Sol Orwell Founded in 2011, Examine.com, a health information site, was at the forefront of a multi-million dollar business trend with a small team of contractors for over a million dollars.
But multi-million dollar, one-man businesses don’t last forever. (You can read about the first story of the business: “Young entrepreneur’s passion for hacking his diet creates a seven-figure business”). While many founders dive into fine-tuning boutique solopreneur businesses without adding employees, others eventually choose to go the traditional route and grow. Toronto-based Orwell is taking a hybrid approach. After growing the size of his virtual team to about 25 people with a mix of contractors and employees, he recently relaunched the website and now projects $2 million in revenue by 2022. His goal is to build the business into a nine-figure income.
“It’s important to have a job that really makes you happy, especially when it comes to the great retirement,” says Orwell. “My mission is to build a company that I can be truly proud of.”
Sol Orwell once called a million dollar one-man business to a team of about 25 people.
Examine.com sells nutrition information, including its supplemental guides, through a subscription model that pays $19 a month or $144 a year. Before the redesign, he and his team organized the site around specific nutrients, such as vitamin D. Now the information is organized into health challenges that drive people to search the Internet for diet-based solutions, in 25 categories ”) covering 65-80 health conditions (such as “high blood pressure”). . The site also provides insights into “results”.
“People don’t care about vitamin D,” he says. You think, “I have high blood pressure.”
Orwell’s “This is one of the controversies of one’s business approach. To be honest, on our part, it was a consensus on the mission and the vision. In mid-2019, we reorganized everything. We started to move towards holocracy and full financial transparency. (A holocracy is a management system based on networks of self-organizing people. It means that it shares monthly information such as income and expenses with the group in full transparency.)
Things started to improve. Then covid hit. “Covid destroyed us,” Orwell said. “Personal trainers, a huge client segment, have been wiped out.”
Orwell and his team doubled down on their search engine optimization and marketing efforts with customer relationship management (CRM) software. They also assign a Customer Success Associate to each customer. “From the moment someone buys it, we want to make sure it doesn’t go stale,” he said.
This approach is working and the company is now serving more than 10,000 customers. Although Google’s algorithm change once hit traffic hard, it took a big rebound. In addition to numerous customer reviews on Trustpilot, what visitors are flocking to is Examine.com’s way of organizing information. If someone is searching for “migraines,” they might ask, “Does not getting enough sleep cause migraines?” You will find answers to common sub-questions. Also a list of relevant studies on migraine.
“Instead of visitors having to search through 20 different blog posts, we’re putting it all in one place,” he says.
To grow, Orwell had to double his investment in researchers. About 75% of the salary goes to researchers, especially professionals like MDs and Ph.D.
Aiming to build an attractive work environment, he runs the company on a four-day work week and is introducing benefits such as four months of paid paternity leave. He also introduced a six-month maternity leave that covers team members regardless of the pregnancy outcome. Every month, the company gives 20% of the profit before tax to the employees.
What the exam does not offer is unlimited vacation time. “We try not to pay lip service to the benefits of the company,” Orwell said. “Companies say they can have unlimited vacation time. How many have followed through?”
Orwell plans to grow the company to 40 employees within a year of running the business — a goal he seems unlikely to have any trouble reaching. Although Orwell has added complexity to the business, it still operates using poor digital methods, such as communicating via Slack, rather than holding more formal meetings. Another thing he made public was the employee handbook. “480 people applied for five positions,” he says.
