Message From Our President

I just can't believe it's been 19 years since I made that first phone call "Hi this is John Bauer with eGumball". That month and year was September 2007. Since then I have watched our core service platform - originally Google Local Business Center - rebrand four times. While the housing crisis, the pandemic, and endless Google updates forced most of our original competitors out of business, we are still standing here after nearly two decades.

I want to be direct about something, because our industry rarely is. Local search marketing has a deserved reputation problem. Business owners get cold calls from people implying they work for Google. They get guarantees nobody can honor. They sign agreements they cannot get out of, with agencies that hold their listing hostage on the way out. I have spent twenty years competing against that, and I have watched it cost good businesses real money.

We have made our own mistakes over two decades. What I can tell you is what we have chosen not to do. We do not guarantee positions, and our written terms say so. We do not claim a relationship with Google that gets you ranked faster, because no such relationship exists for anyone. We keep our clients as the owners of their own listings, so leaving us costs you nothing but a phone call.

Here is something I think about often, and almost nobody in this industry remembers. In April 2007, five months before I incorporated this company, Google launched 1-800-GOOG-411. It was free directory assistance. You called a toll-free number, said a city and a business type, and a computer read you the listings and connected the call. The listings it read out came from the same business data we were already working on in the Local Business Center.

Google shut Local Business Center down on November 12, 2010. It was never meant to be a business. Marissa Mayer, then a vice president at Google, said plainly at the time that the reason they built it was to collect enough recorded speech to train a speech-to-text model. Millions of people saying business names out loud into a phone was the training set. GOOG-411 became Voice Search, then Voice Actions, then eventually the assistant in everyone's pocket. Once Google had the phonemes it needed, the service was switched off.

I am not telling you that story as a warning. I am telling it because it is the same shape as what is happening right now. Business listing data was the raw material for Google's last interface change, and it is the raw material for this one. When someone asks an AI assistant for a plumber in their city today, the answer is assembled from profiles, citations, and reviews - the same substrate, feeding a new front end.

The lesson I took from 2007 to 2010 is simple and it has not changed. GOOG-411 could only find the businesses whose data was accurate. The ones with a wrong number or a stale address were invisible to it, and they were invisible for reasons that had nothing to do with how good they were at their jobs. That is exactly as true of an AI assistant in 2026 as it was of a phone line in 2008. The interface keeps changing. What it reads has not.

The other thing that changed is us. At our peak we had 450 employees doing by hand what software now does. Today we are a group of just over 100 specialists internationally, and the difference went into our prices rather than our margin. A plan that would have cost $600 a month a decade ago costs $289 today and does more. Shrinking a payroll is not usually something a company advertises. I do, because the alternative was to keep it and keep charging you for it.

I have spent my adult life fighting for small businesses, and this company has fed my family for twenty years. That is why I am still doing it rather than something easier.

Twenty years in, the work itself has not changed as much as people think. Get the business information right. Keep it right everywhere. Earn reviews honestly. Measure it properly. Tell the customer the truth about what is possible. Everything else is fashion.

Thank you to the clients who have been with us since the Local Business Center days, before Google Business Profile existed. You had other options every single year.

Best regards,
John Bauer
President, eGumball, Inc
Irvine, California