Sharat Sharan’s On24: Lead Generation Through WebCasting (Part 5)

SM: Describe some of your team building experiences. Is your management team complete now?

SS: Our management team is more or less complete. With that said, I’m always looking to add 1-2 more people. From a people perspective, I am constantly looking at roles to fill in to support the growth of the company. At the moment, one key position that I am recruiting for is a VP Marketing.

You see, we made a transition during the downturn which 99% of companies fail to make. We had to do a complete overhaul of our team, business strategy, everything. Since then, at every stage, I have tried to make changes that keep us staffed with the right kind of people for the level of growth and scale that we are dealing with.

SM: What is your growth strategy?

SS: We continue to explore growth opportunities that align with our vision to provide webcasting and rich media marketing solutions for a company’s global communications needs for pre-event promotion, event delivery and post-event reporting and analytics.

This includes growing internationally with our offices in London and Beijing, which we recently opened. So far, 85% of our business has been in the US.

We are also developing new products and services that map back to our business model. For example, we saw an opportunity where companies were developing rich media assets (e.g., webcasts, podcasts and videos) for a specific campaign. Once the campaign was over, the companies moved on to the next campaign, but they still had all of this content. That’s when we though of Insight24, which I mentioned earlier. Through Insight24, we provided our customers and non customers a way to extend the investment of these investments and increase ROI.

From a growth perspective, I believe it’s important to have the right strategy and to execute against it. We always focus on the numbers and being able to produce against that. Whether it’s with a new service like Insight24 or our continued expansion internationally, I look at growth as a percentage of the business and how to maintain the 40% growth year after year. I see constant innovation and international business growth as a challenge and opportunity for us.

SM: What are your thoughts about exit?

SS: To build an important company in the rich media space, a public offering would be a milestone. It is not an exit strategy in itself. I am looking to build an important company in rich media marketing. However, an IPO is certainly a good milestone, as it would mean that we have reached a certain size and profitability.

[To be continued]

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Part 4]

This segment is part 5 in the series : Sharat Sharan’s On24: Lead Generation Through WebCasting
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