Big Dog Performance - Alberta Canada

Results for Big Dog Performance


Website:	Created search engine friendly website templates

SEO:	Local search optimization for their main product line

Impact:	Felt on the other side of the world

In This Article

Thank You

This project was started on the basis that Big Dog Performance would receive business benefit and ROI for the advancement of their website and so that something special can be passed along to perfect strangers, seven time zones away for a better life.

Big thanks go out to Richard Thomas and Big Dog Performance in Alberta Canada for being on board - thank you for being a part of a miracle.

The Big Dog Performance Story

Richard Thomas and I met just one week before the 2007 SCORE International Baja 1000, he was the leader of a Canadian Class 8 team that we were going to spend the next week with in Mexico. I had been working with Carli Suspension on a number of projects and finally it was time to go racing. The impact that was brought to Carli Suspension was an attention getter in the industry and Richard is a premier distributor for Carli's product line in Alberta Canada. Naturally these two were going to connect.

Timing had everything to do with this small project. To backfill some information, I have a friend from Togo, Africa who is a security guard in Downtown Los Angeles that plays an important role helping me maintaining a healthy ethical horizon. Here's a brief story on a real life hero. Yao spends every night keeping watch on the Higgins Building in LA making less than half of a mortgage payment in monthly wages. He has a family, including a daughter that he's never met, living in their village back in Togo. Yao sends every cent home to take care of his family and at the time I met Yao, he was renting floor space in a studio in the San Fernando Valley. After Yao was granted Asylum in the United States from political uproar in his home country, he was faced with being a resident of the US, speaking only French and his native language. Security work was about the only option as far as employment goes.

Yao learned English by studying a French / English dictionary, one word at a time. A year had passed and Yao became important to me and several events had taken place building up to this project with Big Dog Performance. New residents of the US are quickly taken advantage of and Yao found himself locked into a credit contract and the owner of a home surround sound system. Not having a home, or a television for that matter, wasn't enough for the aggressive sales person at Curacao in Downtown LA and Yao was simply taken advantage of. Once I understood what had happened, I collected everything from the store that was purchased on credit, did some research and finally met with the manager at the retail store to receive a full refund and cancellation of the credit contract. The next progression was to teach Yao how to drive, an exhilarating experience and if you ever have the chance to let a 35 year old man that has never sat in the driver's seat of a vehicle before, cannot read English and hardly understands it, drive your vehicle through Van Nuys - I highly recommend it, turns out that the event lead to incredible life changes.

I learned that Yao took busses and Metro trains to work every day, which was a two-hour stint after working 10 hours at odd times. Metro employees went on strike for three months, practically crippling Yao's ability to live, let alone provide for thirteen family members in his village. Yao had a place to sleep, laundry, food and only a walk down stairs to work for a while and sometimes a ride to and from. Yao took it upon himself to learn how to drive through professional training, maybe the Van Nuys hot lap was too much stimulation and he needed a more progressive format - nevertheless I was as committed to Yao's development as he was. Three months later Yao completed his training and was licensed, so now he just needed a vehicle. I took it upon myself to organize a fund event and told parts of Yao's story to enough people to assemble a loft party. The proceeds were in excess of $4,000 and enough to purchase a 1999 Nissan Altima. The new commute time is 40 minutes one way in moderate traffic.

You can't live and drive in Los Angeles without a cell phone, so that was the next piece of putting more air under Yao's wings. I moved from Downtown several years ago and find myself standing in the lobby of the building keeping a close ear on how things are going and Yao is just as interested and caring about my life. Our bi-weekly visits for coffee and updates had been pretty normal and Yao had informed me that he was starting a family business back home in Togo.

Money is a matter of life and death in small African countries. Hospitals cannot afford to treat patients who need attention, unless they have money. Yao's family was growing, his brothers got married, started families and Yao is on the hook for everything that came up. Being from a village in Togo and having a family member in America with a job, regardless if it was minimum wage or not, is like having a rich uncle in Beverly Hills. If your sister was sick and had to see a doctor, who would you call? Right. Yao spent his years trying to save some money and just couldn't pull it off. Every time he had $200 of disposable income, somebody got sick, had a baby or was of the age to start school. Yao could barely sustain the family he left, and it keeps growing. A solution was born from a real entrepreneur.

Yao sent his two oldest brothers to university in Lome, the capital of Togo, who graduated with CPA degrees. Two of his sisters went to the same university for business management. Yao started a second job working even odder hours in order to fund the business. He was building a retail store and communications outlet right there in his village. People had to get rides to the capital to purchase goods and that meant standing on a bus, or in the back of a truck for hours, both ways. Yao's plan was to send back several thousand dollars so that the store can be constructed, inventory purchased and bring in a phone, fax and Internet connection. Yao's plan lasted two weeks before he wound up getting a cat scan from sleep deprivation. I heard about this, immediately told Yao to quit his job and let me figure it out. The next day, the phone rang and it was Richard who wanted a little help with his website. I told him that it was his lucky day.

Changing Lives

For the exact amount that Yao's family needed, we put together a project to get his website out of flash and onto an optimized text-based platform that search engines can read - a first step. Richard was excited to be a part of something so unique and patiently waited for his work to be completed and sent a check in US funds to my office. The next day the check was in Yao's hands and a day after that, it was wired to his family in Togo via Western Union.

Shown to the left is Mrs. Bate Yao (right), his sister (left) and daughter (middle) who will all work at the store, have jobs and a family income. His sister has graduated with a business management degree from the university in Lome and will be an active manager of the retail business.

Yao has two brothers that graduated with CPA degrees from university and will manage the finances of the business and help run the store. The ability to earn an income living in a remote village in Togo is rare. Having graduated business and finance programs at the capital's university and have a retail business under construction is a miracle.

Yao's sister shown in this picture is a few days post op after having surgery. Life is everything but safe in that world, she withheld telling her family that she was ill only because she knew that there wasn't money to pay a doctor for treatment. Her condition worsened and finally she was in a compromising position.

It's a very difficult call to take, not to mention the fact that Yao's financial situation here in the US would only cover if something else dropped, rent, health insurance, fuel, food... something. She was taken care of and had a procedure and is just fine. Life and death is a reality every day and the matter of a few hundred bucks can mean walking away from a trip to the hospital, or not. She'll be working at the store and earning enough money that any future medical needs will be easily handled through the family's income.

Yao has a wife and daughter back home that he talks to twice a week and received pictures from periodically. She'll be part of the family business and will grow up in a blessed family and experience a different comfort than her peers. This includes Yao's mom (below) and another sister (right), every day Yao's brain churns over the safety of his family and has lived a commitment to them with each passing day. With just a little assistance from my close community of off-road racers, the small business community and good intentions, the plan that Yao created was realized.

Cooperation and Community

If we never slow down and think about how our choices and actions can create a better world, it won't happen. Being accountable for the world we live in and demonstrating the acts that would make it better, is a part of life here. An entire family has the opportunity to pass this on half way around the world.

Yao, pictured to the right, is now the consigliere at the Higgins Building and can't believe that help of this magnitude made it to him and his family.

I am grateful for Yao teaching me about life and am glad that I can be here for him in this capacity.

Brad Holland
Lead Consultant
Organic Visibility, LLC