He who seeks shall be found

Beat Muttenzer (l.) and Lukas Stuber (photo: pan)

Millions of "first movers" around the world would even sell their grandmother for it. The "Google Addicts" from Yourposition got the hot deal completely free of charge. "Do you want to use it?" the boys from Mountain View would have asked. The surprising call from Silicon Valley came via Skype. Then everything had to happen very quickly, Lukas Stuber and Beat Muttenzer remember. A dozen pairs of glasses were shipped by DHL from Google's headquarters in California to Yourposition's headquarters in Oerlikon. 

"Okay Glass!" was the most heard sentence for five days in the Zurich agency for search engine marketing. For almost a week, the crew from Yourposition was allowed to test the most talked-about and most hotly sought-after gadget of the year: Google Glass. "The fact that the search engine market leader found us, of all people, was the most beautiful recognition in our ten-year career with our search engine marketing agency," the two managing directors are pleased to say, and the triumph of the proud trendsetter is still written all over Stuber and Muttenzer's faces.

What the employees of Yourposition experienced during the following week while testing the Google Glasses can be followed in an exciting video on Youtube by typing in the title "Yourposition: Google Glass Hands-on Test in Switzerland".

"It works fine," Yourposition's testers there can confirm. In the supermarket, the glasses provided valuable information about the nutritional value of a mayonnaise at a glance. Family photos could be called up via Google Glass. When riding the streetcar through the city, the wearers of the glasses knew at every turn that they were now in Zurich and not in California. The only thing the U.S. prototype didn't quite respond to without an accent was commands in German.

The results of the first test of Google Glass in Switzerland were also worth a major story in the SonntagsZeitung. The only flaw in wearing these glasses: the test run was a fake. At the same time, however, it was a more than successful guerrilla campaign by Yourposition to draw attention to the search engine marketing specialist's 10th anniversary.

At that time still "search engine stuff

The Yourposition agency is one of the pioneers in search engine advertising in Switzerland. "When we started in 2003, this discipline was still a niche affair. Only a few companies had anything to do with search engine marketing," Lukas Stuber recalls. Today, the situation is completely different. "Search engine marketing has clearly established itself as a central pillar of online marketing. You can also see it in the growth figures," analyzes Beat Muttenzer. There is still "double-digit growth per year".

In addition to the growth, a strong professionalization in search engine marketing can also be identified. "In our ten years with Yourposition, we've already seen a number of competitors join the agency world. With clients, marketing people who know what's at stake can now make decisions. And the media agencies are moving with it, too." Stuber would therefore like to sum up as the biggest change in the last ten years: The exotic specialty discipline has become one of the central online marketing disciplines. He himself has been in the business since 2000.

It all started with playing ping pong. Lukas Stuber was in the same table tennis club as Markus Gabriel from Angelink. The historian and political scientist, who was still studying, had a job at Orell Füssli at the time and worked for Books.ch, "with a very pleasant supervisor. His name was Beat Muttenzer and he was responsible for building up the online book trade at Orell Füssli. But Stuber was more drawn to advertising.

"I had the idea I could earn my living as a copywriter," said the author of an award-winning novel - "Sechs Fussbreit über dem Boden" - as well as an ambitious licentiate thesis on "Schimpfwörter". That's how Lukas Stuber ended up at Markus Gabriel and his Angelink. Here one had relatively early the nose for the "search engine stuff ". This could become important and Stuber should "take a look at it," Gabriel said.

That was at the very beginning of the new millennium. Three years later, the business was already so big that Angelink could no longer handle search engine marketing on its own. "We looked for solutions and also sat down with Yourposition.ch, a competitor, for this purpose. " Since both agencies saw themselves as an ideal complement, one linked without further ado to the new company Angelink Yourposition. Since then, this company has grown rapidly.

In 2005, Beat Muttenzer also "got involved for the first time", as a freelancer for 18 months. Later, the trained bookseller, who also studied change management and interaction management at the Basel University of Applied Sciences, wanted to get involved in fair trade because of his specialized knowledge. Muttenzer has worked for the Fair Wear Foundation in the Third World to promote social working conditions in the clothing industry as well as in the production of carpets. "But I had to realize that I was less a human rights activist than an entrepreneur," Muttenzer now knows. After trying to reconcile both for a while, he joined Yourposition as a full partner in 2007.

Extension with Analytics

A year later, Lukas Stuber and Beat Muttenzer expanded their search engine marketing and "actually anticipated a trend" by setting up the Analytics division. They saw: tracking marketing measures is just as important as search engine marketing itself. "So we started to establish web analytics." Since then, Yourposition's offering has included the three core areas: Adwords, SEA and Analytics.

In the division of labor, Lukas Stuber functions as "Foreign Minister" and is mainly responsible for marketing and communications. Beat Muttenzer is the "Minister of the Interior" and is responsible for operations and finances. The areas of innovation and business development are jointly driven by both. Three team leaders are responsible for the specialist areas.

The start-up began with 130 employees. Today, the agency employs more than 20 people "and further positions are open. Growth really took off in 2010, when "we realized: The customers really want this and we are no longer the exotics who want to proselytize with search engine marketing. From that point of view, we were perhaps a bit too early in the market. But we had a head start in experience when it really took off."

Commitment to the next generation

In 2009, the two managing directors Stuber and Muttenzer thought that a 200-square-meter office they had just moved into in Oerlikon "offered incredible growth reserves. But then the young entrepreneurs soon had to "step on the gas to be able to get out of the existing contract again". Since the beginning of 2013, Yourposition has been present in the Noerd in Oerlikon and now, with 400 square meters, "definitely still has growth potential for up to 30 people".

In earlier years, it was very difficult to find such specialists. This is also one reason why Stuber and Muttenzer are both active at universities of applied sciences, in order to be able to train these young professionals themselves. The managing directors of Yourposition teach at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, the University of Applied Sciences of Northwestern Switzerland in Basel and Olten, and are also frequently in demand as speakers at the universities of St. Gallen, Bern and Fribourg.

The writer and the bookseller as sought-after entrepreneurs. At the beginning of their careers, that would have been a book with seven seals at best. But Lukas Stuber and Beat Muttenzer obviously enjoy their new responsibilities. "All management is learning by doing for us. We haven't attended any management seminars, and we don't need any business plans according to the blueprint. We have simply always responded to what our customers and the market have demanded, and in doing so we have tried to reflect this need as well as possible, as well as to initiate innovations from our increasingly broad market experience. Today, we are in many cases the point of contact not only for search engine marketing, but for digital marketing as a whole."

Lived corporate culture

At the same time, Stuber and Muttenzer have tried to maintain their values of a corporate culture. The open-plan office at Noerd has a very creative working atmosphere. Employees are given a great deal of direct customer contact and initiative.

The search engine pioneers Stuber and Muttenzer did not necessarily seek out their current situation. They just thought search engines and analytics were "great" and realized there was money to be made. "But when you realize for the first time that the payroll for more than twenty employees exceeds two million per year, you can get scared for a moment."

Beat Muttenzer and Lukas Stuber are convinced, however, that they will be able to keep their perspective on future developments and have full control of the technology. Even if the official use of Google Glass in Oerlikon is still a few moments away.

Andreas Panzeri