search engine optimization, viral marketing, online partnerships, affiliate marketing, and e-mail marketing strategies. We raised venture capital and obtained commercial financing from Wells Fargo.

Fortified planned to execute an initial public offering (IPO) in late 2001. However, our plans changed drastically when the dot com bubble burst. I was in San Francisco negotiating with investors when the NASDAQ began its collapse. The multi-million-dollar value of my Fortified stock evaporated in what seemed an instant, and I lost over $100,000 of my own cash. My wife and I nearly lost everything.

Thankfully, the other three businesses provided decent returns. In 2006, I left the private sector and accepted a position at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Small Business Development Center (SBDC). Our SBDC is one of nearly 1,000 centers across the United States and its territories. Our sole purpose is to help small business owners like you start-up, expand, and grow their companies through free business advising services and non-credit business education programs.

I oversee all non-credit business education programs on the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse campus. I also teach classes on search engine optimization, increasing online conversion rates, and sales strategies. In addition, I focus a portion of my time toward scholarly research in e-commerce, strategic marketing, and finance.

So how am I qualified to write The Small Business Owner’s Handbook to Search Engine Optimization? Here are some highlights:

• Built a successful search engine optimization model based on hundreds of research hours in both private-sector and academic settings
• Over 13 years of private-sector Web strategy and site development experience
• Consulted with hundreds of clients on Web strategy and site development
• Built Fortified Nutrition to a valuation of $10 million and planned an IPO
• Teach wildly popular search engine optimization, online conversion rate, and sales training classes at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and other universities
• Successful track record of scholarly research and academic journal publication — most recent paper analyzed entrepreneurship within Second Life, a popular virtual world. The paper was published in the Journal of E-business.

In addition, I have a proven track record for successfully developing strategic and tactical solutions to problems in as little time as possible. My mantra in life is to work smarter…not harder. Consequently, my goal is to always maximize efficiency and effectiveness. I learned early on in my career that I had a gift for rapidly dissecting how a system worked, and once I understood the operation, I could quickly troubleshoot the relevant decision-making data to create a problem-solving solution — and typically in less time than my peers.

I earned my MBA from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse as well as a bachelor of science in marketing also from the UW-L. In addition to my work at the university, I serve on several non-profit boards, including the Onalaska Area Business Association, Workforce Development Board, and the Riverfront Inc. Foundation.

I shared all this background with you so you can be confident that I understand small business and the constraints dealt with every day. My 15-step SEO process will positively impact your bottom line. Cash and time are two assets you can never have too much of…and my SEO process can give you more of both.

My 15-step SEO process is effective at driving more traffic to a Web site and is simple and efficient to implement. And I back up your results with my 110-percent money back guarantee! I wish you the best of success!

- Stephen Woessner