Building an Organization for Success
Continued from Part 4: Building a New Business Begins
As we moved through the development process of creating the foundations to support Campaign, I also sought to build a company to fully realize the opportunity. I’d realized in the summer of 2007 that to build a successful organization, the place to be was not Victoria BC, and I needed to make a number of moves to drive success. In April of 2008, as Collector was nearing completion, I invited Mark Hoffman to join the company as CEO. Mark formerly was CEO of both Sybase and CommerceOne, two massive technology success stories. Mark brought a lot of great qualities to the organization, not just a phenomenal track record. A great organization is built by constantly adding strong people to it, with each making it better in their own way. With Mark, I found a great partner with whom to build the business, who not only knows how to build a winning organization, but like a great military general, is fiercely determined, and more importantly, knows how to take the hills that matter to win the war. Together, we’ve brought together a highly skilled team to drive the organization to the next level.
When we introduced Enquisite Pro, we sought out the feedback from many friends and thought leaders in the SEO & PPC space. This was to gather feedback, and provide insights on market needs. The people I tapped included, but was not limited to Stephan Spencer at NetConcepts, Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz, Todd Friesen now at PositionTech, Andrew Goodman, Eric Enge at Stone Temple, Bruce Clay, Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Mike Grehan from Acronym, Tim Ash from Site Tuners, Matt Bailey from SiteLogic, as well as input from people at Zaaz, GroupM Search, Outrider, iProspect, RepriseMedia, Avenue A | Razorfish, Big Mouth Media, and many others. With the Link reporting system underway, we used the feedback process to ensure that we hadn’t missed anything major we would need for Campaign. The links report technology allows us to monitor links campaigns, social media, newsletters and other activities within Campaign, and makes it possible for SEOs to be compensated for conversions from all their efforts.
Finally, with the Collector, Auditor, and Optimizer complete, and the hyperfast database in process, the foundations for Enquisite Campaign were in place, and we immediately started development.
Continued in Part 6: