Danny Mola, CEO of Kolau, runs the multinational company from a small office in east Vancouver. (Photos by AMANDA COWAN/The Columbian / Earth illustration by iStock)Photo Gallery
Danny Mola’s office in east Vancouver is little larger than a cubicle, peering into a thicket of trees so clustered it could be mistaken for camouflage wallpaper.
The 34-year-old Spaniard relishes it. When asked why he and his wife moved here, of all places, he juts his excited palm toward the window to serve up the view.
“We thought of Vancouver, it’s a very, very nice area that not a lot of people were talking about,” Mola said in a thick Spanish accent. “We like the outdoors and we like hiking. Life is better.”
From this vantage — and the dual-monitor computer at his desk — Mola orchestrates Kolau, one of the more unique businesses in Clark County, with 21 total employees spanning Alaska, Hawaii, Florida, Spain and even Kazakhstan.
Kolau is a marketing and technology company billing itself as a one-stop shop for search engine optimization. Its service hinges on helping small businesses reach as many potential customers as possible. Businesses today often live or die on the first page of a web search. A florist, accountant or local grocer who can’t or won’t pay a marketing consultant would turn to Kolau, the company hopes.
“The whole model is do-it-yourself,” he said. “We provide them the tools to do so. … We make it so easy.”
Do-it-yourself
The idea for Kolau began in the mountains. Two years ago, Mola and his wife hiked through the Ko’olau Mountain Range in Oahu, Hawaii, talking about internet-based platforms that made their name by making online resources easier to access.
Websites such as WordPress and SquareSpace help people with virtually no programming experience create websites. TurboTax helps people manage taxes without an accountant. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 4.47 million of the 6.69 million businesses in the United States employed 19 or fewer people in 2012. Small businesses are growing and those online platforms are giving people more tools to be their own bosses.
“Yet, one thing you could not do unless you knew how to is having your website on the first page of Google,” Mola said. “In that moment, I decided to start Kolau, naming it after the mountain that inspired it.”
Today, Mola works 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. He works mostly from home but spends a lot of time in the second-story office along Northeast Fourth Plain. Engineers in Kazakhstan and customer service employees in Spain work evening shifts to synchronize. Mola checks with them in the day and leads a weekly Skype meeting. The company deploys the increasingly popular chatroom app Slack and asks workers to get to know the other departments, which are often in other countries.
“It is fun to talk to other team members in different countries on Friday and in Slack always,” said Carme Moraleda, in Spain, via email. “On Friday, we talk to somebody in different team and it is good to know them and talk to them. It is very fun! It is a very good team!”
The company weeds out people who struggle with telecommuting — people who will procrastinate without a boss over their shoulder, Mola said — with a 90-day probationary period. Employees’ wages are based on the skill level and on the geography.
Mola points to several companies, particularly tech companies, that work with broad networks of employees, often called “distributed teams.” He expects them to become more and more common.
“There are certain times when you need to communicate in person, but for the rest I think the future is remote employment,” he said. “In my opinion, people work better from home. At the same time, this person needs to be willing.”
Search marketing
The company officially launched Oct. 13, but it has been making waves for the past year as a beta project. In March, Mola attended SMX West, a large search marketing conference in San Jose, Calif., where he was introduced to executives from search engine giant Google, who offered encouragement.
“One thing they told me several times is, ‘We don’t want to sell, we don’t want to become sellers, we need you (and other) platforms and agencies to do the selling job, we’re a technology company,’ ” Mola said. “So they need us. They need us to get more small businesses to open accounts.”
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Local entrepreneur Dave Barcos, who uses the company, said he expects the service to be highly sought after as people learn about it.
“(They are) trying to crack a huge issue that has been a ton of headache for the average business,” Barcos said. “SEO is very complex and it takes constant monitoring.”
How Kolau will grow in the future remains to be seen. The company will launch in Spain and Latin America in January and expects to net many small businesses in both markets, which Mola said are underserved when it comes to online marketing. As a technology and marketing company, Kolau is limited only by its employees’ work hours, he added, so the company is prepared for growth.
“Startups are successful if they come up with something new. Challenging the conventional wisdom when starting a new company,” Mola said. “That’s what I’ve done.”
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