Tigh Buckles - One of a kind

Today was Tigh Buckles last day with ShoeMoney Capital INC. I know many of you have gotten to know Tigh at conferences and other events. He is not the kind of person (at all) who would ever write a post or want attention drawn to him but I felt the need to do a good bye post. Tigh Buckles was my first real employee. I had hired several remote people working for me since 2004 but in 2007, shortly after selling AuctionAds, I felt that I wanted to build a real office and hire local people. I hired Tigh to run my once a year conference, the Elite Retreat. But the first event was about 6 months away. Tigh has a work ethic like nobody I have never seen. No job was beneath him. I had no clue what so ever on how to manage an employee and for the couple months I had Tigh getting me lunch and creating mass twitter accounts (someday I need to post that case study). I gradually explained what I did... but obviously its kind of complicated. Tigh moved on to take over all the messages we get from the blog contact form and in addition to weeding out messages also sold advertising. Our blog revenue from direct ads doubled in a matter of months. When it came time for the conference Tigh really showed his organizational talents and for the first time in many events actually turned a profit on the show (imagine that!). About 1 year later my mother-in-law, who had been working part time from Omaha doing all of our books, decided that it sucked commuting every day to Lincoln and she wanted to go back to school and also had a job waiting for her with a Venture Capital Firm in Omaha. I interviewed a couple people for the position. None of which I really liked. Tigh said he wanted to step up and take over all of our books. He about doubled his annual salary by taking on all of these responsibilities. Fast forward a couple years later when we were ass deep in the ShoeMoney System and like 5 other projects. I decided we needed a CEO to run the company an keep a high level overview of our 12 corporations and all the income streams. At the time I realized I SUCKED at running a company and Tigh said he wanted to step up and do this. At this time Tigh became our CEO and doubled up again on his salary. With all this responsibility he worked like a dog. He was taking care of managing employees, all of our books and record keeping which included employee benefits, payroll and all that too. He also kept doing the Elite Retreat event which kept growing and growing. One day he had a idea for a site called FreeSEOreport.com which would leverage one of our best tools from ShoeMoney tools. 6 months after launch the site was doing sizeable revenue but more valuably was becoming a BEAST in the SEO world. We were getting hundreds of new users per day completely virally. We started getting offers from many SEO agencies to purchase the site. 6 months to the day we launched it we sold it for 6 figures. Tigh handled 100% of the development of the site. He contracted Latvia’s Finest Programer aka The ELK, and within no time they had it ready for me to market... This was a nice change. Other than marketing the site and negotiating the sale I had very little to do with it. Tigh also was a huge reason for the incredible success of the ShoeMoney System. He managed our graphics, video, and the overall design of the content. I just made kickass videos and marketed it. Even thought Tigh is 10 years younger than me he is years beyond me in maturity and wisdom. He taught me how to manage employees (without throwing things and freaking out). He was almost like a mentor too in my personal and business life. I am not sure what Tigh wants to do going forward. I know he needs a break from the internet marketing/ affiliate world =P. He might roam the world like Kane for a bit... But it would not surprise me at all if he landed an executive level job with a firm. Either way I would happily endorse him. But if you have met him you already know what a talent he is. He will be missed.