About HatcherSoft

A tow truck driver was kind enough to give me a ride home after a breakdown. We started chatting about life, work, and eventually websites.

He told me that he had recently paid for a new website, but it didn't seem to do anything. When he paid for Google Ads, the phone rang. When he stopped, it didn't. The website itself made no difference.

At the time, I was a full-time W-2 employee working for a large enterprise company. I had no plans to start a business. But helping a neighbor seemed like the right thing to do, so I offered to take a look.

What I found explained his frustration:

• Only 6 website visitors total since launch (8 months).
• Website and Google Business Profile contradict each other
• The site wasn't connected to Google's Business Profile at all
• Google Ads campaigns are only ~20% optimized, advertising services he didn't even offer
• Core website fundamentals are below average across performance, accessibility, and SEO
• Average Google ranking of 98.5 for high-intent local keywords, despite almost no competition

He was right. The website wasn't helping him. And he'd paid $1,000 upfront plus $250 every month for it.

That didn't sit right with me.

I offered my help. He was planning to retire in about six months, so a long SEO campaign didn't make sense. But at the very least, I could cut his ongoing costs dramatically, clean things up, and make sure the phone calls he did get were actually relevant-so he wouldn't be woken up at 3 a.m. for tire changes.

I rebuilt the site into a fast, simple static website, fixed performance issues, pushed page speed scores above 95 across all devices, cleaned up the messaging, added structured data, connected and corrected his Google Business Profile, and repaired the Google Ads setup.

The results surprised even me:

• 100+ website visitors in the first two weeks
• Google rankings jumped from #98 to #1 in his town (2 weeks) and #10 in the largest nearby city (3 months).
• Call volume stayed ~10/day, but nearly all calls were now relevant
• Monthly website costs dropped to $3.50
• Google Ads CTR jumped from 1% to 13%
• His income tripled, and I got offered free tow for life

No expensive SEO package. No massive marketing budgets. No proprietary software. Just honest engineering.

When it came time to start my own business, I kept thinking about that experience. I asked friends and neighbors who owned businesses if they had similar issues. They did. Over and over, I heard the same complaint: they asked for a specific outcome, but received a templated solution that delivered little or no ROI.

That raises a question I couldn't ignore: could the no-BS mindset that causes friction in large corporations actually be a competitive advantage as a business technology consultant?