About Ollan

In June 2024, I got fired. Not laid off, fired, for refusing to finish tasks I thought were a waste of everyone’s time, tasks that had nothing to do with growing traffic or revenue. I’d been doing that job for two and a half years, recruited into an Irish tourism company in 2022, and in that job and the one before it, I posted 15 to 25 percent year over year gains in traffic and ROI. None of that mattered once I stopped playing along.

I’ve spent 25 years in SEO inside real companies: Chevron, a Silicon Valley startup called Sandhill Systems, Alameda County Auction in Dublin, Diamond Resorts, Machine Guns Vegas, and an Amazon store I built myself, until I learned the hard way that sellers on Amazon and eBay don’t own their customers, the platform does, and one bad inventory purchase can end it anyway. At the auction house, I took walk-in conversion from 10 percent to 40 percent a year and held the number one local ranking for 8 straight years. I know what a fix is worth before anyone opens a spreadsheet. That was always the problem. I was never there to nod.

I’ve always been like this. I spent over two decades as a professional bass player before any of it. If someone in the band played a passage wrong at rehearsal, I stopped the song and fixed it, bandleader included. People laughed about it. Nobody argued I was wrong.

After I got fired, I tried building my own business instead of looking for another job. I offered agencies and small businesses a complete web and SEO strategy for $1,000 flat. I landed a few clients. Then I found out what the job actually costs in hours: 48 to 72, sometimes a full week, per strategy, even with ChatGPT doing half the work. I couldn’t scale a business that ran on my own sleep. I tried to automate it myself, but I only knew HTML, a little JavaScript, and SQL, not enough to build what I needed. I shelved it and went back to looking for a job.

I applied to more than 500 of them. A handful of phone screens. I’ll be 65 on my next birthday, and companies don’t exactly compete for that. My credit score went from near 800 to the high 400s in about two years. Debt collectors called daily. My wife, who’d never paid a dollar of rent in almost 30 years of marriage, started covering half of it. That part still bothers me more than the credit score does.

By June 2025, nothing had worked, so I called a logistics company I used to drive for and asked for my old route back. Since then I’ve been hauling airplane parts, computer parts, and medical specimens, organs and tissue, across the Southwest, 10 to 12 hours at a stretch. Every so often I fly instead, when a kidney has to make a flight, which is a hell of a conversation starter with the stranger in the next seat. My 14-year-old dog, Stevie, rides along on the drives. He’s a fifteen pound rat terrier mix who helped me relearn how to walk after spinal surgery, a quarter mile at a time until we were doing three miles a day. He forgets I exist the moment my wife walks in the door. I’ve made peace with that.

In January 2026, I heard a guy named Lazar Jovanovic on Lenny’s Podcast talk about building real apps without knowing how to code. I started teaching myself Lovable that week. First I built small stuff, a time tracker, an invoice tool, a vacation planner, just to see if I could. Then I went back to the strategy problem that broke my consulting business. I almost built a clone of SEMrush or Ahrefs, until I noticed a wave of new apps doing exactly that, all of them great at finding problems, none of them answering the only question that matters: then what, what do I fix first? That gap, prioritizing fixes by what they’re actually worth and telling you how to implement them, is what I built.

StratifySEO turns that 48 to 72 hour slog into a few minutes. It tells you which fix to do first and what it’s worth, instead of handing an agency 800 audit findings and calling it strategy. A confused mind says no. Nobody pays you to hand them homework.

I used to start things and quit when they got hard. Not anymore. Quitting is no longer in my vocabulary. I’ll quit when I’m dead, and I mean that as a plan, not a threat.

My wife has heard every version of this story, the good years and the ones that scared both of us, and her answer has never changed: whatever went wrong before, we came through it. She’s right more often than I want to admit.

Here’s what 25 years and one very bad stretch taught me. Credentials don’t make you competent, and a title doesn’t make you right. Results do. That belief is the entire reason StratifySEO exists, and it’s the same reason I still get up every morning and work on it, even on the days I spent the night before flying a kidney across the country.

No matter how good or bad things get, they eventually end. I’ve learned to trust that on both sides of the sentence.