Recently I read an article about a bank robbery in California. It was so amazing to me, that I decided to compare the antics of this foolish “wanna be” robber with some of the business decisions I have seen made.

You decide if there is any similarities:

Recently, 40 year old Sudan Provost, entered the River City Bank in Sacramento and quietly announced to a few in the lobby that he was there to rob the bank. Then Mr. Provost handed the teller his drivers license and a money order that he wanted to cash first. The teller asked if he had an account with that bank to which Mr. Provost replied that he was serious, had a gun and did this for a living (not sure if he meant robbing banks or that he is a professional idiot). When he opened his bag however, there was no gun and then he asked to have a tissue for his runny nose. The teller responded that she didn’t have one, so the robber said he would be right back. He then left the bank, walked across the street to a pharmacy for a Kleenex, only to return and find the police there ready to arrest him. DUH!!!!!

Now contrast that absolute stupidity to the following:

Business owner Wesley Jones (names changed to protect the stupid) owns a very successful retail outlet with several retail locations. Mr. Jones has always been a believer in being first in line for everything, so he had a nephew who loved to play video games and tinker on the internet build him a website. It had flashing lights, animated computer characters that waved their arms about and a really cool phrase that just followed your mouse around while you were on his site.

After a number of years, Mr. Jones felt like he needed to have a more professional website built for him so he contacted some local web design companies in Utah. All of the proposals to design his site were “outrageous” so he once again turned to family. A website was created using front page and seamingly intelligent content stolen from other competitor sites.

Now that this great new homemade site was ready, it was introduced to the world like a leaf falling in the woods. When nothing seemed to happen, Mr. Jones got upset and frustrated with the family webmaster because nothing was happening and no sales were occurring. So the young member of the family decided that he needed to do something, besides Uncle Wes still owed him $200.00 for the site. So he devised a plan after an evening of playing video games to get more traffic to the site. Having used a search engine before, he could work his way around and found a great company that promised top placement, lots of traffic and lots of sales for just a few dollars.

Uncle Wes decided that he had nothing to lose in this new venture so he gave his credit card, to get the ball rolling. Needless to say this “Black Hat SEO” company charged much more than was expected, they did nothing with a poorly designed and engineered site, they created mounds of paperwork that made it appear that great success was being achieved. Until finally calls from the SEO Company were not being returned, then nobody would answer the phone and finally the numbers were disconnected. Soon after Mr. Jones found out that they had closed their shop and his site was black balled from the major search engines.

As stupid as the bank robber story was, in my world, stories of foolish business owners cutting corners and hiring untrained technical help is not uncommon. Great websites are not stumbled upon. Top search engine placement is not achieved with luck alone, and Profitable websites are not bought at 7-eleven and hosted in the backroom.

A successful web operation is a collection of sound business principles, savvy and strategic marketing, following a carefully planned and well executed business model. A professional web design team is necessary to make sure you start the process properly. Professional business web hosting is important to make sure all of the infrastructure is in place to handle your site traffic, a professional search engine optimization team needs to be involved to make sure the right path is chosen and that you stay on that path until your objectives are met.

Long blog, silly stories and lots of reality. Good luck to all!