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SDL To Take Over Alterian

Posted in business, tagged , , , , on December 2, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Today, it was announced that SDL will acquire Alterian. Therefore soon,  a social media business that started as Lift9 will be getting its fourth company name within the last two-and-a half years.

I started Lift9 in July, 2009 to offer social reports to large brands. On April, 2010 we merged with a boutique market research company Intrepid to provide deeper insights from the social data set. Shortly thereafter we were acquired by Alterian in September, 2010 to compliment its social monitoring and listening tool SM2.

Social is a hot space. Four transactions in two-and-a half years may not be the norm, but there certainly are a lot of activities within the Social market. I believe we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg of what will happen as the Social space matures further. The social data set has disruptive elements that will attract many innovative minds who will build considerable values in this space.

For me, this acquisition is very positive. We will have greater resources to execute on our vision of providing social insights and foresight in compelling ways. SDL has language and statistical capabilities that can really improve our tools and solutions. I expect immediate impact in extending our social offerings.

My goal today remains the same as when I started Lift9. I want to answer critical business questions faster, cheaper and more accurately than anything in the market by using social data. I believe SDL provides a conducive platform for us to execute on this goal in even a bigger way.

So, how do I personally feel about all the changes — going from a two-person startup to now being a part of a Fortune 1000 company in two-and-a half years? I consider where we are now in such a short period of time as success. Being a part of large organization offers greater opportunities as well as additional challenges. I can live with that.

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PART III: When 1+1 Can Equal Something Greater Than 2

Posted in business, Digital Marketing, entrepreneur, social media, tagged , , , , , , , on September 11, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

PART III: When 1 + 1 Can Equal Something Greater Than 2

We met at Wild Ginger for the first time in December, 2009. Misia Tramp and I talked about leveraging the available social media data for market research projects. She obviously knew her subject matter as she had been providing market research services through her company, Intrepid, for more than 11 years.

Misia had charisma that was further enhanced by her proper British accent. I was intrigued about the rigor of market research methods that could be used with social media data to gain truly useful insights. We left that lunch with just a promise to reconnect, but my mind was already racing ahead about the possibilities.

Lift9 had expertise around social media data and analytics. We had an improving team of cost-effective analysts at our research center in Ho Chi Minh. Intrepid had agro rhythms, methods and rigor from market research projects that could potentially be applied to social data. They had a bigger revenue base, but struggled with margins that would be improved with Lift9’s cost structure and focus on accessible digital information.

My first proposal was to merge Lift9 with only the US entity of Intrepid. In the end, however, we decided to merge both the UK and US operations of Intrepid with Lift9.  Misia’s business partner, Liz High, had been running Intrepid UK.

We put together an operations agreement in late January, 2010 to test whether we could merge the two companies’ products. Meanwhile, we concurrently kicked off the due diligence of the deal.

The signs were encouraging from the start. Misia was able to get more attention from her client base by incorporating social elements into her pitch. In many cases we were able to deliver faster, better and more cost-effective outputs right away.

The biggest challenges were at the speed we needed to improve our cash flow, which had been a deteriorating issue for Intrepid, and how to effectively merge the two different cultures into working cohesively together. We allowed some turnover of people in the beginning, and focused on driving sales and improving margins and cash flow.

On May 3, 2010, we finalized the merger with Lift9 taking controlling interest, but keeping the Intrepid brand. From there, the financial performance began to improve so dramatically, I started to think about raising capital to acquire additional boutique market research companies that had solid client bases. We now had tangible proof that combining social elements with traditional market research methods provided compelling insights that resulted in better sales traction and improved financial results.

The management team approved plans to raise money for acquisitions, which included up to 11 potential transactions within a three-year period.

Right about then, I received a call from an Alterian senior executive about a possible service partnering deal using its social media monitoring tool, SM2. When he asked to come visit us, I had an inkling our world was about to change yet again.

My advice to entrepreneurs is to keep improving your companies’ stories through different possibilities. Don’t get too stuck in just what you are trying to do with your current resources. Understand what’s happening in the market around you and find ways to improve your story within that context.

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The Signing: Acquired by Alterian

Posted in business, entrepreneur, social media, tagged , , , , on September 3, 2010 | 2 Comments »

The Dominos Pizzas arrived while we were all scattered among the desks in front of the CEO office. It was late, nearing 10pm in the Alterian office in Bristol, UK. The “deal” team was frantically making the final changes to the stock purchase agreement, while others were trying to coordinate the signing of a wide range of documents from three different continents.

I called Warren Sukernek, the EVP of Intrepid US & Vietnam, who was in Seattle eight hours behind, imploring him to get all the new employment agreements signed. I knew he was trying his best, he always does, but my anxiety was growing by the minute.

Hungry, those of us in Bristol, devoured the pizzas without much enthusiasm. It was just necessary fuel to get us past the finish line.

We had gotten all the signatures from Ed Kim, Director & Country Manager for Intrepid Vietnam, and now were waiting for documents from the London and Seattle offices. The executives who had gathered in Bristol could not sign until all the other documents were first signed and accounted for.

Liz High, the Managing Director of Intrepid UK, informed everyone that all the documents were now accounted for from the London office. I resisted calling Warren again.

Meanwhile, the final schedules to the stock purchase agreement were ready for my review. I particularly focused on the list of our liabilities, which seemed to grow at every revision.

Finally, Warren called with the welcomed news of delivering the necessary documents from the Seattle office. Now, all the documents had to be routed to Alterian’s lead attorney in California.

David Eldridge, the CEO of Alterian, the company that was about to acquire my company, Intrepid, went to the printer while the final version of the stock purchase agreement was being printed. He playfully joked about how the stack of paper felt like a lot of money. We all laughed at the humor, but also with some relief knowing that the deal was about to happen.

It had been almost three months since Alterian approached Intrepid with interest, and five long weeks of grueling due diligence since negotiating the initial terms of the deal in late July. The month of August had been tremendously intense for me, and it was about to end.

With the stack of papers, David and I with the rest of the deal team walked to the front desk and signed the deal in front of the Alterian’s logo. Done deal!

How did I feel just then? Relieved mostly. I was Just happy at being able to move on from the grind of due diligence.

In the following blog posts, I will be writing a series about starting Lift9 a little more than a year ago and merging it into the Intrepid brand before signing this deal to join forces with Alterian.

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Getting All I Asked For – Lots of Traveling

Posted in business, entrepreneur, social media, travel, tagged , , , , , , on August 8, 2010 | 1 Comment »

“Be careful what you wish for.”

I was very specific when starting Lift9 (which has since become Intrepid Consultants) that I wanted a business that was global.  I had a lust to travel again as I had done during most of the 90s when helping to build ARIS to its IPO in 1997.

Last month I was in London for three weeks, returned home to Seattle for just the past week, and am now on an airplane to Ho Chi Minh City for the coming week.

The good news is that our company is doing so well that such travel is necessary. It’s exciting to see a plan come together. It was about a year ago that I initially came to Vietnam with the idea of starting a social media research center in Ho Chi Minh City. Now, I’m visiting again because the group has been so successful that we’re moving the research center to a better and bigger facility.

Our vision was always to make sure that our global offices, including the one in Ho Chi Minh, were going to be integrated into one core culture. In other words, we wanted to allow people in each office to all have equal opportunities to grow and contribute to Intrepid. After watching the “two-class” dysfunctional relationships that were built with many of the off-shoring efforts of the IT industry,  we wanted to build something very different.

To that regard, when I return from this trip, one of our most promising rising stars, a researcher from the Ho Chi Minh, will be accompanying me back to Seattle, then to a trade show in Chicago. It wasn’t easy to get his visa for such a trip, but lots of people helped to make it possible. It will be his first trip to the US, and the Seattle office has some good events planned for his welcome.

So, while the jetlag and the long-stints in hotels can be tiring, when I see what we are building, and the relative success in such a short period of time, I’m still happy to be getting “what I had asked for.”

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Video blog: Back in Vietnam where it Began

Posted in business, entrepreneur, social media, tagged , , , , , on May 26, 2010 | 5 Comments »

The first video blog post. Would love any feedback.

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After Merger, Harnessing Friction to Hone The Blade

Posted in business, entrepreneur, management, social media, tagged , , , on May 20, 2010 | 4 Comments »

Organizational optimization, now that’s a mouth full. Whenever you go through a merger, there is some underlying compelling business reason. Successfully integrating two entities, however, isn’t as easy as merely modeling out a new business plan.

At Intrepid, we just merged Lift9 and Intrepid. On paper, the prospects are exciting as we merged a creative boutique research consultancy with a social media research firm. The new Intrepid has an opportunity to disrupt the market research industry by integrating and applying digital data sets with traditional research insights. There are out-of-the-box type of research thinking that we are providing right now for clients. That’s exciting.

Candidly, our biggest challenge will be on successfully integrating the two very different, yet complementary entities. Even with two small companies, the change management issues can be time-consuming and distracting.

For me, a key success factor is how to harness the inedible frictions that will occur into positive energy. We want to let the natural frictions “hone the blade” making us together sharper. Let the frictions become overwhelming and unproductive and they will certainly break the blade – us.

Each entity, each individual for that matter, has a distinctive point of view on how to move forward. After the hoopla of the merger subsides, the realization of all the work ahead to integrate and achieve the goals sink in. People tend to dig their heels in with their own perspectives, creating friction. I see this as a point of great opportunity. You have smart, capable people with differing points of view now trying to work together. The ensuing frictions make each person look at problems differently. Blind spots, which we all have, are now better covered throughout the organization. With effective collaboration, innovative, stronger strategies emerge. The blade becomes more effective.

It takes leadership to create an environment that is conducive to harnessing such frictions. There needs to be shared vision throughout the new leadership and alignment throughout the troops. Too many mergers end up ineffective because the friction is not harnessed properly, ending up as broken blades.  Others avoid friction altogether, letting the entities operate separately with no synergies. In these cases the blade remains dull and ineffective.

I’m obviously optimistic about our future. I believe in our people’s ability to harness the frictions properly. It is their ability to do so, and to get in alignment, that will eventually determine our overall success.

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Report on Nordstorm Shows Lift9′s Capabilities

Posted in Digital Marketing, social media, tagged , , , , , , on December 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Here on this blog, I’ve often written about the progress of my newest venture, Lift9. My thoughts on company-building and entrepreneurship are a recurring theme for sure.

After coming up with a business plan in July and finding the right partners, we started hiring and building a social media research center in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. That has been,and continues to be, a tremendously rewarding experience. Our staff there has exceeded all my expectations not only in ability, but also in their embrace of our company vision and culture.

After a couple of months of ramp, we started to offer our services here in the US to forward-looking brands. Our traction really started to take hold this month in December. We are closing out 2009 with great anticipation for the coming year.

Amongst friends, however, some still have a difficult time grasping what it is that Lift9 does. This is not surprising given the newness of our industry in social intelligence. Recently, Lift9 posted one of our research reports on Slideshare (see below). This report measures the sentiment and reaction on social media to Nordstorms’ New Moon Sweepstakes campaign and its Twilight Fashion Line.

Our reports require a lot of data cleansing and validation, but the findings are very interesting. Also, we try to have tangible actionable takeaways from each page.

I hope this helps everyone understand the value that Lift9 is providing, and why we are all so excited about our future.

Peace everyone!

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In the Zone Week

Posted in business, social media, tagged , , , , , on August 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

I’ve had an “in the zone” type of a week, where things just fall into place. The Lift9 research center in Vietnam is now set up. Our web site will soon be launched (sorry, but with so many execution points, this has taken a back seat).

Now, more good news seem to be on the way as Lift9 is moving fast toward an automated solution to accessing information from additional  ”closed” forum and review sites. Our social media analytics solution will encompass results from the best social media listening tools as well as from a specialized Lift9 web data aggregating tool, all manned by our own highly trained research center. The clients will receive accurate insights in the form of automated dashboards, report templates, as well as social media engagement and strategy support.

Stay tuned, more to come. I need to be somewhat discreet for the time being.

I hope you are all enjoying  ”in the zone” days as well.

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Building an International Team is Challenging, Rewarding

Posted in business, entrepreneur, tagged , , , , , on August 6, 2009 | 4 Comments »

Hiring new employees is always a challenge. Trying to hire in a foreign country takes the challenge to another level.

Lift9 is building part of its social media research center in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam to support our efforts here in the states. We believe that in order to make much of the social media data relevant and useful, extensive research needs to be a big part of the solution.

While initially building the research team in Vietnam, I was excited about the eventual competitive advantage that was being created. Later during the process, however, I became just as excited about the human element of providing employment and opportunities to our new recruits from this foreign land.

I was impressed with many of the candidates’ English skills and willingness to interview in a foreign language. They asked critical questions and each sold him/herself in different and interesting ways. The interview process was difficult, with language and cultural barriers among other challenges. It, however, was an extremely rewarding process, as we bonded with those who joined our team. Breaking down the additional barriers makes the eventual relationship that much sweeter.

Moving forward, we will continue to have barriers to overcome. For one thing, the employment practice in Vietnam is to have sequential one-year employment contracts with an initial two-month probationary period. This creates a business environment of higher potential turnover, as opposed to the life-time employment culture during the “developmental eras” in Japan and Korea.

Yet, we’re excited to overcome these barriers. We plan on providing a nurturing, creative and challenging work environment for our Vietnamese staff. They are valuable contributors to our overall solution, as well as human beings deserving of respect and capable leadership from us.

You know, this is actually a lot of fun.

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Lift9, Making Sense of Social Media Data

Posted in business, entrepreneur, social media, tagged , , , , , on August 3, 2009 | 1 Comment »

lift9 logoTime to share a little more information about our new startup, Lift9.

The era of social media is just beginning. Digital information is doubling every 18 months, with social media data leading the charge. Unfortunately, this data is mostly fragmented and unstructured. Content is coming from all directions and impossible to control.

While leading the marketing strategy, analytics and planning group for the digital agency Ascentium, I realized that making sense of this growing data would be an increasingly difficult task. Social media listening and monitoring tools pull mostly unstructured data and cannot access every social media platform. To really get a true picture of social media conversations, human research and analysis are crucial to providing relevant solutions.

That was the genesis of Lift9. We leverage leading social analytics tools and incorporate the “human” element of research and analysis that help make sense of the available data. We are a team of senior marketing and public relations experts with a research center focused on structuring and validating social media data around a set of best practices and reporting templates.

Information is truly powerful, but only if it is understandable and useful. Our mission is to make social media data relevant and powerful for all client brands.

Our vision is to overcome the cost barriers of the labor-intensive nature of research and analysis. We have made relevant social media data affordable to all brands by building our research center off-shore.

Today, we are filling a critical niche by making sense of social media information for our clients. Tomorrow, we hope to be a market leader when social media research and reporting will be an essential marketing discipline for all brands.

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