Lisa Wehr & One Up Web

Nov. 21, 2007

After 10 years spent in the Alaskan wilderness with sled dog teams, Lisa Wehr could take anything that huskies, surly mushers, and white-out blizzards could dish out. She’d laugh about her near-misses with death and give it right back to the guys racing against her on the trail. Adrenaline was her addiction of choice. But at the age of 34, she was expecting a baby, and knew she had to come up with a different way to make a living. Improbably, she decided she would design websites. And that was the genesis of Oneupweb, now one of Traverse City’s fastest growing businesses.
Wehr herself is frequently quoted in business/technology magazines, yet Oneupweb has maintained a pretty low profile in Traverse City. Her story is fascinating, and so is the work of Oneupweb.
Wehr’s zigzag professional life began with a “storybook” childhood. She grew up in Florida and spent summers in Ohio, staying on the farms of her two sets of grandparents. She thinks her strong work ethic came from getting up at 5 in the morning, milking cows, baling hay, and delivering the occasional calf.
In high school, she set up a car detailing business to help pay for college, where she majored in commercial advertising photography. After she graduated, she joined the Charlotte County sheriff’s department and worked as a forensic photographer. She was soon promoted to deputy sheriff, and patrolled events.
Her life took another turn when her mom became interested in sled dogs and moved back to her hometown in Ohio. Wehr took an interest, too; she bought a couple of sled dogs and moved to Ohio in 1985 at the age of 23. She married Jeff, now her ex, and she raced dogs in Ohio and northern Michigan. That’s what brought her in 1987 to Fife Lake, a place where they’d have ample room to run her 15 huskies.

THE FIRST HARROWING MOMENT
In 1990, she and her husband went to Alaska to watch the Iditarod, the most competitive race of the dog sledding world. She fell in love with the idea of racing sled dogs, and before returning home, wrote a check as a down payment on a tiny home and lots of land. She borrowed and begged money to cover the check and a week later, she and Jeff loaded their 3/4-ton truck and trailer with their 28 dogs and headed off to Alaska.
The cross-country trip hinted at the hardships awaiting them in Alaska. In one instance, Wehr drove the truck and trailer, followed by her husband in their car. They made the steep climb up Steamboat Mountain in Canada. She pulled over at the peak of the hill to let the dogs out for a short run and meal. Unbeknownst to her, one of the dogs chewed the brake lines on the trailer.
As Wehr started back down the mountain, she quickly realized she had no trailer brakes. She screamed for help on the walkie talkie to Jeff. There was nothing, obviously, he could do, so she cut corners, screamed and pumped the truck’s brakes down the stretch.
“When I finally reached the bottom, I had to get out just so I could breathe.”
By the time they reached Willow, Jeff and Lisa had $20 in their pockets. He took a job busing tables. She worked at a deli, but not for long. Between shifts, she was on the phone getting sponsors for her dogsled team. Even though she had little experience, she persuaded several to sign up, including one who provided five tons of ground beef each year for the dogs.
Meanwhile, she began to build a team of dogs from 15 dogs to 60. The work of feeding, training, cleaning and sledding was back-breaking—“as bad as any farmer’s schedule. The dogs owned us,” Wehr said.
She said dogs are similar to Olympic athletes who require a strict diet, exercise, and medical care. Mushers today put their dogs on treadmills and often have a staff veterinarian.
The profession has its drawbacks. Wehr took no vacations for eight years. As one of the very few women mushers, she also had to put up with more ribbing than usual from the guys. And there were problems with sabotage on the race trail—someone throwing ground beef on the trail, for example, to tempt the dogs to stop. And, of course, the danger. “The first year, I fell into the river ice and that’s as close to death as I want to get.”
All that aside, Wehr lived for the experience of plunging into the Alaskan wilderness with a team of 16 dogs working in harmony. “There is nothing like it,” she said.

SUNRISE AND HOPE
The romance ended when Wehr took a wrong turn in a 1996 race late on a cool winter night. The trail markers had been wiped out, and she didn’t know which way to turn. The lead dog didn’t agree with her decision, but she forced her left where the river was covered with a foot of water. That’s not uncommon, Wehr explained. She presumed there was ice underneath the water, but she was wrong. Her eight dogs plunged into a hole, and Wehr was pulled in and on top of them. Wehr is tall and solidly built, but it was fear and adrenaline that allowed her to pull the dogs out quickly. As the dogs lay sodden in a pool of water, she realized she had neither dry clothing nor food for them or herself. And she had 30 miles until the end of the race with no hope of rescue. The next person was 100 miles behind me.”
Wehr tried to get the dogs to walk down the river with her. But they were dejected and refused to move. She and the lead dog heaved them up and dragged them down the river. “There was water on the surface, and I never knew if there was water or ice underneath. It was extremely stressful. After the panic, you just need to keep moving. You make a choice whether to give up or keep trying. I made the choice to live, and I didn’t think about anything except my next step.”
By the time she found the trail leading off the river, the sun was rising. Wehr dragged the dogs onto the bank, and talked to each one in a soft voice, showing them the sun, telling them they could do it. “I spent some time with them, I had to. They weren’t going anywhere, they were just utterly dejected, they had given up. But there is something hopeful about the sunrise. It gives you optimism. After our talk, we all got up and kept going—even the one dog that had broken her foot running. She walked the last 30 miles on three legs.”
Soon afterward, Wehr retired from dog sled racing and formed a touring company that took women out in the wilderness behind their “own” sled dog team.
It was 1995, and tour companies had just begun setting up websites, which gave her the idea for her new company.

BASICS TO BOOMING
In 1996, Wehr was living in Willow, a speck of a town that backed up to the 1,100 mile Iditarad trail. She had to trek to Anchorage to find a computer. The best she could buy was a basic 25 megahertz Packard Bell that she picked up at a Wal-Mart, along with the book HTML for Dummies. And just like that, she was in business.
She threw herself into it with the same gusto she had reserved for her beloved 60 huskies. Word of her new ambition and skill spread like wildfire, and soon Wehr was hiring people and working 15-hour days.
After three years, her business was booming with 350 clients and three employees (a full-time nanny helped pick up the workload at home). But she worried about her son, Collin. He was growing up in the wilds of Alaska with no culture, no nearby friends or family, and with little mom time. So she made exploratory trips to Traverse City, close to where her parents lived, and found some investors to help her with an “incubator” business that she initially called SoDoIt. The idea was Wehr would start web-based commercial businesses and sell them off to larger businesses.
Unfortunately, her timing was off. When she moved here in 2000, technology stocks were crashing and her investors abruptly pulled out. She decided to forge ahead without them. She borrowed $40,000 from her parents, and drastically narrowed the company’s mission: to help people get their websites noticed with what’s called “search marketing.”
Specifically, it is Wehr’s job to get the website of her client’s company to pop up when someone types in key words into a search engine like Google. Wehr and her early cadre of three employees would research the company and identify the key words that would most likely be used in a website search. They’d test the words against the hits, and try new words. The structure of the website would also be analyzed to make sure the search engine would pick up those key words.
If Wehr and her staff do their job right, the client’s company website shows up on the first of three pages of a Google search—either as an ad on the right-hand side (known as a sponsored listing) or within the body of the Google search itself. “If you don’t show up by page three, you don’t exist,” said Maureen Michaels, the public relations manager for Oneupweb.
Search marketing was a fairly new science in 2000 and Wehr was breaking the trail. She needed to quantify for clients the increase of visitors to the website and how those hits translated into sales. To do that, she and her staff wrote a program called ROI trax.

TELL IT LIKE IT IS
The company is now helping clients market in the Internet’s “social media.” It places banners in MySpace and Facebook based on the client’s demographics. They also help clients create podcasts and videos that explain a product or provide testimonials. In fact, there’s a shiny new broadcasting studio at the new Oneupweb office.
Wehr recently bought the Howard Energy building and moved her team of 46 employees into the two upper floors. The building was renovated in a 1940s deco style that makes you think of long cigarettes and jazz—silvery blues, curvy chairs, and lamps that ooze personality.
Wehr and nearly all her employees have views of the Grand Traverse Bay. As you walk in, Wehr’s three dogs—a Chihuahua, a Labrador mutt, and a collie - bound over to get petted. A blue and yellow parrot walks around on the top of its expansive cage in a corner, occasionally freaking out one of the bird-shy employees. Downstairs, during break time, employees get a snack in the company cafeteria and play games on the company’s pinball machines.
This is the fifth move for Oneupweb, which was previously headquartered in Lake Leelanau. Wehr said they’ve grown, in part, because their services are provided by “real people, not an automated program.”
The company’s growth has been mostly smooth, with a few bumps. On a personal level, Lisa split from her husband soon after moving to the Traverse City area. Her idea for search engine optimization was a little ahead of its time, and she had to borrow money for payroll a few times from her parents (she paid back everything before her dad passed away a couple of years ago).
Wehr describes herself as a tough, tell-it-like-it-is boss, and expects a lot from her employees, mostly young, some self-taught. She’ll let an employee know if he or she is lagging behind—and how to improve. She believes Oneupweb is only as good as the sum total of each employee’s performance and happiness.
On the other side of Wehr’s tough work ethic, is her droll sense of humor. She doesn’t mind poking fun of herself—especially useful when things get stressful.
Wehr says she’s in a good place now. There’s lots of room to grow, and she’s learned how to delegate. She can spend more time with her son, now 11. He hangs around the office after school, and Wehr waits until he goes to bed before she puts in the last few hours of a 14-hour day.
And for fun? Wehr has taken up driving muscle cars. She just never lost that adrenaline thing.