OnlyOnce

2009-11-05T08:31:32-05:00

Book Short: Chip Off the Old Block

I have to admit, I was more than a little skeptical when Craig Spiezle handed me a copy of The Speed of Trust, by Stephen M. R. Covey, at the OTA summit last week. The author is the son of THE Stephen Covey, author of the world famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People as well as The Eighth Habit (book, post). Would the book have substance and merit or be drafting off the dad's good name?

I dog-ear pages of books as I read them, noting the pages that are most interesting if I ever want to go back and take a quick pass through the book to remind me about it (and yes, Ezra, I can do this on the Kindle as well via the bookmark feature). If dog-ear quantity is a mark of how impactful a book is, The Speed of Trust is towards the top of the list for me.

The book builds nicely on Seven Habits and The Eighth Habit and almost reads like the work of Stephen the father. The meat of the book is divided into two sections: one on developing what Covey calls "self trust," a concept not unlike what I blogged about a few months ago, that if you make and keep commitments to yourself, you build a level of self-confidence and discipline that translates directly into better work and a better mental state. The other core section is one on building trust in relationships, where Covey lists out 13 behaviors that all lead to the development of trust.

In fact, we just had a medium-size trust breach a couple weeks ago with one of our key clients. Reading the book just as we are struggling to "right the wrong" was particularly impactful to me and gave me a number of good ideas for how to move past the issue without simply relying on self-flagellation and blunt apologies. This is a book full of practical applications.

It's not a perfect book (no book is), and in particular its notion of societal trust through contribution is a bit weak relative to the rest of the book, but The Speed of Trust is an excellent read for anyone who wants to understand the fastest way to build -- and destroy -- a winning culture. It reads like a sequel of Covey senior's books, but that's a good thing.

If this madness all ended tomorrow, I would do…almost nothing

2009-10-22T07:00:00-04:00

If this madness all ended tomorrow, I would do…almost nothing

(This post originally appeared on FindYourNerve on October 21)

I don’t know what you call the last 12 months of global macroeconomic meltdown. I’ve taken to calling it the Great Repression. In part because it’s somewhere in between a Recession and a Depression, in part because it’s certainly repressed the wants and needs of startups and growth companies the world over. And it makes for good cocktail party chatter.

Someone asked me a question the other day, which started off with “Now that the recession is over…” I can’t even remember the end of the question. I got lost in the framing of it, mostly because I’m not convinced it’s over yet. Fine, fine, Bernanke says it’s over. But he couldn’t possibly have used more caveats or more cautious language to couch his statement. I haven’t seem great signs of a recovery, in any case. But the question got me thinking. What would I do if the recession really was over, or if I knew that, say, tomorrow, the heavens would open up and swallow our inflation fears, deflation fears, and collective global deficits whole?

You know what? I wouldn’t do a thing. That’s not entirely true. I’d probably sleep better that night. But I wouldn’t do a lot of other things out of the gate. This last year has tested nerves. My nerve as a CEO, my Board’s nerve, and the collective nerve of our organization. And we’ve pulled off a great year. We will still grow close to 50%, we greatly expanded our operating margins and are generating nice cash flow, and we preserved all jobs, salaries, and core benefits (all five of our objectives that I laid out 12 months ago when the &*%$ started to hit the fan).

So, why wouldn’t I do anything different if I knew the world would be a different place tomorrow? Because holding our nerve this past year has changed a lot of things about our organization for the better, and I don’t want to see us reverse course on those things just because we can. Here’s one example, one of many we have - when we cut our travel budget by 50% this year, everyone on the team looked at us like we were crazy and said there was no way we’d be able to make budget. Guess what – we BEAT the slashed budget by almost a third, without complaint! Why should we triple it going forward to get back to where we were?

Anyway, other companies can lose their nerve when they aren’t forced to have it. As for me and Return Path, while we will certainly move some things back to normal over time as the world improves, it won’t be a wholesale reversion to yesteryear.

Why I joined the DMA Board, and what you can expect of me in that role

2009-10-21T08:46:57-04:00

Why I joined the DMA Board, and what you can expect of me in that role

I don't normally think of myself as a rebel. But one outcome of the DMA's recent proxy fight with Board member Gerry Pike is that I've been appointed to the DMA's Board and its Executive Committee and have been labeled "part of the reform movement" in the trade press. While I wasn't actively leading the charge on DMA reform with Gerry, I am very enthusiastic about taking up my new role.

I gave Gerry my proxy and support for a number of reasons, and those reasons will form the basis of my agenda as a DMA Board member. As a DMA member, and one who used to be fairly active, I have grown increasingly frustrated with the DMA over the past few years.

1. The DMA could be stronger in fighting for consumers' interests. Why? Because what's good for consumers is great for direct marketers. Marketing is not what it used to be, the lines between good and bad actors have been blurred, and the consumer is now in charge. The DMA needs to more emphatically embrace that and lead change among its membership to do the same. The DMA's ethics operation seems to work well, but the DMA can't and shouldn't become a police state and catch every violation of every member company. Its best practices and guidelines take too long to produce and usually end up too watered down to be meaningful in a world where the organization is promoting industry self-regulation. By aggressively fighting for consumers, the DMA can show the world that a real direct marketer is an honest marketer that consumers want to hear from and buy from.

2. Despite a number of very good ideas, the DMA's execution around interactive marketing has been lacking. The DMA needs to accept that interactive marketing IS direct marketing - not a subset, not a weird little niche. It's the heart and soul of the direct marketing industry. It's our future. The acquisition of the EEC has been one bright spot, but the DMA could do much more to make the EEC more impactful, grow its membership, and replicate it to extend the DMA's reach into other areas of interactive marketing, from search to display advertising to lead generation. The DMA's staff still has extremely limited experience in interactive marketing, they haven't had a thought leader around interactive on staff for several years, and their own interactive marketing efforts are far from best practice. Finally, the DMA's government affairs group, perhaps its greatest strength, still seems disproportionately focused on direct mail issues. The DMA should maintain its staunch support of traditional direct marketers while investing in the future, making interactive marketing an equal or larger priority than traditional direct marketing. We have to invest in the future.

3. Finally, I think the DMA suffers from a lack of transparency that doesn't serve it well in the hyper-connected world we live in here in 2009 - that's a nice way of saying the organization has a big PR problem. The organization does a lot of great work that never gets adequately publicized. This whole proxy fight episode is another example, both in the weak response from the DMA and also in a lot of the complaints Gerry lodged against the organization, many of which the organization says are untrue or misleading. Senior DMA execs or Board members should be blogging. They should be active thought leaders in the community. They should be much more engaged with their members to both understand member needs and requirements and more aggressively promote their agenda.

In short, I will be an independent voice who advocates for progress and change in the areas that I consider to be most important, and I will be transparent and open about expressing my views. I've already been clear with the existing DMA Board and management that I do have this agenda, and that I hope the organization will embrace it. If they do, even if only in part, I think it will be to the DMA's benefit as well as the benefit of its members. If they reject it wholesale, my interest in long-term involvement will be fairly low.

That's the story. As I said up front, I am taking up this new role with enthusiasm and with the belief that the DMA is open to change and progress. We'll see how it goes, and I will blog about it as often as I can.

Do you have thoughts on the future of the DMA? I'd love to hear from you. You can leave a comment below or email me directly at matt at returnpath dot net.

Wanted: Rock Star Marketer

2009-09-30T13:18:58-04:00

Wanted: Rock Star Marketer

Return Path is hiring a VP Marketing. This is a new position - we haven't had the job filled in a couple years like this, reporting directly to me. The job spec is here.

What it's like to work here is pretty well captured here.

Why should you pass this on to a friend who is a good fit? Because you will help a friend find the best job he or she ever had! Oh and because we will pay you a nice referral fee if we hire your friend.

Why should you apply? That's a longer answer:

1. We are inventive market leaders with a really unique business model, at a good scale, in a rapidly growing niche

2. We are reinventing our business in a way that is going to dramatically impact the entire email ecosystem in an extremely positive way for ISPs, filters, mailers, and end users alike

3. This position will be a hugely strategic role, managing a very strong marketing team as well as being an executive partner to the rest of the senior team around positioning and telling our story, both to all sides of the industry as well as potentially to Wall Street (someday, anyway)

4. As a growth stage company, we offer the best aspects of small company/startup life and larger company benefits

5. We have the best VC investors in the country, and we are also materially cash flow positive

6. We are a really fun place to work (just ask us!) If you are interested or know someone who is, you can comment here, or you can email me directly at matt at returnpath dot net. The details are in the spec, but we have a strong preference for someone in the Bay Area who has worked in email/messaging security.

Closer to the Front Lines, Part II

2009-09-29T07:00:00-04:00

Closer to the Front Lines, II

Last year, I wrote about our sabbatical policy and how I had spent six weeks filling in for George when he was out. I just finished up filling in for Jack (our COO/CFO) while he was out on his. Although for a variety of reasons I wasn't as deeply engaged with Jack's team as I was last year with George's, I did find some great benefits to working more directly with them.

In addition to the ones I wrote about last year, another discovery, or rather, reminder, that I got this time around was that the bigger the company gets and the more specialized skill sets become, there are an increasing number of jobs that I couldn't step in and do in a pinch. I used to feel this way about all non-technical jobs in the early years of the company, but not so much any more.

Anyway, it's always a busy time doing two jobs, and probably both jobs suffer a bit in the short term. But it's a great experience overall for me as a leader. Anita's sabbatical will also hit in 2010 -- is everyone ready for me to run sales for half a quarter?

The Gift of Feedback, Part III

2009-09-24T07:00:00-04:00

The Gift of Feedback, Part III

Last week, I posted about my new development plan. I thought I'd also share a "team development plan" that we crafted this year for the entire Executive Committee at Return Path (basically me and my direct reports), coming out of all of our 360 live reviews taken as a whole.

Push each other harder and be continuous in our effort to provide the team and each of us feedback and further develop: Improve ability to handle conflict as a group; Drive this work deeper into the organization; “Eyes/ears/mouth open;” Explore how to better serve as role models to the rest of the organization, especially our direct reports/the next level of management; How do we get the Level II to function in the way that we do?
Getting messaging out/improve our communications as a team to the rest of the organization
Be more hawkish with underperformers: Exert a discipline in dealing with problems; Making tough calls that don’t feel very good; Do we accept mediocrity?
Take responsibility for everyone as a group
Do we have a team of A+ players? How do we recruit them as we get bigger? Can we attract the best? Or pay differently? Revisit incentive comp plan if we don't feel like it's working as intended?
At least 2x/year comprehensively evaluate next level management to assess bench strength
Goal: to have this executive team be the outlier and be able to grow and each and as a team be able to manage a $100MM company

Thanks to our friend Marc Maltz at Triad Consulting as always for facilitating these great sessions and distilling the learnings down into bite-sized pieces for us!

How Deliverability is Like SEO and SEM for Email

2009-09-18T09:02:10-04:00

How Deliverability is Like SEO and SEM for Email

I admit this is an imperfect analogy, and I'm sure many of my colleagues in the email industry are going to blanch at a comparison to search, but the reality is that email deliverability is still not well understood -- and search engines are. I hope that I can make a comparison here that will help you better understand what it really means to work on deliverability - they same way you understand what it means to work on search.

But before we get to that, let's start with the language around deliverability which is still muddled. I'd like to encourage everyone in the email industry to rally around more precise meanings. Specifically I'd like propose that we start to use the term "inbox placement rate" or IPR, for short. I think this better explains what marketers mean when they say "delivered" - because anywhere other than the inbox is not going to generate the kind of response that marketers need. The problem with the term "delivered" is that it is usually used to mean "didn't bounce." While that is a good metric to track, it does not tell you where the email lands. Inbox placement rate, by contrast, is pretty straightforward: how much of the email you sent landed in the inbox of our customers and prospects?

Now let's come back to how achieving a high inbox placement rate is like search. If you run a web site, you certainly understand what SEO and SEM are, you care deeply about both, and you spend money on both to get them right. Whether "organic" or "paid," you want your site to show up as high as possible on the page at Google, Yahoo, Bing, whatever. Both SEO and SEM drive success in your business, though in different ways.

The inbox is different and a far more fragmented place than search engines, but if you run an email program, you need to worry both about your "organic" inbox placement and your "paid" inbox placement. If you are prone to loving acronyms you could call them OIP and PIP.

What's the difference between the two?

With organic inbox placement, you are using technology and analytics to manage your email reputation, the underpinning of deliverability. You are testing, tracking, and monitoring your outbound email. Seeing where it lands - in the inbox, in the junk mail folder, or nowhere? You are doing all this to optimize your inbox placement rate (IPR) -- just as you work to optimize your page rank on search engines. One of the ways you do this is by monitoring your email reputation (Sender Score) as a proxy for how likely you are to have your email filtered or blocked. The more you manage all of these factors, the greater likelihood you will be placed in inboxes everywhere.

With paid inbox placement, you first have to qualify by having a strong email reputation. Then you use payment to ensure inbox placement, and frequently other benefits like functioning images and links or access to rich media. With this paid model, there's no guarantee to inbox placement (don't let anyone tell you otherwise), just like there's no guarantee that you'll be in the #1 position via paid search if someone outbids you. But by paying, you are radically increasing the odds of inbox placement as well as adding other benefits. There is one critical difference from search here, which is that you need good organic inbox placement in order to gain access to PIP. You can't just pay to play.

Like SEO, some organic deliverability work can and must be done in-house, but frequently it's better to outsource to companies like Return Path to save costs and time, and to gain specific expertise. Like SEM, paid deliverability inherently means you are working with third parties like our Return Path Certification program.

As I said, it's an imperfect analogy, but hopefully can help you better understand the strategies and services that are available to help you make the most of every email you send.

Another Only Once Moment, Sort Of

2009-09-16T10:09:36-04:00

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, Jim Follett. Jim was formerly CEO of Survey Sampling, a larger company in the online market research business, and has over 20 years of prior experience as a senior executive in market research and information services companies. While we still share the office in New York and I will stay on as Chairman, the percentage of time I can now devote to Return Path is now 100% -- the first time it's ever been that way (for the deliverability business).

I didn't start Authentic Response, and I've never been deep in the bones of the business the way I am Return Path. Even so, I definitely experienced a range of emotions at our all-hands meeting where we introduced Jim to the company that I don't regularly experience at the same time: mainly a mix of pride in the work the team has done on my watch, excitement for the business, and sadness at not working quite as closely with the nearly 100 people in Authentic Response going forward.

I'm sure someday, I will hand over the reins to Return Path. No time soon, but that day eventually comes for every entrepreneur. If this was a preview, it will be an emotional day.

But for now, I'm mainly happy to welcome Jim to the family, and I'm excited for the entire Authentic Response business as it embarks on the next chapter in the company's journey.

The Gift of Feedback, Part II

2009-09-14T07:00:00-04:00

The Gift of Feedback, Part II

I've written a few times over the years about our 360 feedback process at Return Path. In Part I of this series in early 2008, I spelled out my development plan coming out of that year's 360 live review process. I have my new plan now after this year's process, and I thought I'd share it once again. This year I have four items to work on:

Continue to develop the executive team. Manage the team more aggressively and intentionally. Upgrade existing people, push hard on next-level team development, and critically evaluate the organization every 3-6 months to see if the execs are scaling well enough or if they need to replaced or augmented
Formalize junior staff interaction. Create more intentional feedback loops before/after meetings, including with the staff member if needed, and cultivate acceptance of transparency; get managers to do the same. Be extra skeptical about the feedback I'm getting, realizing that I may not get an accurate or complete picture
Foster deeper engagement across the entire organization. Simplify/streamline company mission and balanced scorecard through a combination of deeper level maps/scorecards, maybe a higher level scorecard, and constant reinforcing communication. Drive multi-year planning process to be fun, touching the entire company, and culminating in a renewed enthusiasm
Disrupt early and often, the right way. Introduce an element of productive disruption/creative destruction into the way I lead, noting item 2 around feedback loops

Thanks to everyone internally who contributed to this review. I appreciate your time and input. Onward!

Scaling Frustrations

2009-09-09T07:00:00-04:00

Scaling Frustrations

Two things have come up in spades lately for me that are frustrations for me as a CEO of a high growth company. These are both people related -- an area that's always been the cornerstone of my leadership patterns. That probably makes them even more frustrating.

Frustration 1: Worrying that I don't get completely candid feedback from deep in the organization. I've always relied on direct interactions with junior staff and personal observation and data collection in order to get a feel for what's going on. But a couple times lately, people had been warning me (for the first time) when I've relayed feedback with comments like, "Of course you heard that -- you're the CEO. People will tell you what they think you want to hear."

So now the paranoid Matt kicks in a bit. Can I actually trust the feedback I'm getting? I think I can. I always have. I think I'm a good judge of character and am able to read between the lines and filter comments and input and responses to questions I ask. But maybe this gets harder as the organization grows and as personal connections to me are necessarily fewer and farther between. I probably need to start recognizing that as the CEO, people may feel uncomfortable being totally open...and it is my job to figure out how to be sure people understand that I do want to hear their voices...unplugged and constructive.

Frustration 2: Needing to be increasingly careful with what I say and how I say it. This comes up in two different ways. First, I want to make sure that while I'm still providing as transparent leadership as I can, that I'm not saying something that's going to freak out a more junior staff member because they're missing context or might misinterpret what I'm saying. Ok, this one I can manage.

But the tougher angle on this is having unintended impact on people. Throwing out a casual idea in a conversation with someone in the company can easily lead to a chain reaction of "Matt said" and "I need to redo my goals" conversations that aren't what I meant. So I'm doing some work to formalize feedback and communication loops when I have skip-level check-ins, but it's creating more process and thought overhead for me than I'm used to.

Nothing is bad here - just signs of a growing organization - but some definite changes in how I need to behave in order to keep being a strong and successful leader.

Links for 2006-10-05 [del.icio.us]

2006-10-06T00:00:00-07:00

Feld Thoughts: Falling Down and Getting Back Up
Brad's colorful, quick posting on "how running is like entrepreneurship."

Links for 2006-08-16 [del.icio.us]

2006-08-17T00:00:00-07:00

Fractals of Change: Are You an Entrepreneur?
Tom Evslin's entertaining Top 10 Ways You Know You're an Entrepreneur. Some may dovetail nicely if I ever write up my read of The Fountainhead through entrepreneurial lens!

Links for 2006-07-27 [del.icio.us]

2006-07-28T00:00:00-07:00

Techdirt: India Says No Thanks To The $100 Laptop
It's kind of a "Let Them Eat Cake!" response -- which kind of makes sense, given our recent trip to India.

Links for 2006-07-26 [del.icio.us]

2006-07-27T00:00:00-07:00

The dangers of relying on collective intelligence revealed!
Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence Founding Fathers, Patriots, Mr. T. Honored (From The Onion -- hilarious)

Links for 2006-07-24 [del.icio.us]

2006-07-25T00:00:00-07:00

A VC: Scars From The Last Bubble
Fred has a good posting on some of the downsides of having managed through the bubble bursting. I wrote about this (a little bit) last year in Ratcheting Up is Hard to Do (http://onlyonce.blogs.com/onlyonce/2005/01/ratcheting_up_i.html), but Fred's posti

Links for 2006-07-01 [del.icio.us]

2006-07-02T00:00:00-07:00

Seth's Blog: Nine things marketers ought to know about salespeople (and two bonuses)
Great blog posting from Seth Godin on things the rest of us need to remember about how challenging it is to sell...and a couple pointers for the sales team about how to handle the rest of us!

Links for 2006-06-25 [del.icio.us]

2006-06-26T00:00:00-07:00

Kevin Menzie
Slice of Lime, Inc. CEO Kevin Menzie, who I have known for years, writes a good summary of his thoughts on the early days of getting a startup off the ground and growing fast!