Counter Cliche:  How Much Paranoia is Too Much Paranoia?

Fred’s VC cliche of the week this week, Opening the Kimono, is a good one.  He talks about how much entrepreneurs should and should not disclose when talking to VCs and big partners — companies like Microsoft or Google, for example.

In response to another of Fred’s weekly cliche postings back in April, I addressed the issue of opening the kimono with VCs in this posting entitled Promiscuity.  But today’s topic is the opposite of promiscuity, it’s paranoia.

I was talking with a friend a few months back who’s a friend and fellow CEO of a high profile, larger company in a similar space to Return Path.  He was obsessing about the secrecy surrounding the size of his business and wouldn’t tell me (a friend) how much revenue his company had, even within a $20mm band.

He pursued this secrecy pretty far.  He never shared financials with his employees.  He never told anyone the metrics, not even his close friends and family.  He even withdrew his company from consideration for a high-profile award for growth companies which it had entered into and won in prior years since someone might be able to string together enough years of data to compute their size.

Why?  Because he didn’t want any venture capitalists to figure out how big they had gotten and decide to throw money at upstart competitors.  Talk about a closed kimono!

I’m much more open book than that with Return Path, but I have a tremendous amount of respect for this guy, so I gave the matter some thought.  There are certainly some situations which call for discretion, but I couldn’t come up with too many that would drive my guiding principle to be secrecy.

1. Being “open book” with employees is essential.  Your people need to know where the business stands and how their efforts are contributing to the whole.  More important, they need to know that you trust them.

2. Using some key metrics to promote your company can be very helpful.  I challenge you to show me a marketing person who doesn’t want to brag about how big you are, how many customers you have, what market share you have.

3. There’s no reason to worry about Venture Capitalists.  Sure, they can fund a competitor, but they’ll do that without knowing exactly how much revenue you have, how quickly.  The good ones are good at sniffing out market opporunities ahead of time.  The bad ones, you care about less anyway.

4. All that said, you can never be paranoid enough about the competition.  Assume they’re all out to get you at every turn, that they’re smarter, richer, quicker, and better looking than you are.  Live in fear of them eating your lunch.

Paranoia is healthy (just ask Andy Grove), but it does have its limits around the basics of your business, and around how you treat employees.

Book Short:  Required Reading

The Leadership Pipeline, by Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel, should be required reading for any manager at any level in any organization, although it’s most critical for CEOs, heads of HR, and first-time managers.  Just ask my Leaderhip Team at Return Path, all of whom just had to read the book and join in a discussion of it!

The book is easy to read, and it’s a great hands-on playbook for dealing with what the authors call the six leadersihp passages:

From Individual Contributor to Manager (shift from doing work to getting work done through others)

From Manager to Manager of Managers (shift to pure management, think beyond the function)

From Manager of Managers to Functional Manager (manage outside your own experience)

From Functional Manager to Business Manager (integrate functions, shift to profit and longer term views)

From Business Manager to Group Manager (holistic leadership, portfolio strategies, value success of others)

From Group Manager to Enterprise Manager (outward looking, handle external and multiple constituencies, balance strategic and visionary long-term thinking with the need to deliver short-term operating results)

All too often, especially in rapidly growing companies, we promote people and move them around without giving enough attention to the critical success factors involved in each new level of management.  I’ve certainly been guilty of that at Return Path over the years as well.  It’s just too easy to get trapped in the velocity of a startup someitmes to forget these steps and how different each one is.  This book lays out the steps very neatly.

It’s also one of the few business books that at least makes an attempt — and a good one at that — at adapting its model to small companies.  In this case, the authors note that the top three rungs of the pipeline are often combined in the role of CEO, and that Manager of Managers is often combined with Functional Managers.

Anyway, run, don’t walk, to buy this one!

Memory Lane or Dark Alley?

We had an interesting meeting today.  A small group of the old-timers at Return Path, including one of our founders who doesn’t work at the company any longer, convened a summit to brainstorm ways to reinvent our original, original business, Email Change of Address (ECOA).

For those of you who don’t know what it is, ECOA is a very simple idea — that people who change email addresses need help updating their personal and business contacts, and also their most trusted commercial email newsletter relationships.  It’s a free service for consumers, and a paid service for opt-in email marketers and publishers who use our service to reacquire their customers with renewed permission and a shiny new email address.

When we created ECOA in 1999, we were sure it was the proverbial $100 million idea (what idea wasn’t in 1999?).  More than six years later, the product is a success and profitable, but it never took off with that explosive growth we all imagined early on.  Return Path has grown a lot since then, both organically and through M&A, and since about 2002 or early 2003, we basically put the ECOA business on “auto-pilot,” tending to it as needed and making sure it still worked well for consumers and clients and was adequately competitive in the market, but no longer investing meaningfully in its growth.

Now that we’re much larger and have the time and resources to put into it, we decided earlier this year to pay some attention to our neglected first child and see what we could do with it.  Today’s meeting was the first step, and boy was it interesting.

So I can’t decide whether the process of preparing for and going through this meeting was like a pleasant walk down Memory Lane…or a scary run through a Dark Alley late at night.  It was fun having a conversation about a part of the business that was so important to us at one time in our lives (it was all we had!), and the group of us were literally reminiscing in the meeting about all the different thoughts and ideas we had for the business over time, as well as about different former colleagues who worked with us on the business.  At the same time, it was pretty painful to look at some of our original projections for market size and of course business size — not to mention some of the marketing efforts, Powerpoint templates, logos, and names that fell by the wayside.

The good news is, either way, we do have lots of great ideas for how to move the ECOA business forward con gusto…so look for more news on this front as the year unfolds.

Counter Cliche:  Who’s The Dog in this Scenario?

Fred’s VC cliche of the week is a good one — “If you lie down with dogs, you’ll come up with fleas.” His point is a good and simple one, that VCs shouldn’t take people risks in deals and shouldn’t try to back management teams they have serious concerns about (ethical or otherwise) in the hopes of trying to change the team or change management.

The obvious counter cliche is that entrepreneurs run that same risk in accepting capital from less-than-savory venture investors.  An ethically-challenged investor can wreak havoc on a young company, potentially tying the company up with peripheral legal problems or even damaging the company’s attempts at raising future rounds of capital.  So, VCs can be the dog in the scenario as well.

But I think there’s a broader counter cliche here, which is that one’s reputation in business is always tied, to some extent, to the company one keeps.  This applies to investors, and also to clients, vendors, and partners.  The appearance of a connection to an unsavory character, even if it’s just an appearance, and even if “unsavory” is in the grey area instead of black-and-white, is almost as problematic as a real connection.

Our business at Return Path is a good illustration of this principle, as is the case with many companies in email marketing, since email marketing has some very visible bad guys (spammers), good guys (think eBay and Expedia), and lots of companies that operate in shades of grey in between.  One of our lines of business, Delivery Assurance Solutions (email deliverability), is particularly critical in terms of us having a great reputation in the industry, since we work on behalf of email marketers to get their mail accepted (not blocked/filtered) at major ISPs.  No matter how you cut it, this business invariably involves making some judgment calls from time to time on who’s a “good guy” vs. a “bad guy” in the email marketing world.

We try to be as clear as possible with our prospects and clients about what kinds of behavior we wil or will not accept from clients, since our reputation in this business is everything to us.  We won’t, for example, help a client with ISP relations or monitoring tools if they don’t sign reps and warrantees in our contract about their email practices that go well beyond CAN-SPAM in terms of compliance with industry best practices.  We can’t accept clients into the Bonded Sender whitelist program unless they jump through all kinds of hoops with our third-party watchdog partner, TRUSTe.  And as painful as it is from a revenue perspective, we do fire clients periodically who we discover to be either not in compliance with their reps and warrantees to us, or who we discover to have a particularly poor reputation in the industry.  All of these things are designed to make sure we stay flea-free.

One area that’s particularly tricky for us is what to do with a “bad guy” who comes to us asking for help to become a “good guy.”  While it’s hard to be completely objective about this type of situation, we have an emerging policy around it.  We WILL work with clients who the world perceives as a “bad guy,” but only on a consulting basis to teach them email best practices and how to become a “good guy” (one of my Board members, Scott Weiss from IronPort Systems, calls this Return Path’s 12-step program).  If those clients take our advice and make meaningful and measurable changes to their email programs, we will continue to work with them and will slowly allow them to use our other services over time.  If those clients resist our advice or are too slow to change their ways, we will stop working with them immediately.

I guess the point of the counter cliche is that sometimes it’s hard to tell, as Sally told Harry in the movie, who is supposed to be the dog in a particular scenario.

Book Short:  Great Marketing Checklists

Trade Show and Event Marketing:  Plan, Promote, and Profit, by our direct marketing colleague Ruth Stevens, is hardly a page-turner, but it is a great read and well worth the money for anyone in your B2B marketing department.  That’s true as much for the event marketing specialist as the marketing generalist.

The author brings a very ROI-focused approach to planning and executing events – whether big trade shows or smaller corporate events, which are becoming increasingly popular in recent years for cost, focus, and control reasons.  But beyond events, the book has a number of excellent checklists that are more general for marketers that I found quite useful both as a reminder of things we should be doing at Return Path as well as ways we should be thinking about the different elements of our B2B marketing mix.

Some of the best tables and charts include:  strengths, weaknesses, and best applications of trade shows vs. corporate events; comparative analysis of marketing tools by channel (this was great – talks about best applications for all major tools from events to newsletters to search to inside sales); 12-month exhibitor timeline for trade shows; a great riff on bad booth signage vs. good booth signage (hint:  don’t make the visitor do the work – be obvious!); business event strategic planning grid; pre-show campaign and post-show follow-up checklists; dos, don’ts and options for corporate events; a great section on qualifying and handling leads that extends well beyond trade shows; and several good case studies that are show-focused.

Thanks to Ruth herself for an autographed copy!  Team Marketing and sales leaders at Return Path – your copies are on the way.

Less is More

The latest research shows that people spend 51 seconds reading any given commercial email newsletter, as opposed to 15 seconds on a promotional email.  I find this credible based on personal experience, at least the ratio of the two, although I might do a little less on both.

Return Path’s Stephanie Miller blogs about this and the implication for marketers on the Return Path Online Resource Center for Email Marketers.

Feedburner…They’re Real AND They’re Spectacular

Sometime in early 2004, I met Dick Costolo, the CEO of Feedburner.   We met about at the same time he also met Fred and Brad (I can’t remember who met who first), both of whom subsequently invested in the company.  We hit it off and had a number of informal and formal conversations over the past two and a half years about online media, the interplay of RSS and email and blogs, and entrepreneurship.  Feedburner and Return Path have developed a still-somewhat nascent partnership as well to bring ads in feeds and ads on blogs to Return Path’s Postmaster advertisers.

I was recently fortunate enough to be invited by Dick and his team to join Feedburner’s Board of Directors.  You can read the official note (as official as Feedburner gets!) on Feedburner’s blog here.  I am huge Feedburner fan and am jazzed to be part of their extended team.  The company is impressively leading its market of RSS publisher services and RSS advertising.  It’s all very reminiscent of the early days of email, and the early days of banner advertising before that.  More than that, though, I’ve been incredibly impressed with how the company operates.  They execute swiftly and flawlessly, they have a ton of fun doing it, and they have a very authentic voice and ethos for communicating with and handling their customers that I admire tremendously.  Very Cluetrain Manifesto.

In a much earlier posting, I wrote that entrepreneurs should join other boards as well to get more experience with how different organizations are run and how different board dynamics work, so I guess this means I’m following my own advice.  And so far, it’s all true — I’ve gotten a lot out of the first couple of meetings I’ve attended.  It’s a little weird for me to be the “old media” guy around the table (old meaning web and email, of course), so I’ll have to work hard to not be a Luddite and keep pace with all the new toys.

Selecting an ESP

Return Path’s Ken Takahashi (formerly of DARTMail fame) wrote a great post today on the Return Path blog — the first in a series — about selecting an ESP.  If you are an email marketer who is thinking about selecting an ESP, it’s a great read.

The Same, But Different

Mariquita and I spent several hours on the dueling laptops this evening.  It turned out, we were both working on OD things (Organization Development).

Mariquita’s project, for her Masters’ Program at Amercan U — was writing a lengthy paper on data collection and feedback as a major function of OD, as applied to a specific case of a startup going through growing pains (not Return Path…a case given by the teacher).  Her main comment — “they’ve got problems, man.”

I was working on an overhaul of Return Path’s management structure and what I call M/O/S (management operating system), based on the results of this year’s 360 Review process.  My main comment — “we’ve got problems, man.”  Well, not exactly in the same way, but we certainly have some major things to think through and change about the way we operate if we want to get the business to the next level.  The main topics were around preparing our organization — in terms of attitude, development, structure, and culture — to be 4x larger than it is today within a few years.

Interesting comparison.  Both valid uses of OD, totally different applications.

New Deliverability Index is Out

Return Path’s semi-annual Sender Score Deliverability Index, which has become a sort of industry standard metric about how much non-spam commercial email is getting snared by ISP filters, is out.  You can read Heather Palmer Goff’s posting about it (and download the report and the metrics) on the Return Path blog here.

Book Shorts:  Sales, Sales, Sales, Sales, Sales

Jeffrey Gitomer’s Little Red Book of Selling and Little Red Book of Sales Answers were great refreshers in sales basics for you as CEO (and head of sales, and sales manager, and sales rep).  The books were a bit “self-help” flavor for my taste as a reader, but they were excellent on content, and I have two long pages of notes of “back to basics” items I need to remind myself and my team about.

Anyone at Return Path in sales/account-project management/marketing — your copy is on the way, hopefully by way of a barter I proposed with the author (sorry, Stephanie and Tami…), but in any case, we’ll buy them.  Anyone else who is interested at RP, let me know, and the copy is on me.

Some of the most critical reminders — although you have to read the books to get to get the color:

– Ask questions, don’t talk talk talk at prospects (just like the SPIN Selling methodology we always train with at Return Path)

– Never say “tell me a little bit about your business” — do the research first

– Importance of testimonials in selling

– Never blame others or blame circumstances when things go wrong.  Take control and solve the problem (good for sales and for everyone!)