Quick. What are the 12 most important words in your business? If you don’t know, you may be losing sales you didn’t know you had. Well, Paul Darwish knows just what to do. The 1987 graduate with a Harvard M.B.A. has a new business that guarantees your company’s web site will show up at the top of an Internet search page.
Darwish and a partner founded SearchDaddy.com last year and have already signed on 20 clients, including Fifth Third Bank, Rookwood Properties, Drees Homes and Richter & Phillips jewelers in Cincinnati. There’s also Le Pavillon Hotel in New Orleans and Guaranty Trust in Nashville, Tenn. The goal is 100 clients before branching out to more cities nationwide.
“We’re helping clients capitalize on a very important media space,” says Darwish. “You need to be where your consumers are—online.”
After a wildly successful first business followed by a total loss in a second, Darwish says this is his last start-up. Ever the entrepreneur, he took the plunge again after learning that consumers spend a third of their media time searching the Internet and that most businesses spend their marketing dollars in traditional media—newspapers, TV and billboards.
Now he spends time looking for clients while his technology director, Brian Geraghty, a 1997 Xavier graduate, finesses clients’ web pages. By making sure key words are prominent on their sites—like “gold,” “jewelry” and “Cincinnati” for Richter & Phillips—SearchDaddy can get the company positioned at the top of a Google search page and, hopefully, catch the eyes of potential customers—which of course is tops for any business.
