A 28-year-old Langley man has been named in BC Business magazine’s 30 Under 30 award for his work building a company that started as a side project while he was a teenage lifeguard.
Keenan Beavis runs Longhouse Media, a digital marketing company based in his hometown.
As a child, he attended Blacklock and Murrayville Elementary, then HD Stafford and Langley Secondary. He was a lifeguard at the Al Anderson Memorial Pool when he was in college.
“I’ve stayed in Langley ever since,” he said.
The company goes back to its roots when I was a kid who was fascinated with YouTube.
Beavis had a YouTube channel in high school, and he said many of the videos he posted were typical and somewhat embarrassing things: lip-syncing, doing parody songs, jumping on a trampoline.
But Beavis researched how some YouTube videos got a lot of views, while others only got a few.
“I had a lot of time on my hands, and I spent all that time figuring out YouTube’s search algorithm,” he said.
He put it to work and soon his videos of acrobatics on the trampoline had more views than those of Olympic-level gymnasts.
To make more money, he sold some merchandise, including t-shirts, and that led to another business: selling minimalist design t-shirts for various fandoms, including Pokemon and Game of Thrones.
From selling the t-shirts, he learned more about search engine optimization (SEO), the tactics to make sure people searching for something like “Pokemon t-shirt” can find your design, not the dozens or hundreds more available online.
With all that experience getting attention online, Beavis’ first campaign wasn’t someone he was looking for as a client. He was a student at a local jiu-jitsu school with a great teacher, but attendance dropped. Beavis helped the school with an online campaign and the number of students doubled.
He just wanted more people to deliver, but then Beavis said he realized he could do digital marketing as a service.
He founded a company, which grew to become Longhouse Media, named after his Métis heritage. It helps businesses to increase their sales through online marketing.
Based in Murrayville, Beavis said there are advantages to starting a digital media business in Langley.
“It’s harder for people to live in Vancouver,” he notes, not to mention the lower cost of office space.
And with customers coming from all over North America, a significant portion of their business lately is with Texas companies, no matter where a company like yours is located.
“There’s really no geographic bottleneck where we can grow,” Beavis said.
The company will grow slowly but steadily, Beavis said, as it is looking to make one or two more hires in the near future.
That’s something being here also makes easier, with graduates from schools like UFV and Kwantlen Polytechnic nearby.
“I love growing up around Langley,” Beavis said.
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Business Langley
Keenan Beavis, foreground, at 28 is one of Business BC’s 30 under 30 honorees for the success of Longhouse Media. (Longhouse Media/Special to Langley Advance Times)
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