A Fresh Start
I left the University of Maine in 1985 with a Chemical Engineering degree focused on Paper Science. The pic on the left was very familiar territory in my ABB days. ABB was on the cutting edge of internet and networking capabilities. I left ABB in 2004. I loved that company, and they truly allowed my digit-head personality to shine. I got to travel worldwide and interact with some fantastic people. I got very familiar with the tech and digital world.
Then, one morning, I "woke up." I flew in the night before, took a taxi to the hotel, prepared my sales presentation, and went to bed. When I awoke, 
I looked at the ceiling and could not remember where I was! I went down to the lobby and looked out of the lobby doors. To the left of me loomed the Eiffel Tower, and to the right was the Arc d'Triomphe. That was the day I decided to leave corporate life. I took a much-needed 2-week vacation in Paris, flew home, and turned in my 30-day notice.
Starting a New Business
Nothing is more humbling than getting excited about an idea only to find out you're not the first to have it! I wanted my business to be called WEB IT originally. I even had a cute little logo - you guessed it - a frog (say a bit fast). Get it? Someone else had the same idea: cute little frog and all. So I went for the prominent—local SEO, Web SEO Services, and on and on. At the time, while there weren't many websites associated with domains using those terms, someone was smart enough to own the domains at least.
50Bubbles started as a web design company in a franchise called WSI. It wasn't long before I realized that web design was not what small businesses sought! The question wasn't: "Can you build us a great website?" The question was, "How do we show up on Google?" 50Bubbles left WSI after the five-year commitment with them ended. Using an outsourced business model, we developed our business partners according to our needs for web development, web design, SEO, IT services, and digital marketing.
In 2004, Google was only a five-year-old baby, but it had already assumed the top spot for search engines. (The other option back then was Yahoo!, which happened to be a lot of people's home page.) With a 50-keyword strategy, there were two ways to get Google's attention. First, good page content. Second, backlinks use the keywords as the backlink text (the anchor text). Those strategies still work today; however, hundreds of other rules collectively affect your search ranking.
Our customers didn't know what SEO was; they just wanted the phone to ring and didn't care how we accomplished it. You may recall, back in the early 2000's, the Yellow Pages was still a thing. Early internet adopters saw the writing on the wall and knew that even a full page in the Yellow Pages would be a thing of the past. They wanted to know how to get business from the internet. It was a lot easier back then, but it was still evolving. We started researching the best keywords associated with our customers' businesses and weaving those into the page copy on their sites and following all the SEO best practices we could discover at the time. While most marketing companies were content with developing SEO for 4-5 keywords, we developed a 50-keyword strategy. We still do it to this day.
So? 50Bubbles? Well, here's the concept. A Bubble is a keyword (a search phrase in Google). Google is the ocean. What do bubbles do? They rise to the top! OK, corny. At least, I thought so. 
But - and this is a good business lesson - people approach my business with a question and never seem to forget the name. And now, you know why the circles above our name in the logo match the colors of Google 
.