Local SEO blog
Four Years at Evergreen Digital, and the Career I Started at 38
I was 38 years old when I finally got a job I wanted to keep.
Four years ago today.
That makes Evergreen Digital the longest job I have ever held, and I know how that sounds. Forty-two years old, bragging about four years of tenure like it is a gold watch.
It is, though.
To me, it is.
The ladder I never got on
I grew up believing the plan was simple.
You finish high school, get hired somewhere real, stay, move up, retire with a decent chair, and collect a story about the good old days.
Everybody around me talked like that was what happened next.
It did not happen next.
What happened next was a long stretch of jobs that existed to extract something from me. Dispatch. Retail. The kind of workplaces where the schedule changes without warning and somebody’s cousin gets the promotion.
Lane and Reed was the other long job I held, right after high school.
I thought insurance might turn into the safe career. The kind of job that would let me take care of myself and build something steady.
Instead, it became soul-crushing.
That office sits in my memory as one more place where I kept trying to force a stable future out of work that was draining the life out of me.
I was still chasing the same basic thing I chased for years after that. A path that felt solid. A job I could stay in without feeling myself flatten out inside. It took me a long time to realize I was going to have to build that path myself.
I was a tow truck dispatcher in 2013 because I was trying to make my first real career hop. I wanted to build a career using computers. That pull was already there in the same part of my brain that loved spending hours on a computer playing World of Warcraft. I hoped dispatching might lead me toward that kind of work.
Instead, the job became difficult and the workplace experience was painful. I have written about that one already. I have seen some shit in an office.
I took a bus dispatch job after that, and that one went badly too.
I was expected to do a perfect job without proper training, without clear explanations, and without real answers when I asked questions.
People told me to do things because that was how they wanted them done. Nobody taught me the reasoning. Nobody explained the system. I was supposed to somehow absorb the logic by osmosis and then perform like I had been trained.
One especially overloaded, chaotic day turned into cluster-fuck craziness. It went badly, and my boss screamed at me for not handling a situation I had never been trained to handle.
I quit afterward.
That experience stuck with me because it made something very clear. You cannot do perfect work inside a system nobody will explain or teach.
Every job was a way to avoid being broke that week.
Four years anywhere was unthinkable.
Nine years between finding the skill and finding the job
I taught myself SEO in 2013 because I needed out and could not afford school.
No degree. No bootcamp. No mentor.
Just a computer and an obsessive interest in why one page outranked another.
The skill part clicked fast. The rest took nine more years.
That gap is the part nobody puts in the LinkedIn post.
Having a skill and having a place that will pay you fairly to use it are two separate problems. The second one took me most of my thirties to solve.
I freelanced.
I took contracts that ghosted me. I worked for people who wanted an SEO the way they wanted a lawn guy. I worked for people who genuinely could not tell the difference between my work and a $50 Fiverr order.
I almost quit the industry twice.
Then I was 38 and landed at Evergreen Digital. For the first time, the work I was good at and the job I actually had were the same thing.
That changed my life in a very practical way.
I could pay my bills with work I cared about. I could get better at that work around people who understood what it involved. I could stop treating every job as a temporary shelter and start building something.
What four years of liking your job looks like
It looks boring from the outside.
That is the point.
I run day-to-day search execution across SEO, AEO, and GEO as part of my agency work at Evergreen Digital. The client list keeps me interested: cannabis packaging, dispensaries, paintball e-commerce, self storage, senior living, and New York City design-build contracting.
I have written FAQ schema for a THC brand and audited directory citations for a Manhattan firm in the same week.
My independent projects and Evergreen Digital client work are separate lanes. This story is about the work I do with the Evergreen team and the career that grew from it.
I have also written more about my approach to search on my SEO services page and in my article about AEO, GEO, and the continuing need for SEO.
My favorite fix from the last four years involved 64 directory listings for one client.
Fifty-two of them still pointed to an address the company had left years earlier.
I found the syndication source feeding those listings and killed it there instead of fixing 52 listings one at a time.
That is the work I love.
Find the one upstream problem instead of doing the same task 52 times.
I have also helped build and maintain many of the systems our team uses now.
The LLM seeding tracker. The backlink tracking sheet. The content strategy documents. The page brief template.
Four years ago, I was the new person.
Now the templates have my fingerprints on them. That quietly means more to me than any single ranking win.
Search has changed more in the last two years than it did in the ten before that.
AI Overviews appeared. ChatGPT and Perplexity started citing pages. Every consultant on earth suddenly began selling GEO like it descended from the sky.
I get paid to figure out what is real in all of that.
I would be doing it anyway, at night, for free. That is how I know I picked right.
The part nobody writes honestly
I stayed four years because of my boss.
Brady has emotional intelligence. In practice, that means he can tell the difference between someone struggling and someone slacking, and he responds to those two things differently.
Most managers cannot do that.
Most managers have one setting.
Brady also built a business that is not running on squeezing people. He wants clients to get real results, and he wants the people producing those results to have a life.
Both things matter at the same time.
He does not treat having a life like a workplace perk that can disappear when business gets difficult. That has made a bigger difference to me than I knew how to explain at first.
If you have only ever worked for people who take, you do not know how much energy that takes until it stops.
I got years of my capacity back.
A career can start late
For a long time, I thought I had missed the window.
I looked at people who started their careers in their twenties and assumed I had spent too many years catching up. I thought I should have figured everything out sooner. I thought starting over at 38 meant I had already lost the most useful part of my working life.
I was wrong about that.
Starting later gave me a better understanding of what I wanted to protect.
I knew what unstable work felt like. I knew what it was like to be managed by people who only noticed mistakes. I knew how much time and energy bad jobs could take from the rest of your life.
That knowledge came with a cost.
It also helped me recognize a good place when I found one.
What I would tell myself at 30
Nobody showed you the real timeline.
Late only exists on someone else’s schedule.
The jobs that grind you down say more about your options than your ability. Options are something you can build.
Learn something specific enough that a business bleeds money without it. Keep looking until you find people who know the value of that skill.
It took me until 38.
It was worth every year it cost.
I am still learning. I am still figuring out what search becomes next. I am still building my own work alongside the work I do with Evergreen Digital.
Year five starts tomorrow.
I have been feeding the algorithm since 1997, and I am not done yet.