About

Hey, how goes it? My name is Trevor Mauch and I’m a 25 year old entrepreneur and owner of businesses both online and off… in industries from marketing to real estate investing. I’m a life long Oregonian and have called Portland (actually… Lake Oswego for the past year or so) home for the past couple years.

Nope, I don’t proclaim to be this “all knowing” entrepreneurship and marketing god, but I would say I know a thing or two about internet marketing, social media, and building successful businesses… and most important… having fun living life.

We all like stories… don’t we? Well, here’s my story…

I think I’m a lot like you… and have had a bit of entrepreneurial and competitive passion most of my life. My brothers and I were “those kids” that sold lemonade (the fake stuff even! That powder lemonade sold like hotcakes!) in front of our dad’s construction equipment rental business in Southern Oregon.

As a kid, I was always on the look out for new ways to bring in a buck or two to stash away in my savings account for a rainy day.

From playing school mates at pool for money in Junior high (had a few $200 games… luckily won them all)… to doing full on landscaping jobs bringing in $4k in 3 days one time (man 14 hour days… and I hired an employee to help me out… way too much work)… I’ve tried my hand at a lot of entrepreneurial ventures.

What the heck do I want to do with my life???…

Going to college was something I knew I was going to do… but I really didn’t know what the heck I wanted to do once I got there. Here’s a little progression of what I’ve wanted to be over the years:

Grade School - Professional Baseball Player like my dad (didn’t happen)
High School - Orthopedic Surgeon (I know… what was I thinking??)
- Update: took a Health Occupations class and almost fainted watching a procedure in the emergency room… that day on being a surgeon didn’t all that enticing.
College - Well…
- Freshman: No clue
- Sophomore: Something w/ business and real estate investing
- Junior: Real estate and business attorney (once again, what was I thinking??)
- Senior: Started to really love marketing… and got more in tune w/ my entrepreneurship core… and I bought my first 4 unit apartment building w/ no money down… it really is possible… but not that easy

So… I ended up graduating college w/ degrees in Marketing and Entrepreneurship… and knew only 1 thing…

I ABSOLUTELY LOVED MARKETING… AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP WOULD ALWAYS BE A PART OF MY LIFE!

My First Official Business Venture…

I started my first “real” business back when I was in college. In my junior year of college I finally bought my first multi-unit property, a 4 plex that I still own today. Several months after I bought the property my dad talked me into starting an LLC to hold the property to take a bit of the risk off my shoulders… which was an excellent decision.

Really, buying this property and going through the process of starting a business taught me way more than I ever thought it would.

My First Online Experience

I really can’t trace back my first online experience to one time and place… I think it was in the mid 90’s dinking around with AOL. But, in college I took a class called “Marketing on the Internet”.

Knowing what I know now… this class was a pile of crap… but it was really a jumping off point and introduced me to the business side of the internet… and the possibilities there are to create solid businesses on the net.

The year that I graduated is really when I started to explore making money on the internet.

I was tired of buying textbooks from the school library for $124.82 (yep, I paid that for a damn book once), and selling them back to them 3 months later for $45. What a racket.

So, I found a little site called half.com (owned by ebay) and started to list my textbooks on there for sale. It didn’t take me too long to realize that I could sell my book on half.com for 2-3 times as much as the school book store would buy them for. Then, I started selling books on half.com for other people too as a favor… didn’t make a dime from those sales though… but I learned a lot about writing persuasive ads and pricing.

While this was cool… I still hadn’t figured out internet marketing and had no clue how I could build a business on the internet.

Ahh… the World of SEO, Internet Marketing, and Building Websites

First off, I don’t proclaim to be a web designer… and actually hate to design websites… I’m more of an idea, traffic, and conversion guy. But, I built my first website for my dad’s construction equipment rental company right after I graduated college. Starting off… this website was meant to be just a way for local people to find the business online.

Within a couple months this website began to rank very well in search engines for weird but highly targeted keyword phrases that draw in new customers from all over the U.S. and added a completely new income stream for my fathers business.

“Man… this is great stuff”, I remember thinking.

Then, I moved up to Portland and took a marketing job at a mortgage company working as an outside contractor (technically self-employed… but didn’t feel like it quite yet). Biz was slow… and I started messing with their website to try to get some visitors to the site… and hopefully some loans.

After studying and implementing every SEO strategy I could find, the site slowly began to get visitors… doubled… tripled… then people started emailing and calling asking about home loans. Soon enough… there were months when the majority of new business was coming right from the website.

Hmmm… there’s something to this internet marketing thing…

Then My Entrepreneurial ADD Got A Hold Of Me

It didn’t take me too long to realize that I was on to something w/ the whole SEO and internet marketing thing. While still marketing for the mortgage company on monthly retainer, I brought on another client on the side and did work for them on nights and weekends building their new website and optimizing their old site that they had spent thousands on and received absolutely no results.

The results?

The new website I created for them (pretty ugly site… but very effective) has ranked #1 for their top keywords in Google and Yahoo for over a year now and generates a steady stream of calls each and every week.

The old website of theirs already had a great presence on the net… but it didn’t produce even 1 call over the several years it was working. So, within a few months after taking over and revamping the site for SEO and conversion… this site now ranks at the top for many of their top keywords and has produced a steady stream of calls ever since the changes were made.

This consulting gig led me to part ways with the mortgage company and take on a Vice President of Marketing position at Settlement Professionals Inc. in Portland; a national company with 13 offices around the U.S..

Taking a Risk and Going Out On A Limb…

It was pretty cool getting these results for other people… but if I could replicate these results for a business of my own… that would be really cool!

So, in late 2006 I started my first website called The REI Brain (a real estate investing portal). This site started off as a place to put unbiased resources about real estate investing for new investors… and to write about my personal experiences in real estate.

After about a year of messing around with this site… traffic picked up to several hundred people a day and really turned into an SEO and conversion laboratory for me to test new strategies before I use them on my clients websites.

This one website has turned into a small network of websites that I own and operate myself and use as testing grounds for internet marketing and SEO strategies… and to generate a passive income for my newest business venture Mach One Media Marketing, Inc., my internet marketing consulting firm based here in Portland, Oregon.

Whew… That’s the 30 second Cliff Notes Version of My Life

I just read through my story above… and realized that I didn’t tell you a thing about me as a person.

Here we go…

I’m the middle brother of 3 and love sports… especially baseball and golf (on the links any chance I get). My beautiful wife Carly is just getting ready to graduate from the Physicians Assistant graduate program and will be a great PA once she gets out.

Passions?

Traveling, golf, marketing, entrepreneurship, making new friends in real life (and in the social media world online), trying to figure out what makes people tick… and having a great time in life.