“Working as a married couple does have its challenges, but on the whole, it’s also been a great experience,” shares Matt Williams of Prominent Placement, Inc. “I mean, who can you trust as your business partner more than your spouse?”

Matt and his wife, Stacy, run a search engine marketing firm (www.ProminentPlacement.com) from their home in Atlanta, Georgia. Since 2001, they have been helping clients achieve better search engine listings, which in turn, drive more traffic to their web sites and generate more online sales. Some of their services include: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), pay-per-click campaigns, press release optimization, link-building, local search marketing, and Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM).

In addition to themselves, they have six part-time employees, plus a bookkeeper who comes in once a week. “Most of our account manager employees are women who have chosen to leave the corporate rat race in order to spend more time with their children,” says Stacy. “They all work out of their homes, and they seem to appreciate the flexibility we offer them.”

The Williams are able to run an efficient virtual company with the help of modern technology. “Obviously, given the nature of our business, everyone’s required to have a computer and broadband Internet access,” comments Matt. “In addition, there are three main technology tools that help our team stay in touch and make us look like an office-based company.” These tools are a virtual phone system, a Web-based extranet, and a virtual conference calling center. 

“The single, greatest advantage to running a virtual company is the lifestyle it allows us and our employees to have,” says Stacy. “Not only are we happier, but our employees are happier. This means they’re likely to stay with us longer, which reduces our costs and time demands because we don’t have to continually find and train new people.”

 As for being together around the clock, that makes the Williams happy, too. “We’re working together toward the same goals in both our personal and professional lives,” adds Stacy. “We’ve discovered that, in a lot of ways, we’re very ‘yin/yang’ — where one of us is weak, the other is strong. So we balance each other out well.” HBM