What Surfaced
I sat in an all-hands last Thursday that went for almost six hours.
That’s a long time to be in one room. But the conversation needed to happen. We’d been carrying tension for months — between the people we promote and the behaviors that earned that promotion. Between the version of SEO Hacker that exists on paper and the version that people experience on the ground.
The trigger was a 100-day report from our Operations Manager. He’d done the work — exit interviews, pulse surveys, organizational analysis. He presented it to the executive committee and it wasn’t comfortable to hear.
I’ve been running this company for 16 years. I’ve sat through hundreds of meetings. But this one hit differently because it forced me to confront patterns I’d been sensing but hadn’t fully addressed.
I’m not going to get into specifics. It was a closed-door meeting and the details belong to the people in that room. But I can share the themes because they’re not unique to us — every company that’s been around long enough deals with some version of this.
The data showed a recurring concern around leadership in the middle layer. Not at the top. In between. The gap between how the execom leads and how that leadership translates through to the people doing the work.
The pulse survey of current employees pointed in the same direction. Trust was lower than it should be in certain layers. Not everywhere. But enough to pay attention to.
I’ve written before about how leadership bears the weight of organizational outcomes. That Thursday was one of those moments where the weight became very tangible.
The Review Problem
Our Glassdoor rating had dipped. Some of the reviews are sharp. And if you’re an outsider looking in, those reviews paint a certain picture.
But here’s what 16 years has taught me: the people who leave negative reviews on career platforms are overwhelmingly the ones who were fired, let go, or disciplined. They have a grievance, an audience, and nothing to lose.
People who had a positive experience almost never leave a review. They move on. This is true for ecommerce, it’s true for apps, and it’s especially true for career satisfaction platforms.
That doesn’t mean the negative feedback is fabricated. Some of it reflects real experiences. But the picture is skewed. You’re seeing the loudest voices, not the most representative ones. Making decisions based on that snapshot is going to lead you somewhere inaccurate.
Fresh Eyes vs. Historical Context
This is where the meeting got interesting.
Our Operations Manager came in with fresh eyes. Five months in the company. He talked to 25 people. Analyzed 169 exit records. Ran a survey. What he presented was genuinely valuable because he could surface things that the four of us in the executive committee simply don’t have the bandwidth to catch.
That’s the honest reality of where we are. SEO Hacker’s organizational structure is almost flat. We’re top-heavy and thin in the middle when it comes to leadership. Four people in the execom are solving problems that mid-level leaders should be handling — client escalations, team friction, process breakdowns, people issues. We’re not missing these things because we don’t care. We’re missing them because we’re buried in work that shouldn’t be landing on our desks in the first place.
That’s the structural problem. And it’s the one we need to fix over the next two years.
But fresh eyes without historical context can be dangerous.
There were moments where the data said one thing and the story behind it said another. Attrition numbers that looked alarming until you understood that a significant portion were people we wanted to let go — bad fits, toxic influences, people working against the team. Those are healthy exits. They just don’t look healthy on a spreadsheet.
This is the lesson I want to share with anyone leading an organization right now. You need both. The fresh perspective of someone who can walk in and tell you what they see without the filter of loyalty or history. And the institutional memory of people who know why things are the way they are.
Fresh perspective alone leads to overreaction — tearing down things that were built for good reasons because they look rough from the outside. Historical context alone leads to complacency — defending broken systems because “that’s how we’ve always done it.”
Tying them together is what those six hours were really about.
What We Acted On
We’re changing how we think about promotions. Hitting your numbers is not enough. If someone delivers results but leaves disengaged people behind them, they should not be leading others.
We’re rebuilding our HR function with more rigor. Policy gaps that seemed minor had compounded into real operational problems. We’re closing them.
We’re being more honest about performance timelines. No more extended performance improvement plans when the pattern is already clear. Either move the person into a role where they can succeed, or execute a dignified exit.
And we’re building out the middle layer of leadership. The execom cannot keep being the catch-all for every operational problem in a company of almost 70 people. We need leaders in between who can manage, coach, escalate properly, and protect the culture without everything flowing up to four people at the top.
This is the structural investment we’re committed to over the next two years.
What I’m Watching Now
New closed deals are harder to come by. The market is tightening — inflation, the Middle East conflict, clients holding their cash. The search landscape is shifting too. AI overviews are reducing organic click-through and clients are questioning ROI differently than they did two years ago.
SEO Hacker has already moved toward AEO and entity-based SEO. I’m confident in the direction. But no external strategy fixes an internal structure problem. You can have the best market positioning in the Philippines and still lose if your operations can’t execute consistently.
Thursday was about getting the inside right so the outside has a chance to work.
What I’d Tell Other CEOs
If you haven’t sat in a room like this in a while — where the data is uncomfortable and the conversations are honest — you’re overdue.
Bring in fresh eyes. Let them present what they find without filtering it for your comfort. But don’t make decisions based on a snapshot. Walk them through the history. Show them which exits were healthy and which ones were losses. Give them the context to turn observations into recommendations that actually work.
Then act. Not react. Act. Based on the best combination of what’s true right now and what you know from the years you’ve spent building this thing.
Sixteen years into SEO Hacker, I’m still learning how to do this well. Thursday reminded me that the learning doesn’t stop — it just gets more expensive when you delay it.
The work continues. By God’s grace, so do we.
