Happy 30th Outsell

You could say this post took 30 years to write and it wouldn’t be completely wrong. This is a long-one so grab a cup of coffee and lean in.

This week, we celebrate Outsell’s 30th anniversary. April 24, 1994, is the day our company was founded, incorporated, stamped with a seal in the state of California, C Corp and all with $5,000 deposited in the bank.

No one knows that on my laptop is a file dating back to the late 90s. In it: over 700 pages of emails that chronicle the story of Outsell. Randomly chosen, no rhyme or reason. Like a journal, with some lapses in time it is a good and accurate depiction of what unfolded. Here today is some of that story, the change we witnessed, and the lessons learned.

Few know we started as an outsourced sales firm, selling information services for organizations who, for whatever reason, couldn’t sell their new offerings or had territories open. What they had in common was information and technology — the roots of our founders. Our clients were recognizable brands. After three years of success, we were reminded of two things — when you are successful at selling others’ offerings, over time they resent paying commissions. When they take their lines back it’s hard to start over. After doing that a time or two the writing was on the wall — we were building others’ brands and not our own.

We were also getting asked questions about why something wasn’t selling, how to position it better, and so on. It was also 1997 and the Internet writing was on the wall. By then I’d left Outsell temporarily to take an exec role in an information services firm in Minneapolis. About to go public, Peter Appert of Alex Brown asked me who provided the external ‘independent’ market validation needed for our S1. He said we couldn’t commission our own research. I had to tell him it didn’t exist.

And so, it was time to pivot.

Back at Outsell, we launched our first subscription service looking at application markets for information and end-user consumption habits. Too soon for the market and ahead of our time — we did studies on these topics and sold them instead as multi-client studies.

We then launched our first service called Info About Info to look at trends and hot topics in the information services space and to fill the hole in the market Mr. Appert raised. We launched a weekly newsletter — e-briefs that made such a splash the Outsell name became known. So, we decided to keep it. We then launched I-Price and I-AIM (InfoAboutInformation Markets.) We had an I in our prefix well before Apple.

In December 1998 we published our first annual Outlook a tradition that continues to this day. We provided the industry’s very first comprehensive segmentation and began sizing a gnarly fragmented world.

And during that time, we moved from a home office (working where we lived) to a small office nearby because it was becoming clear that we were living where we worked! Do great work, deliver forward-thinking views with excellence, share what’s around the corner, and do it in a family-friendly way. Our kids would bring their friends to the office after school to drop off back-packs, grab a snack, and go around the corner to hang out on Main Street.

When we started, we were 100% virtual in a dial-up world. We had employees in Maine, Idaho, Minneapolis, and several parts of California. Fearless in our pursuit of a new way to work, we had no tracking of sick and vacation time (trust people trust!) Our philosophy was to hire the best people wherever they lived, have fun, and be there for our clients, each other, and our families. Soon our then head of finance was in Pittsburgh; our head of sales one day would be in London.

And from that perch we witnessed so much. Prior to starting Outsell we lived through the semiconductor (microprocessor, DRAM, and application specific integrated circuit world,) the birth of Lisa, the Mac, and the mouse. We went from luggables and the first ‘brick’ cell phone, to the evolution from mainframes and dumb terminals and Wang word processors to a whole new world pacman and all.

That laid the ground for us to witness the greatest acceleration of modern technology while we tracked and analyzed the impact of technology on our world of information — data, content, editorial, analytics, …. Call it what you want but if it was IP driven it was in Outsell’s watch.

• The dot.com era: Y2K and then March 10, 2000, the dot.com bust literally took place at our conference where I sat next to Mark Walsh, the CEO of Vertical Net about to keynote while his net worth evaporated.
• The terrorist era: September 11, 2001, we awakened in California to emails from our colleagues in New York describing what was unfolding in the wicked reality in front of them. I still have those haunting emails.
• Search on Steroids era: June 2004 the launch of the Outsell Leadership Councils and Google’s Tim Armstrong speaking at our inaugural event at The Plaza Hotel in New York. Who cares if they were in the quiet period about to go public that August. They wrote the rules their way.
• Mobile social era: 2007 Facebook was quietly emerging and by end of year in full swing launching advertising products, becoming their modern self, off the back of their college heritage. The iPhone was announced January 2007 and released that June. Our world was never the same.
• The Great Recession era: 2008 another collapse and during another Outsell event. Our keynote speaker covering the economy Michael Boskin, CEO and president of Boskin & Co was on and off the podium while talking to the White House, helping with a response to the Lehman Brothers collapse, and trying to keep AIG, whose insurance kept the economy moving, from the brink of catastrophe.
• The SaaS era: Post 2009 the next big wave and with it the workflow era of software and information and platforms were firmly in place. Big tech was here to stay. Convergence had finally arrived. Uber and the gig economy came along for the ride.
• Fake News era: 2016 Presidential Elections brought nothing but turmoil as our world began to fracture. Trump elected; Brexit ‘approved.’ China on the rise; India emerging as an economic powerhouse. Information warfare became real.

And then it went poof — COVID-19.

Was that an era or a black hole in space and time?

The world as we knew it stopped. After 9/11 we wrote a reference guide about working virtual to help those in NY who were so shockingly displaced. During COVID, we dusted it off, updated it, and wrote a series of blog posts about working virtual.

By that time, I had been doing it since 1995 and we at Outsell had been doing it since 1997. And so many years later the world finally caught up. We shut our one and only small office and became 100% virtual once again.

Everywhere in offices around the world trust became the operative word. Employees and employers were level set and in the same boat. Teams were given freedoms we had in place for years — to work, collaborate, and function in ways that afforded them the flexibility they needed to ‘do life’. Outsell’s mantra “life doesn’t happen in 9 to 5 boxes’ was truer than ever.

The pandemic was heartbreaking. A silver lining from the carnage opened doors to a kinder/gentler way of doing business. We learned to collaborate with digital tools, make video the norm, and use flying and in person meetings for what they were best designed to do. COVID took a huge toll and yet it opened the possibility of other ways to work.

• The Inflation era: 2022–2023 high Interest rates, stubborn price increases, one too many COVID-era bailouts. Supply, short and constrained combined with too much time and money and a new era in which none of us have led was upon us. Quiet quitting gave way to lay-offs, a mini-banking crunch averted, another cycle of cash preservation, venture capital drying up and PE owners left holding assets for longer cycles, with playbooks upside down, calling for cost-cuts and profits a different way.

And now the Generative AI era. VR/AR and the Metaverse, EVs and self-driving cars are taking a back seat to LLMs, and a world where machine learning and ‘traditional AI’ (oxymoron anyone?) is giving way to the next wave of technology on our doorstep.

During these 30 years I remember moments of client disbelief:

1. Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, Dialog looking at us like we were crazy when we told them Google and Yahoo! were competition. But we charge and they are free!?? Exactly… when something is free and it’s just as good as something for fee that’s disruption with a capital D. We even did some of the tests to prove the search results were equal.
2. Folks at Gale Group didn’t like when we told them that the Internet was the big public library in the sky.
3. An iBanker called us negative about J.D. Power’s fit with McGraw-Hill as we were told we were missing the point that J.D. Power was a ‘ratings company.’ It didn’t look to us like S&P, its sister company. We said it lacked synergies as a market-research company measuring c-sat. We caught flack. Later jettisoned we were vindicated.
4. Another client didn’t like that we called Tech Target and Capterra competitive to Gartner. A CEO from a third IT media company called me and said we didn’t know what we were talking about. ‘They are media companies.’ Yes, we know what media is. If it’s free to an end user, and comparable or good-enough it’s going to look and feel competitive to a paid source. It’s called a substitute product (Back to item 1.) Years later, Gartner bought Capterra and others like it as part of an SMB play.
5. Predicting disastrous moves in the news industry, in a forecast scenario we got right — one we called ‘Hitting the Wall,’ our then client at Associated Press called it prescient. Twitter became a new source of ‘news.’ We thought the Library of Congress was insane for trying to archive it.
6. We’ve been in board rooms where editors and publishers met for the first time to discuss strategy, despite the company being founded during the gold rush. One company’s editors had no idea that print distribution was going away because the couriers that carried print checks to banks were vanishing and so too was their distribution. Print to digital or die. The panic was palpable.
7. I’ve been chastised for telling the truth about brand names that sound like bad pharma drugs. RELX still sounds like relics to me. IQVIA still sounds like ICK when I see it. I think the world of the companies but not their names. The then CEO of EMAP didn’t like my call-out of the name Ascential. Names like art are personal. So, this we let go.

I’ve loved watching the quiet and persistent march of Wolters Kluwer under its leader Nancy McKinstry as she executed so well on the performance of diversified portfolios and the migration to analytics and software-first businesses. She has inspired and is inspiring. And for that I say hooray as this industry needs more women leaders on the heels of the late Helen Alexander, or Marjorie Scardino. Thank you, Kit van Tulleken and Wilma Jordan, for your I-banking leadership and prowess in a blue suits world.

In those 30 years we have lost great leaders, too many to count — Dave Power III, Patrick McGovern, Jeff Killeen, Tony Hsieh, Christopher Ainsley, and Steve Smith. We have consoled and supported too many who have been removed from office, unceremoniously let go, or told their time and tenure were up.

And we have heard amazing speakers:

· David Calhoun who from GE ran Nielsen and gave his first keynote to industry at the Outsell Signature Event.

· Dr. Andrew Weil shared lessons in self-care with our CEOs also as a closing keynote. I’ll never forget our CEOs in attendance doing deep breathing exercises. Bliss.

· We were inspired by our friend, Scott Parazynski’s keynote, who during 2009 joined us in Ireland under our theme No Guts, No Glory. We were riveted as he told his story of a first failed, then second, successful summit of Mt. Everest. He shared his experiences from five space shuttle missions. Today he remains the only person in history who has been to both outer space and the top of our world’s tallest peak.

· There was the time I was moved to tears when friend and keynote Jeff Tarr told the story of his then firm Digital Globe working with AP to break the story of human trafficking in the fisheries of Thailand. That is the power of information and why we do what we do.

We have had great partners. Wilma Jordan and her team at JEGI CLARITY, or David Worlock who joined us in 2006 via his firm EPS and remains with us 18 years later, a friend, colleague, thought leader and collaborator. Who says you can’t work with friends and family? David’s daughter Kate has been part of the firm for as many years. One key person, Steve Giglio, instrumental for our firm’s growth joined us, left, came back, and has singlehandedly helped drive our top line.

In our 30 years, my sister, brother-in-law, daughter, two of three sons, and a couple of best friends and their sons and daughters have held or hold meaningful roles. It can be done, and relationships can remain intact especially during tough times.

What have I learned along the way in rough times, great times, and just so-so times? Here is my list in no particular order:

· Market selection and problem to product fit are critical.

· Being early to market or under-capitalized when the road to market education is long or complex is a slog.

· Instinct and intuition matter as much as data and analytics. They go hand in hand and so does bringing good data to life with so-what and what next. Prescriptions matter.

· Surrounding oneself and the firm with the best talent is a relentless and essential pursuit. As long-time partner Jay Hussey said just yesterday: measure exec teams not just against each other but against what’s best in class in market.

· Relationships matter. So do great values and a purpose to rally behind.

· Deliver great experiences whether digitally, over the phone, in the written or presented word, or at an event. Be memorable. As we say in the Greek tradition: treat people as if they are in your home.

· Focus on one big thing. Doing one thing awesomely well is way better than a myriad of things just so-so. There is alchemy in pulling ‘no cards’ as I have come to call them.

· Recognize every financing decision has consequences. Self-funding, Angel, VC, PE, going public. They all have pros and cons and tradeoffs and have as much to do with founder preferences as they do with business and market contours.

· As my long-time friend Tom Kemp says, “every leader has a sell by date.” Said another way quarterbacks are best set to retire when they are on top. Know when it’s time to pass the baton.

· Do what you love or don’t do it at all. And remember everything needn’t be done 100%. Pick the lanes of excellence that matter. 20/80 is a real thing.

· Carry a brand name that is simple, memorable, and easy to repeat. Use it consistently!

· Know yourself and tell the truth about it. I am not the easiest person to work with. I have high standards. My mind is both active and swift; I am not always patient; I ask why too much. I care deeply about people working too hard or too long and wish for them to find simpler/easier ways. I see around corners and am frustrated when others can’t see what I see, or I can’t seem to articulate it well. I am hopelessly direct. I email too much. I loathe new technology that slows me down under the auspices of making me more productive.

· Have an awesome partner and board. Benefit from a diversity of opinion. Outsell wouldn’t be Outsell without Greg, my partner in every way. Steve Goodall, ex-client, investor, board member, partner, and friend has provided amazing advice, counsel, and analytic prowess. Moreso his values align. Surround yourself with good people. Life is short.

· People are not disposable. We have dealt with mental illness, cancer, teen suicide attempts, the arrival of offspring, the death of parents, colleagues passing, marriages and divorce. We have seen kids grow up, go off to college, and take their first job. We have faced individuals who didn’t work out or could no longer make the trek for whatever reason or rationale. How we treat one another in any circumstance matters. Call it a golden rule. Call it what you want. Dignity matters.

Whether we support McGraw-Hill so it can educate; coach emerging firms like k-ID, B3 Insights, or Capital for Climate so they can improve online safety for kids, improve water use in industry, or improve how capital is put to use to solve our significant climate problems, we strive to make a difference. When a new drug is launched, patent awarded and tracked, or healthcare diagnosis made; when we help the provider who supports basic discovery, justice, or awareness around the world we at Outsell are doing our job making this world a better place. And that is why we get up in the morning, 30 years later.

And now the firm continues its journey with the next generation of leadership in our midst. I am excited to see our future under the skills and gifts of Philipp Mueller who joined us last May, and the team he is cultivating and building. How satisfying and fun to work with him each day and see the difference he is making here. We are of the industry we serve, and we don’t get a bye. It’s exciting to go through our own continued modernization, adaptation, moving with the market and the times.

There are also the team members who are not out in front but without whom we couldn’t function. Jeannine — J9 as we’ve come to call her — I couldn’t do any of this without you.

Srini, Rajesh and Karthik — they keep our IT and sales ops running; Rudy and Annalisa keep the finance and admin house in order. When all runs right it’s silent out there. Quiet as a mouse. I never forget they are the foundation on which we all rest and am immensely grateful for who they are and what they do.

I say to everyone in our company we all work for sales. That means we all work for clients. Because if we ever forget from where and how the blood and oxygen pumps, we are DOA as a business. There are real people out there with real problems. We can’t ever forget that.

Every day with clients keeps it real. The alchemy is in the market, the client engagement, the results not the activities. Every decision has a consequence, every action one too. When you are largely self-funded and it’s just you, your partners, your team, and your clients there is no cushion, no safety net. You look in the mirror each day and know where the buck starts and stops. That my friends, is what it’s like to be an entrepreneur, 30-years in the making. And what a ride it’s been. Thank you for being part of the journey.