October 18, 2022 - The Chicago Journal

From Not Knowing Sales to Running Multiple 7-figure Businesses – The Incredible Journey of Michael Borgelt

The Chicago Journal Staff on October 18, 2022

The term 7-figure business might seem far from reality for many, but dreams do come true. Every now and then, we come across many entrepreneurs who have made it big; however, reaching a million-dollar mark still seems unachievable. When we talk about a 7-figure business, it is not as daunting as it sounds. In fact, it is something that helps set clear boundaries for your goals. Achieving a million-dollar benchmark doesn’t mean putting a full stop to your objectives, but the actual art is basking in the glory of success and yet striving for more. After all, why settle for less when the sky is the limit?

With success, you tend to learn when to make the right decisions, with or without emotions. Michael Borgelt, the founder of two successful million-dollar businesses, is living proof for those who aspire to do the same. According to Michael, there is no end to what you can achieve in your lifetime, so moving forward is the only way to go. “I take a few moments to look around and admire the amazing things that have happened so far, but I always tell myself that I haven’t come this far, just to come this far,” he shares.

Born and raised in Hastings, Minnesota and attended St. Thomas University, where he played basketball and graduated with a degree in Computer Science and a minor in Business Marketing. His first job after college was as a database administrator and a classic ASP (Active Server Pages) programmer. Michael then switched his field and transitioned to marketing. He claims that “he fell in love with SEO” after successfully ranking a website #1 on Google for the term ‘mortgage .’He went on to add, “SEO is a perfect mix between my computer science and marketing background, and I love both, so it’s a great fit.” Besides this, he pursued a basketball officiating career, and in the span of four years, he was referred to as D1 – the highest level of intercollegiate athletics sanctioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the US. It was in 2009, after nine years of basketball, that he was referred to the NBA during the strike season.

Though his basketball officiating journey was quite a successful one, Michael decided to end his career and focus on establishing his own startup. After a lot of effort, his agency 51Blocks was founded in 2009 with the aim of educating everyone about SEO Marketing. There were a few unfortunate setbacks initially, but eventually, 51Blocks rose to success and has assisted hundreds of agencies and thousands of clients until now. However, Michael wanted to achieve more. A visionary, he never knows when to stop and hence in 2021, he started another company called BionicWP, which focused on Managed WordPress hosting. Both his businesses provide the best of services along with unbounded customer satisfaction, and that is what distinguishes them from rival companies in the market. In fact, he has worked with some of the best digital marketing agencies in the industry, including Carsdirect.com, Burger King, Old Navy, American Express, Microsoft, Century Communities and the University of Colorado.

Michael Borgelt’s love for website speed and hosting was the reason behind establishing BionicWP. He is filling the gaps in the market by providing agency-level services to the hosting world. Talking about his second venture, the entrepreneur reveals, “At BionicWP, we believe that saying things like ‘Go talk to your Developer’ is a curse phrase. We really try and fix any issue that exists on a website. If we can’t fix it, we will at least point our clients in the right direction, which involves highlighting the exact line of code causing the issue.” Moreover, the company manually updates the core, theme, and plugins, while other companies in the industry just put it on auto-updates, often resulting in errors. “We also offer unlimited edits and handle all sorts of issues for you, even the ones under your brand in a white-label fashion,” he elaborates.

The main focus of BionicWP is to pace website optimization as they realize that every client wishes to speed up their website and deliver optimum results on the Google PageSpeed Insights tool. Therefore, the company also provides KPI services, allowing you to focus on the current trends related to your business. The team of experts at BionicWP values their customers and provides the best possible solutions for their problems. On the other hand, 51Blocks, the white label digital marketing company, guarantees 25 to 40% organic lead growth, whereas BionicWP, Managed WordPress hosting, offers the best packages costing around $25.90 per month. Michael shares, “I have helped grow a business outside of the digital marketing world reach from $0 to $9 million in just three years and eventually sold it for $ 11 million.”

Michael Borgelt always encourages and educates other companies to follow in his footsteps to avoid all sorts of misfortunes he faced and even sheds light upon the path of successfully leading two 7-figure businesses. “Be ready for the biggest rollercoaster ride of your life. I have found that the highs are never as high as the lows. But I say it is better to find a mentor who can guide you, read a lot of guides from the top experts in this space and be ok with not knowing it all. Because many people are more than willing to help you avoid those pitfalls,” he concludes.

The Importance of Digitizing Documents in Today’s World

The Chicago Journal Staff on October 18, 2022

Society is changing, and so is our environment and the reality that we live in. All of these elements are part of the reasons why digitizing documents in 2022 should be something that everybody does in order to protect themselves, their family, their business and their belongings. As we will show below, modernizing the way we handle our paper trail is of utmost importance to each of us but also to society as a whole.

Saving Document on PDF Smart: Great Protection in Case of Natural Disasters

It has been a long time since we have been taking from the earth. Most importantly, we have been a major pollution factor, filling our oceans, our lands, and even the air with chemicals. Scientists warned us that we would find ourselves with natural issues in the future if we did not change the way we consume. The ozone layer disappearing was a major warning in itself. Still, we continued almost as if everything was perfectly fine. And now, we have to face the backlash of extremely warm weather causing forest fires and raising the level of other natural disasters, such as hurricanes, thanks to warmer temperatures of water.

When one of those happens where we live, we can end up losing everything we have in the house or at the office. That is the first reason why we need to transfer our paper documents into a digitized version. The best way is to scan them and save them in a PDF format. That includes our legal identity documents, such as our birth certificate, ID card and passport, as well as pictures and receipts of our belongings, so that we can easily make a claim to our insurance company. By placing these documents on a PDF file, you can easily modify them as you acquire new objects simply by using a PDF editor. If you need to add text documents, PDF Smart will enable you to make a format change, and you can do file modifications whenever you need to in the future to keep everything up-to-date.

Digitizing Documents makes Work Easier for Everyone

It is surprising how much paperwork still exists in the world of business. Contracts that are still in physical forms, when you can actually sign them digitally, these days, totally legally. The problem is that paper takes up a lot of space, which the company needs to pay for uselessly. If you digitize all the documents that you have on file, not only will you save on rental space, but you will also make it much more secure this way. That is because you can protect your documents through a variety of ways once they are scanned by keeping them locked away from those who would like to spy on you.

Once documents are digitized, you can have access to them through a click of a mouse. That is definitely a whole lot faster than having to go through a filing cabinet. Especially when the file hasn’t been stored in the right place, and you need to go through a bunch of them before you finally get your hands on it. It also makes it easier to share the file with all the departments. By having the PDF documents on the server, everyone can pick it up, modify the document with PDF Smart and save it again where it belongs in a matter of seconds. We are, indeed, a long way away from the time when you had to pay an employee just to gather up the paper files.

It also helps in case the company ever gets audited. Whereas before, the persons having to do the audit had to go through all the cabinets in order to find what they were looking for, spending a lot of time inside your office and disturbing the work of employees, now you can just give them access to the digitized files. You can even do so from afar by giving them access to your servers or by opening a door for them on The Cloud service that you use to store these documents.

It is obvious that transferring all of our documents, whether personal or related to our business, into PDF files, will make our life better in so many ways. And it will be much easier to modify them, thanks to PDF Smart.