Yes, It’s That Important
If you haven’t watched Flipping Out it really applies to working from home. Jeff and Ryan both own separate companiess. Jeff flips houses and Ryan designs but they don’t work on every project together. They hire a team and contractors and other people to actually wear the work gloves. Jeff is basically the star of the show, he puts the flipping out in Flipping Out. The rest of the people are just the ones that have to deal with him. He does have a tendency to be paranoid so I thought maybe that was what was going on when he turned on Ryan. I watched the marathon and reunion show yesterday even though I hadn’t seen the entire season.
Apparently Ryan built a website and starting buying google ads using Jeff’s name. He showed Jeff’s work and made it look like Jeff was behind the website then he’d route the visitors to his own design firm. This blew up into such an argument that eventually the two have apparently stopped speaking. The host of the reunion show seemed kind of confused. At one point he even asked “Is Google really worth destroying your decade long friendship over?” I laughed and thought “Oh that poor naive host”. Sure everyone knows about Google but not eveyroen knows how vital it is to a website.
Unless you run an online business you have no idea just how important google is. Most affiliate programs don’t allow you to buy adwords under their name. It would drive up the price so they would have to pay you for a lot of their customers. It’s basically stealing their brand. Sure, sometimes friends blame the business when it’s really about the relationship. However, I really do think that this particular relationship is dissolving because of Google, and if you work on the internet you can probably relate.