Ralph Grundmann: managing director
My name is Ralph and I am responsible for the operations, new business, account management and timely delivery of all projects here at AweSEM. Apart from that some people say I am pretty good at Search Engine Optimisation, Affiliate Marketing and monetisation strategies as well!
all about ralph
I was born in Germany some thirty odd years ago and first got involved with the web thing in my late teens. It all kicked off with a website project I had to do for University which is still online today (no, I will not be giving you the URL!) which forced me to handle Photoshop and learn HTML. Quickly reaching the limitations of the mark-up language I gave PHP a try.
A couple of years, plenty of websites and probably 1000s of cups of coffee later, I eventually realised that lines of code and databases are generally OK, but not something I want to pursue as a career for the rest of my days. I was looking for a fresh challenge and started to focus on online marketing in general and search engine optimisation in particular.
This is at a time when it was out of question that SEO would become a major player in the online marketing arena. I was confident that decision makers eventually would have no other option but to include SEO in their arsenal if they want to stand a chance against the competition.
previous experience and skills
My working life in a nutshell …
Web Design & Web Development Experience
Before I came over to the UK, I have spent four years at an advertising agency based in Münster, Germany. My main responsibilities were server administration and all e-business affairs from pitching to actually ‘doing’ the work.
Client-Side SEO Experience
In 2003 I moved to the beautiful town of Chester to work for a finance start-up company called “The Funding Corporation”. Typically for a start-up we only had a small online team so apart from being responsible for the SEO of various brands I also managed the Affiliate Marketing and external PPC agencies. Three years and various top spots in the result pages (SERPs) for a variety of our finance products later I decided that I could do with a new challenge.
Agency SEO Experience
In 2006 I moved to London to work for The Search Works (TSW), initially as an SEO manager but eventually heading up the (new born) SEO department. When I joined TSW there were no clients, no revenue and no real offering. Fast-forward two years to a healthy client list including EasyJet, The Red Cross, Teletext Holidays, Visit Britain and many more ‘on the books’. I think it’s safe to say it had been another successful venture.
Setting up AweSEM
At some stage we decided that we have had enough experience as employees and that it was time to stop talking about the possibilities of a joint venture and actually do it. Since that day we’ve successfully created scores of websites, custom applications and online marketing strategies and never looked back – the rest is history.