5 Ways to Spot Trends That Will Make You (and Your Business) More Successful I’ve recently started writing a column for The Magill Report, the new venture by Ken Magill, previously of Direct magazine and even more previously DMNews. Ken has been covering email for a long time and is one of the smartest journalists I know in this space. My column, which I share with my colleagues Jack Sinclair and George Bilbrey, covers how to approach the business of email marketing, thoughts on the future of email and other digital technologies, and more general articles on company-building in the online industry – all from the perspective of an entrepreneur. Below is a re-post of this week’s version, which I…
Category
Entrepreneurship
The UnEmployee
The UnEmployee We have a few people who I think of an UnEmployees. They are people who we have almost hired over the years (sometimes more than once), but never have, people who are in our industry and are friends of Return Path. Sometimes they are clients or partners, sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they have a token stock option grant as advisors, sometimes they don’t. In any case, these people have played an incredibly valuable role in our company’s development over the years. They are extra “eyes and ears” for us that have often served up valuable information before any of our regular employees heard things. They have made powerful connections for us with other companies in the industry. They…
Turn it up to Eleven!
Turn it up to Eleven! For some reason, I didn’t do this the very first year I started writing OnlyOnce, but on December 6 every year since then, I’ve marked the anniversary of Return Path‘s founding here. In the midst of an otherwise fantastic year, this hasn’t been a particularly good couple of weeks for us. We have been targeted by a company we’ve never heard of before for a lawsuit that angrily denounced our business, and while the suit doesn’t have a shred of merit, it will probably cost us an arm and leg to make it go away. And the recent phishing attack incident is a long way from being behind us as well. We’ll come through both…
Selling a Line of Business
Selling a Line of Business It’s been a couple of years since Return Path decided to focus on our deliverability business by divesting and spinning out our other legacy businesses. That link tells some of the story, and the rest is that subsequently, Authentic Response divested part of the Postmaster Direct business to Q Interactive. Those three transactions, plus a number of experiences over the years on the buy side of similar transactions (Bonded Sender, Habeas, NetCreations), plus my learnings from talking to a number of other CEOs who have done similar things over the years, form the basis of this post. The Authentic Response spin-out was also partially chronicled by Inc. Magazine in this article earlier this year. It’s…
Why I Love My Board
Why I Love My Board, Part II I’ve written a few things about my Board of Directors over the years, some of which I note below. Part I of this series isn’t particularly useful, though there’s an entertaining link in it to a video of Fred that’s worth looking at if you know or follow him. Today, we are happy to announce that we are adding a new independent director, Scott Petry, the founder of Postini and now a senior email product leader at Google (read the official press release [here]). Scott’s a fantastic addition to our already strong Board, and the process of recruiting and adding him has made me reflect a bit on my Board and its strengths…
What Does a CEO Do, Anyway?
What Does a CEO Do, Anyway? Fred has a great post up last week in his MBA Mondays series caled “What a CEO Does.” His three things (worth reading his whole post anyway) are set vision/strategy and communicate broadly, recruit/hire/retain top talent, and make sure there’s enough cash in the bank. It’s great advice. These three are core job responsibilities of any CEO, probably of any company, any size. I’d like to build on that premise by adding two other dimensions to the list. Fred was kind enough to offer me a “guest blogger” spot, so this post also appears today on his blog as well. First, three corollaries – one for each of the three responsibilities Fred outlines. Setting…
The Value (and Limitations) of Benchmarking
The Value (and Limitations) of Benchmarking I think I am starting to drive my team nuts a little bit. I have suggested, prodded, and executed a ton of external benchmarking projects this year, all of which have different leaders inside Return Path doing both systematic and ad hoc phone calls and meetings with peer companies and aspirational peer companies to understand how we compare to them in terms of specific metrics, practices, and structures. It’s some combination of the former management consultant in me rearing its head, and me just trying to make sure that we stay ahead of the curve as we rapidly scale our business this year. Why go through an exercise like this? One answer is that…
Getting Good Inc., Part II
Getting Good Inc., Part II It was a nice honor to be noted as one of America’s fastest growing companies as an Inc. 500 company two years in a row in 2006 and 2007 (one of them here), but it is an even nicer honor to be noted as one of the Top 20 small/medium sized businesses to work for in America by Winning Workplaces and Inc. Magazine. In addition to the award, we were featured in this month’s issue of Inc. with a specific article about transparency, and important element of our corporate culture, on p72 and online here. Why a nicer honor? Simply put, because we pride ourselves on being a great place to work — and we…
I Love My Job
I Love My Job The picture below is a picture of my dress shoes in my closet at home. You may note that they all have dust on them. That's because I didn't put them on once for six weeks. When we started Return Path back in 1999, we sat down to write our employee handbook, and all I could think was "what things can we add in here that will make this company a unique place to work?" And one of them was a six week paid sabbatical after 7 years. It didn't occur to me that we'd even exist after 7 years. Then for good measure, we said, "7 years and every 5 years after that." I'm happy…
Book Short: There is No Blueprint to $1B
Book Short: There is No Blueprint to $1B Blueprint to a Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth, by David Thomson (book, Kindle) sounds more formulaic than it is. It’s not a bad book, but you have to dig a little bit for the non-obvious nuggets (yes, I get that growing your company to $1B in sales requires having a great value proposition in a high growth market!). The author looked for commonalities among the 387 American companies that have gone public since 1980 with less than $1B in revenues when they went public and had more than $1B in revenue (and were still in existence) at the time of the book’s writing in 2005. Thompson classifies the blueprint into…
From Founder/Builder to Manager/Leader
From Founder/Builder to Manager/Leader After I spoke at the Startup2Startup event last month, one of the people who sat with me at dinner emailed me and asked: I was curious–how did you make the transition from CEO of a startup to manager of a medium-sized business? I’m great at just doing the work myself and interacting with clients, and it’s easy for me to delegate tasks, but it’s hard to have the vision and ability to develop my two employees into greater capacity… I’d be interested in reading a blog post on what helped you make that transition from founder/builder to manager/leader It feels like the answer to this question is about a mile long, but I thought I’d at…