How Jacob and Thomas Actually Split the Work at Hillcane
Updated: Oct 6
People sometimes assume a two-person company just means one person does half the work and the other does the other half, split down some clean, arbitrary line. That's not really how it works here. So instead of describing our roles the way a company page usually does, two headshots, two vague job titles, this post describes how a real project actually moves between Jacob and me, because that's the part that's actually useful to understand.
The short version is that my half is the technical and structural work, and Jacob's half is making sure a café's real voice and story survive the trip into that structure. But the more accurate version, the one this post is about, is how those two halves hand off to each other on a real project, not just what each of us does in isolation.
My half of the work
My part covers the audit, the schema, the Google Business Profile setup, and the location-page architecture, the technical and structural layer this whole company exists to fix. When we run See on a café's site, I'm the one going through the title tags, checking whether real structured data exists, opening the Google Business Profile and checking its categories and hours, and looking at the crawl hygiene underneath the visible page.
This is the part of the work that's mostly invisible to a customer and, frankly, invisible to a lot of café owners too until someone points it out. It's not glamorous, nobody's ever gotten excited about a corrected canonical tag, but it's the layer that determines whether a search engine can understand what a café is and where it is, which is the entire foundation everything else in this company is built on top of.
Jacob's half of the work
Jacob's part is making sure the café's own voice, story, and craft come through accurately once my structural work gives it somewhere to land. That's the About page copy, the way a shop's sourcing and roasting story gets described, whether the language on a new location page sounds like it was written by someone who's spent time in that space or like a generic template with a city name dropped in.
He's spent years visiting coffee shops across the country, which means he has a working sense of the vocabulary regulars use, the difference between a roaster-café and a pour-over bar, the kind of detail that makes a description feel true rather than generic. That's the thing he checks for on every page before it goes live: does this sound like the real place, or does it sound like it could belong to any café in any city.
How a project moves between us
In practice, a project doesn't split cleanly into "my half" and "his half" running in parallel, it moves back and forth. I usually find the structural gaps first, because See is where every project starts: what's missing in the schema, what the Business Profile says, whether the site has any location-specific language at all. That gives us a concrete, specific list of what's broken, rather than a guess.
Then, once Fix has corrected the foundation and it's time to Build something new, a location page, a neighborhood page, Jacob is the one making sure whatever gets written there sounds like the actual café, not a corporate rewrite of a form field. I can tell you exactly what structured data a page needs. He makes sure the sentences around that structure sound like they came from someone who's been in the room.
That back-and-forth is really the whole model. I don't write café-voice copy, because I'm not the person who's spent years listening to how regulars talk about their favorite shop. Jacob doesn't touch schema markup, because it's not where his expertise or his interest lives. Neither of us pretends to be equally good at both halves, we built this company specifically because neither of us wanted to.
Why neither of us works alone
Jacob puts it plainly: a café site that's technically flawless but reads like it was written by an algorithm still fails at the actual job of a website, which is making a stranger want to walk through the door. Correct schema doesn't make someone care about a shop's sourcing story, it just makes sure the right person finds the page in the first place. Both halves have to be right for the whole thing to work.
The reverse is just as true. A beautifully written, genuinely warm description of a café's story does nothing for that café's visibility if the page it's sitting on has no schema, a broken canonical tag, and a Google Business Profile nobody's touched in two years. Great writing on a structurally invisible page is still invisible. That's really the whole reason Hillcane exists as a two-person partnership instead of either of us trying to do this alone, the actual problem this company solves has always had two distinct halves, and most agencies we've seen only ever really focus on one.
What this looks like on a real project, start to finish
Concretely, here's the shape of it. See happens first, and it's mostly my work, going through the site and profile methodically, cataloging exactly what's missing or wrong. I bring those findings to Jacob, not as a technical report he has to decode, but as a plain description of what we found and what it means for the café.
From there, Fix starts, which is still mostly my work, correcting the schema, the titles, the crawl hygiene, the profile details. Jacob gets involved wherever the fix touches actual language, since a corrected title tag or a rewritten meta description still has to sound like the café, not like a keyword inserted for search purposes. That's a smaller part of Fix, but it's real, and he checks every piece of language that changes.
Then Build is where the balance flips the other way, Jacob's doing most of the actual writing for location and neighborhood pages, while I'm making sure every new page is correctly structured, correctly linked, and carrying its own accurate schema underneath the words he's written. Neither step is purely one of us working alone; it's just a matter of whose expertise is doing more of the heavy lifting at each stage.
This full cycle, See, then Fix, then Build, with both of us involved at different points along the way, usually plays out over real time, not in a single sitting. A café's first location page might take several rounds of this exact back-and-forth before either of us is satisfied it's both technically sound and genuinely true to the place. Neither of us signs off alone; a project isn't finished until both halves check out.
Why we're telling you this instead of just listing our titles
We could have written this post as two paragraphs, "Jacob does the coffee stuff, Thomas does the SEO stuff", and called it done. We didn't, because that description, while technically true, misses the actual reason this partnership works: it's not two people doing separate jobs under one company name, it's two specific kinds of expertise checking and completing each other on every single project.
If you want the deeper version of either half specifically, there are two companion posts to this one, "What a Coffee Guy Notices That an SEO Guy Never Would" and "What an SEO Guy Notices That a Coffee Guy Never Would", that go further into what each of us catches that the other one wouldn't. This post was meant to set up how the two halves fit together first, before either of those goes deeper into either side alone.
What it's like working this way day to day
In practice, this doesn't feel like handing a project back and forth on a rigid schedule, it's closer to a running conversation. I'll flag something I found in an audit, and Jacob will immediately have an opinion about whether the fix I'm proposing would read naturally on the page, not just whether it's technically correct. I do the same in reverse: if he drafts a neighborhood page that leans a little too flowery or vague, I'll point out that a sentence like that gives a search engine nothing concrete to work with, and we'll tighten it together.
That constant back-and-forth is slower, in a sense, than each of us just doing our own thing and merging the results at the end. It's also the reason the finished work holds up as well as it does, neither of us ships something the other hasn't at least glanced at, which catches the kind of mismatch that shows up when technical correctness and authentic voice aren't checked against each other along the way.
Why this division isn't just convenient, it's necessary
It would be easy to frame this split as simply a matter of preference, Jacob likes writing, I like structure, so that's how we divided it up. The real reason runs deeper than preference. Genuinely good technical SEO work requires understanding search systems well enough to know what matters versus what's outdated advice repeated forever online. Genuinely good café copy requires having spent real time in these spaces, understanding what makes one shop's story different from another's rather than defaulting to the same warm-sounding generic language every café website uses.
Neither of those skills develops as a side interest while doing the other one. I could learn enough about coffee culture to write serviceable copy, and Jacob could learn enough schema markup to make basic corrections, but "serviceable" and "basic" aren't the standard either of us wants attached to Hillcane's actual output. The partnership exists because doing both halves at the level we think a specialty café deserves takes two people who've each spent real time getting good at one specific thing.
What a client experiences
From an owner's side, most of this back-and-forth is invisible, and that's on purpose. A café doesn't need to know which of us drafted a particular sentence or which of us checked a particular line of code, what matters to them is a finished page that's both accurate and theirs. Where a client does see both of us directly is usually in the first conversation, where it's common for both halves of a question to come up in the same call: what's broken technically, and how does the fix keep sounding like the real place.
That's also why we don't split client communication strictly along the same lines as the work itself. An owner asking a purely technical question might still hear from Jacob if the answer touches how something reads on the page, and an owner asking about voice or story might hear from me if the answer touches how a page needs to be structured to work. The split described in this post is about who does the underlying work, not a rigid rule about who a client is allowed to talk to about what.
Related Reading
More from this Hillcane city series, plus the pages on the site that sit next to the work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Jacob ever do any of the technical SEO work himself?
Not typically, and that's by design rather than a limitation either of us is working around. Jacob's part of the work is language and voice, making sure copy sounds like the real café, while the technical schema, crawl hygiene, and Business Profile corrections stay Thomas's specific expertise. The two halves stay distinct on purpose, rather than either founder stretching thin into the other's specialty.
Does Thomas ever write café-facing copy directly?
Rarely, and never as his primary contribution to a project. Thomas's part focuses on the technical and structural layer, schema, titles, crawl hygiene, Business Profile hygiene, and page architecture. Whenever language actually needs writing or rewriting, Jacob is the one making sure it sounds like the specific, real café it's actually describing, not a generic insertion.
Which founder does a café talk to first?
It depends on what the conversation is mostly about, though a first conversation often touches both areas since most owners describe a mix of concerns without separating them cleanly. Whichever founder's expertise is doing more of the actual explaining in a given conversation typically takes the lead, with the other founder brought in exactly as the conversation requires.
Why does See usually come from Thomas's side rather than Jacob's?
Because See is fundamentally a technical audit, checking schema, titles, crawl hygiene, and Business Profile accuracy against what actually exists on the site, which sits squarely within Thomas's specific expertise. Jacob's involvement typically comes in right afterward, once the audit's findings touch actual language that genuinely needs to be rewritten, added, or reconsidered for voice.
Is one founder's contribution more important than the other's?
No, and treating it that way would fundamentally misunderstand how the company works day to day. A technically perfect page carrying generic, template-sounding copy fails just as badly at building real trust as a beautifully written page sitting on top of broken schema. Both halves have to hold up for the overall project to succeed.
How do Jacob and Thomas communicate during a project?
Through a genuine, repeated back-and-forth rather than a single clean handoff from one person to the other. Thomas identifies structural gaps first, Jacob shapes the language wherever a fix touches actual copy, and Thomas returns afterward to handle the technical architecture around whatever Jacob has helped shape. It moves in real cycles, sometimes more than once per project.
Could Hillcane function with just one of the two founders?
Not in its current form, and that's intentional rather than an accident of how the company happened to start. The business was deliberately built around two distinct, deep skill sets instead of one generalist attempting both. Removing either half would mean losing either the technical rigor or the authentic voice that together define what Hillcane delivers.
Do Jacob and Thomas ever disagree about how a project should go?
Sometimes, and that's an expected, healthy part of how two genuinely different areas of focus come together on real work. A technically ideal solution doesn't always read naturally in a café's own authentic voice on the very first pass, and working through that specific tension is a normal part of getting a project actually right.
Does this split apply to every single post in this blog cluster too?
Yes. Every one of these posts is written from one founder's specific voice depending on the topic, coffee-culture and identity topics from Jacob, search, technical, and company-first topics like this one from Thomas. Even a post about how the partnership itself works, like this one, stays in a single narrating voice; the other founder is quoted and described, not co-narrating.
Where can I read more about what each founder specifically notices?
Two deeper companion posts go further into each side of this specifically: one on what a coffee-culture eye catches that a purely technical audit would miss entirely, and one on what a technical eye catches that even a coffee-savvy person wouldn't think to check. This post is meant as the map; those two are the fuller, more detailed territory.
Work with Hillcane
It's not two job titles on one company page. Here's how a real project moves between a coffee guy and a search guy.
Want both halves of this done right on your café's site? Work with Hillcane, call (256) 384-2449 or start at hillcane.co/contact.
Reach out at hillcane.co or (256) 384-2449.
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