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…
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Authentic Response
Another Only Once Moment, Sort Of
Another Only Once Moment, Sort Of I’ve never handed over the reins of a company before (no, I’m not leaving, and we aren’t selling Return Path). But I did the other day, for the first time. As many people know, last year we reorganized the company to focus entirely on deliverability and whitelisting and spun out Authentic Response, a company in the online market research business, into a completely separate entity. Since then, I have been CEO of both companies. Although Return Path has had more of my focus — Authentic Response had excellent day-to-day leadership under Co-Presidents Jeff Mattes and Rob Mattes — I’ve still been working in both businesses. Today, we officially announced the hiring of my replacement,…
Charting A New Path: Focus is Our Friend
Charting A New Path: Focus is Our Friend When Return Path turned six years old a few years ago, I wrote a post on my personal blog (OnlyOnce) titled You Can’t Tell What the Living Room Looks Like from the Front Porch. The essence of the post is that flexibility is a key success factor in starting and growing a business, and sometimes the business turns out different than what you thought when you wrote that business plan. At the time, I was commenting on how different Return Path turned out – operating five businesses – than we did when we started the original ECOA business in 1999. Today, the message rings more true than ever. On the heels of…
SUGGing and FRUGGing: Practices as Ugly as They Sound
SUGGing and FRUGGing: Practices as Ugly as They Sound (Below is the beginning of my December column for DM News.) We love surveys. Though many people in direct marketing don’t know it, we have a large business unit, Authentic Response, that provides a global online sample aimed at helping market researchers connect with qualified panelists via our MyView portal. And, like most companies, we use surveys to get a read on what our customers want from us and how we can improve their experience with us. Market research is an industry that prides itself on accuracy and purity of data, which is why I want to use this column to let direct marketers know how painful it is when companies…
It’s a Sad Day When the Lawyers Take Over
It’s a Sad Day When the Lawyers Take Over With all due respect to lawyers, of course, Google’s recent decision to start making a legal fuss when people in the media use the word “Google” as a verb is NUTS. Someone, get Marketing on Line 1 — and make it snappy. Steve Rubel wrote about it, as did Jeff Jarvis, and the source material is here. For the record, anyone who wants to use any of the following words or phrases as a verb, noun, or any other part of speech, may do so at any time: Return Path, Sender Score, Authentic Response, Postmaster Direct. Oh, and then there’s ECOA, the service we pioneered in 2000 that *is* occasionally (in…