It's been too long. Stories of my past adventures.

This is my first Blog post since October 2011.  It's been too long and this is the revival of this blog.  In scanning back through the last few posts, it reminds me on some interesting experiences and stories of my career evolution.  I want to share some of those stories.

I entered the world of start-ups originally in 2007.  I joined a garage pair of former associates at a large Bank for 20 years.  They had an idea to infuse customer engagement with retail business through text message driven marketing.  SMS was the short form for this style of messaging.  It was a local, Richmond VA pair of family-men in their 40's and 50's trying to get into a race for mobile gold.

I came on a short 2 years after they launched...

There was one other "sales" guy who had driven all of about $40K in the last year of revenue... I knew he was toast after I was there for 2 days.  Our offices adorned the strip mall adjacent to an Asian-business owned Nail Salon and a Subway.  I couldn't care less where we were every day for 10-12 hours, I thought it was kind of cool... when people walked in off the street for whatever reason - it was like a zoo exhibit for a start up.  We'd conduct our customer presentations on site at times... with meetings circled in the center of the store.  Our product development was to think up good ideas and ways we could approach a market, sector, channel, partner, and we had a lot of ideas.

The initial toe in the water with our mobile company was into the local restaurant scence and clubs like comedy joints and nightclubs. Within a month, I had secured a meeting with the largest email marketer and traditional marketing agency for Restaurants.  We won a huge deal with a revenue share program.  They had also considered large scale operators of mobile services.  Here we are 4 guys in a store with a couple short codes and some dreams... We began immediately with plans to scale the partnership and plans for everything...

When I was able to ink a joint alliance and reseller agreement to pinch our mobile platform into the product suite of an adjacent market, we rose revenue 200% in less than 6 months.  We were poised to do even better with some new license revenue.

When we moved into the downtown clock-tower top floor in the historic Richmond train station, it felt like we had arrived.  There were over 8 offices in our suite, i picked the corner near the train depot.  My office was sick. It was the old brick, huge ceilings, nice furniture and posted up on top of the building next to a leading advertising agency in Richmond at the time.

Now, because i was intimately involved with the revenue source for the company, I knew things were picking up.  We had nearly quadrupled the revenue from our alliance in the last 3 months as sales picked up with key retail restaurants.  Things were good and the money was coming in... What comes in didn't appear to be reinvested and put into strategic buckets for continued growth, however.  When i asked for budgets and conference attendance, we seemed to always have a reason not to participate.

What I found out later was that the partners had serious financial distress and debt that was causing them to think twice about the risks.

When i caught the scent of this trend, I knew I was on my way. We were successful in laying the foundation for future success and dominance in a market with 30,000 restaurant targets... but it wasn't to be.  The partner we notably acquired an alliance in the Restaurant industry decided to divest that partnership and send us directly all leads from mobile.  We thought this would be a folly of business, not having to share revenue.

But the phones didn't ring off the hook.  We were able to secure hundreds of location license deals, but the real goal was large-scale institutional license for mobile for every McDonalds, KFC, taco bell, applebees, and every other restaurant chain worldwide... at least that was my goal.  We were restricted from direct selling, but i hit up 80 calls a day for several weeks in a row to drum up biz, it was not the same edge than saying "Hello Sir, This is James with the company currently handling your digital customer engagement on your website and email - your trusted marketing partner today - we got a great way to help with mobile engagement, let's sit down and take a look..."

I left and began my next chapter - I learned to much about being an Entrepreneur and developing a market-focus in your brand, operations, sales vernacular and understanding of their unique challenges and customers mindset.  I also learned that having a trust established through evidenced gains in customer goals - will translate into larger revenue per customer.  You need to have a focus, but you need to solve all your customers problems if you want that relationship to flourish and ripen over time.  The more you are valued, the more you become indispensable.

Next up, my own lead on a start-up.

Best,
James