Eight Months After My Last Shot at the Majors, I Took a Commission-Only Job Selling SEO

In February 2011 I threw a bullpen for the Arizona Diamondbacks. It went well. Then a senior executive called me and told me it wasn't going to work out, and that was the last serious run at affiliated baseball I ever got.

In October 2011 I took a job selling SEO to small businesses on straight commission.

I've never put those two facts next to each other before. Eight months.

I was still playing. The following spring I was in the Atlantic League — the highest level of professional baseball outside affiliated ball — pitching for Willie Randolph in Bridgeport. Then the Czech Republic that summer, and another championship the year after that. But the thing I do now for a living started in that gap, and it took me about a decade to notice.

National PC Solutions

That's what the company was called when I joined. It was founded by Mike Donato, and it had started life doing something else entirely before turning into an internet marketing agency.

My job was commission only. No base. I sold search engine optimisation to small businesses, and when a client signed, I helped manage them too. If I didn't sell, I didn't eat.

In 2012 or 2013 they moved to Scottsdale and doubled down on the business, and they hired me as project manager. I was genuinely pumped. It's the first time anybody had looked at me and seen something other than a pitcher.

Why it stuck

Two reasons, and neither is the one you'd guess.

I like puzzles. I always have. SEO in that era was a puzzle with a scoreboard — you could see exactly where you ranked against the other guy, and you could move it. Competition with a leaderboard is the only environment I've ever really understood. It was baseball with keywords.

And my boss was my age. Mike was a hard worker running his own thing, and being around him every day did something to me that no book could have. I'd spent my whole life around athletes and coaches. This was the first time I was around a founder — somebody building the thing rather than performing inside somebody else's — and it made me want that.

I didn't have a word for it then. I do now: that's where the entrepreneur showed up.

Substitute teaching, and what I actually did with those days

Around August or September of 2012, I started substitute teaching alongside the sales job.

Some days I'd pick up a classroom. Other days I'd go into the office and make calls trying to sell SEO. On a sub day I was often handed a room and told to put a movie on — which meant I had a full day, a desk, and an internet connection.

I used almost every one of those days to teach myself the internet.

I built websites. I learned what a WordPress install actually was. I read about ranking. I worked on my own business while thirty kids watched a film. I was probably not supposed to be doing that. I don't regret it even slightly, and I was genuinely good with the kids on the days that needed me — being around different ages, all day, taught me things about coaching I still use.

Wix, then WordPress, then everything

I started on Wix like everybody does. Then Helix House built every client site on WordPress, so I lived in that dashboard for years — installs, themes, plugins, the shape of how a site is actually put together, and slowly the language of the code underneath it.

The thing that hooked me was watching clients do well because of work I'd done. That's a strange, specific satisfaction and I got addicted to it.

And I eventually worked out why the whole field fit me: I've always loved art, design, and puzzles, and building websites is exactly where those three intersect. Design is the art. SEO is the puzzle. The site is the thing you make. I'd been looking for that intersection since I was a kid without knowing it existed.

Fifteen years of learning by doing

I've tried classes a few times. They've never stuck. Not once. I learn by building something badly and then finding out why it's bad.

That was a slow way to work for most of those fifteen years. It isn't anymore. Since AI coding tools arrived — and Claude Code in particular over the last few months — my rate of learning has gone up more than in any previous five-year stretch. I'm building things now I'd have had to hire out two years ago.

Which brings the story to something I find funny.

I got into this because a doctor's decision closed a door in baseball. A commission-only sales job in October 2011 was what a broke twenty-six-year-old could get. It turned into a marketplace I built myself, with real money moving through it.

I want to be straight about where that leaves me, because it would be easy to write this as a man still waiting on a call from the majors. I'm forty-one with two kids. I'm not deluded about the level — I know exactly what big league hitters do to pitchers, and I haven't been training for that. I'd still love to compete somewhere real, and I think I could hold my own in the kind of baseball I'm actually chasing. That's a different sentence from the one people expect a forty-one-year-old to say, and I'd rather say the accurate one.

The career I built in that gap isn't a fallback I'm holding in case the arm goes. It's the thing I do.

I never picked any of it. I just kept showing up at the next thing that would have me, and it turned out the next thing was a career.

If you're in the gap right now — the one after the thing you wanted said no, and before you know what's next — that gap is not dead time. Mine was eight months long and I've been living off what I found in it ever since.