ABOUT

The Leadership Team

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A Tip-Top Place to Work

In fact, Minnesota Business just named us one of the Best 100 Companies to Work For. Because it’s such a rocking place to be and grow, we’ve built an amazing collection of people who love working together. aimClear team members speak regularly at industry conferences around the world. In 2011 alone, six staffers spoke at more than 15 advanced international online marketing conferences, including SES, SMX, PubCon, International Search Summit, Media Post Insider Search Summit, OMMA Global, MediaBistro, mozCon, and DMA. Our 2012 roster includes 12 New York appearances, eight engagements in San Francisco, and gigs in Jerusalem, Sydney, London, Las Vegas, Seattle, Chicago, Park City, and numerous others. Five aimClear employees contribute to major trade publications, including Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Roundtable and Bruce Clay Blog. We tell our staff that it’s important to embrace opportunities as if they are unique and priceless…and we do. We invest in thought leadership and share until it hurts. Each year, we devote more than 1,000 hours to scientific studies of YouTube, Bing, Facebook, and Google that result in marketing insights that literally no other company in the world knows. We give it away. In 2011, we spent more than 80 hours creating a free demographic research project to support online marketing of regional tourism. We invest in each employee’s personal brand to the greatest extent possible. aimClear is proud to have supported team members building their personal brands, intrinsically steeped in each person’s deepest goals and dreams. As a result, we bring our whole self to work because each staff member knows he or she will leave at the end of the day with more than they came, in exchange for fully sharing their drive, ambition, and talent. This is huge. We’re known for backing up promises with action, training, and money. We provide motivated employees with stipends to market their personal projects and encourage them to use company human resources and equipment. We find that each team member’s devotion to his or her personal projects daisy chains into passion for our clients’ work. The marketing vocabulary discovered whilst pursuing what matters most to each employee is priceless. We also encourage our employees to use company assets to support charities that matter to them. For instance, we are major sponsors of the Human Development Center in Duluth, a crucial community resource for sliding-fee mental health services. We encourage our employees to volunteer at regional colleges and universities to support marketing students. We’ve sequenced an ambitious three-track Duluth social media marketing conference, “Zenith Social Media Marketing Conference 2012: Tips, Tools, Tactics & Beyond,” and imported a number of our accomplished colleagues to set the speaking roster’s tone. The conference features an impressive sampling of the illuminating panelists we’ve presented beside at international conferences over the years. All proceeds go to benefit the Duluth Chamber of Commerce’s business outreach programs. aimClear places the highest emphasis on culture and creating an atmosphere of respect, love, dignity, human rights, accountability, and natural consequences. Why accept less? We have six to eight monthly fine wine tastings. Our office is centered on a Food-Network-caliber gourmet kitchen. We have a washer and dryer so employees can do their laundry at work. Our team often eats breakfast and lunch here, with great food we keep stocked at our expense. We have family-style meals often and hold regular kitchen-table conferences.

Our Philosophies:

1. Achieve consensus for new hires amongst all employees, even if it means not hiring candidates the CEO believes to be qualified. Choose employees you love to be around.
2. Understand that luck and the actions of others have as great an impact on the outcome as any personal action. Know that personal action can manufacture luck.
3. Never hire at the rate you can get work. Take work at the speed you can hire amazing people. There is no reason to ever go to work with people you don’t like.
4. We travel to support our domestic and international work and encourage employees to piggyback vacation time surrounding business trips so that the company pays air expenses.
5. Achieve buy-in for the financial and product-development missions. Everyone needs to be on the same page: determined and committed to the process.
6. Be totally willing to change your mind in light of feedback from employees and customers. Face the actual odds. Kick butt.
7. Apologize when you are wrong, and don’t give ground when you are right. Say you’re sorry often. Don’t be codependent when you think you’re right. Keep the slate clean with everyone as if there is not another chance tomorrow. Remember that there will be another chance tomorrow.
8. Pay it forward. In the technology space, daily training is crucial. A person can’t live unless their mind is active and questing.
9. Be conservative financially and hire employees who complement your weaknesses. Be brutal in your assessment of your weaknesses. It’s completely essential to understand your own vulnerabilities.
10. Take jobs you can succeed at and don’t kid yourself by taking jobs you can’t win just for the cash. Life is too short.
11. Never allow customers or vendors to treat your employees badly. If they do, fire them. Always have your employees’ backs. In the technology business, you can’t have customers unable to understand and implement your team’s recommendations. Don’t accept anything that drains your life’s energy.
12. Don’t try to be something you’re not. A company has to be aimClear’s size before it’s reasonable to take on areas of expertise not core to the founders. Teach your employees what you personally know, slowly expanding the knowledge base with the addition of specialized employees. Pass your knowledge on to the next generation unselfishly.
13. Manage like you are dying. Be determined to leave this earth with all emotional and personal ledgers even.