The SEO & PPC Agency Built On Referrals For 20+ Years

I built my first website in 2001. I was nineteen, self-taught, and the dot-com crash was burning down everything around me. Best business education I never paid for, and some of the most fun days of my life. I didn’t have much, but I had something I loved, and people knew it.

One of my first sites was an information security site. It ended up forecasting the exploits we all deal with now. Seventeen years running this company, not one client hacked under our care. That’s not luck.

Before this work had a name, I ran my own experiments because nobody had written the manual. I did a stretch at Microsoft tech support, then three years in the energy sector. Every spring breakup, while the other guys flew south, I picked up work in whatever industry would have me and learned businesses from the inside. Out there nobody asks about impressions. They ask if the job got done. That set my standard: if it doesn’t produce revenue, it didn’t happen.

Then people kept landing on my sites and calling. Not about the content. They wanted to know who built it. In August 2006 I turned passion into profit as a marketing consultant under Fresh Standard. In 2009 it became Making 8 Inc., with two promises: never sell work we can’t measure, and put every dollar into real people and real value.

The referrals were never a strategy. Do honest, consistent work year after year and your clients start doing the selling for you.

What I love most is making the impossible possible: taking small businesses up against giants and winning on better thinking, never bigger budgets, and never crossing an ethical line. The Fortune 500 accounts and government clients we once outranked ended up on our client list. Referred.

Some of our best work carried other names: for years our processes powered award-winning white-label campaigns for major agencies, shaped popular SEO software and AI companies, and now run in our own software.

We’re still here.