I joined Wotif Group in January 2014 and that same year it was acquired by Expedia Group for AU$703M. While I was nervous about what the future would hold with regards to possible/likely layoffs, I could see an opportunity ahead and it ultimately led me to joining Expedia Group.

I’d been working for Expedia Group for a little over three years and I was a Director of SEO responsible for Expedia, Wotif & Lastminute in Australia and New Zealand.

Expedia Group sends out an email each week listing all job openings and I saw two job listings for a Sr Director for SEO, one to lead brand Expedia and one to lead a collection of brands associated to Expedia that leveraged the same technology platform such as Orbitz, Travelocity, Wotif and several others around the world.

I remember speaking to Claire about these job listings at the time and I described them as the Mt Everest of jobs for someone in the organic search profession:

• eight different product categories (hotel/flight/package/etc)
• dozens of countries and languages
• huge footprint with millions of URLs in each
• underpinned by sophisticated product & technology capabilities
• generates an astonishing amount of revenue annually
• handful of ecommerce websites operate at this scale in the world

If I missed this opportunity, these jobs wouldn’t become vacant in the near future.

I knew that these roles would be advertised both internally/externally and would garner a lot of applications. Claire asked ‘what if I get it’ question and I said we’d cross that bridge down the road if we needed to cross it. Given the interest in these roles, there was no certainty that I’d get an interview, let alone be successful in getting one of the roles.

Claire commented that she knew I’d get it immediately, forever my biggest supporter <3

As it turns out, Claire was right and after a bunch of interviews I was offered one of the Sr Director roles in August 2017. That bridge that I couldn’t see on the horizon, yeah it was now firmly in view!

It took a few months for the US visa for myself and family to be processed but it came through in November. I relocated at the beginning of January 2018, with Claire and the kids coming in June/July once the US school year had ended.

While moving to the US was completely unplanned, it did turn out to be an incredible opportunity which I’m eternally grateful to Claire, Hugo & Evie for enabling.

If you see a great opportunity, give it a rip – something amazing might happen!

This post is about taking advantage of an opportunity and how I ended up joining Expedia Group leading to a career spanning over 12 years.

I’d been working at Mantra Group on the Gold Coast for over nine years, really enjoyed the work, having a lot of success growing revenue for them with interesting projects and working with some great people.

I’m at squash, waiting for my next match and have the discussion referenced above about opportunity. After returning home that night from squash, I tell Claire about this discussion regarding (missed) opportunity and said that the next time an opportunity presents itself, I’m going to say yes.

The literal next day, I visit the largest job website in Australia and enter a search for SEO roles in the Gold Coast/Brisbane area. Foreshadowing, but on the very first page of the search results, I see a cool job with Wotif Group who were Australia’s largest online travel agent.

True to my word, it looked like a good opportunity and I was going to apply.

After writing a fresh resume, I sent it to a good friend Dan Petrovic who owns an amazing marketing agency for review. My ask to him, would you at least schedule me for an interview. It turns out, my first and second draft weren’t good enough. I submitted my third revision and rolled the dice.

I got an interview and ultimately got that job, I’m now a Sr Manager for SEO at Wotif Group.

Fast forward to later that year and Expedia Group acquires Wotif Group for AU$703M. I’m worried about what the future might hold, it is common place for the acquiring company to execute layoffs* following a merger or acquisition.

Not wanting to get caught out by that, I started applying for a new job and had six interviews lined up. At the same time, I was asked to fly to the USA and be part of a project team to help integrate Wotif Group into Expedia Group.

I remember having a discussion with Claire and saying to her, I think I need to say yes again. I didn’t know what the future might hold, but felt like there could be upside on the other side of that decision.

True to my word, I said yes, cancelled the interviews and flew to the USA. While I was in the USA, I was called to a meeting with HR and offered an Expedia Group employment contract.

If I’d never had that discussion at squash, never started re-evaluating opportunity, I’d have never made it to Wotif Group, which would have meant I’d never have made it to Expedia Group.

Without a shadow of doubt, that discussion changed my life.

* My concern about layoffs was well placed, Expedia Group executed layoffs three months later.

After over 12 years with Expedia Group, it is time to board a flight to somewhere new.

When I joined Wotif Group in January 2014, I couldn’t have imagined what the future would hold and if you’d have said I’d move to the other side of the world, I’d never have believed you.

Joining Wotif Group was an incredible experience, the company was publicly listed under the ASX symbol WTF (still amazing to this day!) and generated over AU$1b in revenue. In my role as a Senior Manager for SEO, I was leading a team of search engine optimization specialists, working closely with Product and Engineering on capabilities we needed to win.

In November 2014, Expedia Group acquired Wotif Group for AU$703M. Immediately after the acquisition, I was asked to be involved in a major cross-company integration project and I flew to the USA for the first time on Thanksgiving weekend.

The image below is a quick demonstration of what a large enterprise can do when it focuses on a big hairy audacious goal. About 25 people from Wotif Group flew to the US, to meet with about 75 people from Expedia Group. If you were in this meeting, it wasn’t because of seniority – it was because you were the knowledge owner for a key area of the business on either sides of the fence.

We were about to complete the Wotif Group inception or Project Tim Tam (iykyk). Over the following four and a half days, the group planned the complete re-platforming of Wotif Group onto the Expedia Group infrastructure. The wall was broken into weeks with electrical tape, filled with hundreds of sticky notes, an enormous amount of work took place by a lot of teams and 14 weeks later, the power was unplugged to all of the systems powering a 20 year old AU$1b+ OTA business.

This was some of the most amazing cross business, cross org, cross team collaborations and aggressive demonstrations of bias to action ever. If this project was taken to a large integrator, you’d get back a multi-year timeline and $100M price tag.

My role continued in leading SEO for the Wotif Group websites and in March 2016, I was promoted to Director and my remit expanded to include the Expedia ANZ websites.

Fast forward to 2017 and Expedia Group were advertising two Senior Director roles for SEO, one to run the Expedia brand and another to run all of the other brands that were multi-line of business such as Orbitz, Travelocity, Cheaptickets and of course Wotif etc. I applied for both and was super excited to be offered the second in late August. This is what triggered our relocation to Seattle. Since that time, my remit expanded to include all of the Expedia Group retail business.

Without question, we’ve run one of the largest, most sophisticated SEO programs in the world. We migrated hundreds of websites across several platforms, completed brand migrations, built truly bleeding edge technology to help scale our SEO business, fought back from countless performance problems as Google continued to change the algorithm and generated a truly astonishing amount of revenue and profit.

It really has been a honor to work for Expedia Group over the last 12 years. I’ve had the pleasure of working with brilliant colleagues, solved a lot of very complex problems and been fortunate to travel to a lot of great places around the world.

I’ll forever be cheering for Expedia Group from the sidelines.