The story of 123notary.com
It was late on a Friday night in 1999. I was at a Title office waiting for documents to be ready for a late night signing. It was up in the valley, perhaps in Encino, CA. In the mean time, the title officer was trying to find a notary in Pagoso Springs, CO. We were using signingagent.com since that was the only signing agent directory we knew of at the time. The problem was that there was only one notary in that county who didn’t answer their phone, and there was no way to find notaries in neighboring counties unless you knew the names of those counties. At that time, you could only look up by county on signingagent.com.
The birth of a vision
This was the birth of my idea to build my own database. I was going to figure out what all the problems were with the other sites, and create my own with some new and practical features. The feature that stuck out in my head was neighboring counties. Its hard to know what counties border a particular county unless you have memorized the geography, or unless you have a good atlas. These days with mapquest and google maps, that problem is much more easily surmounted, but even those sites are not always easy to use. The concept of links to neighboring counties is easy for the browser.
Neighboring counties
Every county on 123notary has links to neighboring counties. That way, if you can’t find someone to do your job in Lemon county, then you will find a few links to nearby counties such as Lime and Cherry counties. Sometimes we’ll have up to five links, while other times we will only have one. Remote areas might only have one link, because there is only one county where you would be likely to find anyone based on its higher population.
These days we do even more
For the last few years, I have personally gone beyond just listing links to neighboring counties to help people find notary services. I will list notaries from surrounding counties who service the county being searched for. I’ll just put them below the locals in the search results, so you find people in a rough order of proximity. Of course, someone in a neighboring county might be two miles from the notary job, while someone on the other end of the same county might be twenty miles away from the notary job. But, in the notary business, availability is more important than exact proximity, so this rough system functions well enough.
123notary was only for me when it started
The first year 123notary was around, it was designed to promote my personal notary business for a few counties in southern California for me to advertise my personal notary services. Yellow Pages were getting too expensive, and I wanted a more cost effective way to advertise. After a while, I thought it would be better to have others share the cost with me, so I started offering listings to other notaries in Southern California. Then, we covered all of California. By 2001 we decided to cover the whole United States and started populating the central and eastern states with notaries. It was grueling hard work to build 123notary, especially since I was doing notaries fifty-five hours a week, and spending another fifteen building 123notary. I had no knowledge of the web business back then and had hardly any money. All I had was an amazing drive and some great ideas.
Its easier now
Now, when I create new web modules for my sites, or do new promotional programs, I have a decade of experience. I know what to do, and when, and what the most efficient ways of doing everything are. Nothing beats experience. But, I’m much more tired these days, and can not do the daily thirteen hour shifts that I used to do back in the day!
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Most of what Jeremy & Carmen at 123notary offer is free!
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The story of 123notary
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123notary behind the scenes
123notary behind the scenes
All of you know what 123notary Notary Directory looks like on the surface, and you know what some of the rules are, and if the site works for you or not. But, have you ever wondered how 123notary is run? We are not a typical company to say the least. I have read books about Starbucks and how they do it, and Cliffbar as well. Their stories are unique and interesting. But, 123notary’s story is interesting too!
When we started
123notary started as a Notary Directory in 1999 on a shoestring in the ashes of the .net bust. It was my idea after seeing how the NNA’s signing agent directory was not always easy to use. I noticed that if you needed a notary in a particular county, that if nobody was in that county and you didn’t know the names of neighboring counties, you would not be able to use their site without an atlas to find out what the neighboring counties names were. Few of us carry a nationwide atlas with us. So, I wanted to start a directory with more features than the other guys. Also, I needed a way to market my own personal notary services as yellow pages were really expensive.
You can read about our growth in other blog entries and our about us page. We started as a California only directory, and then slowly spread out into other states. But, one of our notaries pointed out, that we should tell everyone how 123notary is run NOW.
How were we run in previous years?
I started out doing everything myself. My father helped with programming our Notary Directory back in 2001, but then we hired a local programming house to handle the programming after that. Business was very slow until 2003 when overnight in March, things just started to take off. Revenue multiplied by ten, and the phone was ringing off the hook. I found that working 12 hours a day was crazy and I couldn’t handle it for long. A lady named Carmen bought a course from me and kept calling asking me questions about loan signing. We spent a lot of time talking. I found that she was so smart and people saavy, that I wanted to hire her. She was very resistant at first, but I talked her into it. She was very busy doing signings for several years, and didn’t go full time with us until 2006. I started taking it easy in 2006 and 2007 because I was exhausted from all of the hard work. I wanted to meditate more and do more hiking. Then, in 2008, I started to work on optimization. I worked very hard, and through good strategy and hard work, brought a lot more traffic to the site.
How are we run now?
Most companies have an office and are centralized. 123notary has no office and no employees. I work at home on my computer and my cell phone. I don’t even have a landline because our building has some problems with the phone lines getting scrambled, and they couldn’t fix my line. Carmen is a subcontractor paid on commission and works from her home roughly 4 miles from me. Additionally, I travel quite a bit, and do a lot of my work on the road from Northern California. I sometimes go overseas and have been to Europe and India where I did my work at internet cafes.
Who does what?
Carmen is the person people are more familiar with, because she is in the front lines. Carmen does incoming phones and answers everyone’s questions. I do most of the emails and outgoing phone calls myself. But, there are more people involved in 123notary’s functionality that we can not ignore. There are programmers. We have a team in Los Angeles, and another team in India. Additionally, we have a company in El Monte who is helping us with social media including Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and Blogging which really helps keep search traffic coming in so you guys can get work. Once in a while I hire someone to do outgoing phone calls for welcome calls and update calls as well.
What else?
Where are our servers? — one person asked. We have a server at a programmer’s office in El Monte, with a backup server in Dallas, TX in a data center. It would take a tsumani, earthquake, and WW3 all combined to take our servers down. There is a lady in downtown Los Angeles who helps us a little bit with artwork. Communication is hard, as I only know 30 words in Korean, and she only knows 30 words in English — but, we work well as a team because she is so talented and efficient!
What is a typical day like for Carmen?
For Carmen, she answers the phone all day long, sends passwords, and takes orders. It is pretty much the same every day, but at the end of the month, there are far more phone calls and it gets crazy. Carmen gets about 25 calls a day on regular days, but at the end of the month it could be double easily.
What is a typical day like for Jeremy?
For me, I answer emails first, then process orders and mark people as renewed who paid their bills. I do a small email blast every day or two to tell people about what is going on in our blog, or a reminder to update or renew. Additionally, I write tons of blog entries, and do phone calls to people who are renewing soon. I have to supervise programmers in America and in India, so that can be time consuming and frustrating if they don’t understand my complicated instructions. Additionally, I write for our Facebook campaign and Twitter too. I have to come up with strategies for optimizing and detailed plans for modifying programming. There are many internal formulas in 123notary that help us to know which notaries have better stats, and that takes a lot of thinking to plan. I typically will work seven days a week for a few weeks, and then take a week off in the mountains. I find Los Angeles to be too stressful for me, so I need fresh air, streams and mountains to bring me back to my inner rhythm.
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