Pioneering Data On-Demand: Salary.com CEO and Serial Entrepreneur Kent Plunkett (Part 6)

SM: What are you using your IPO proceeds for?

KP: We continue to favor a philosophy of growth with internally generated cash. We are using IPO proceeds mostly to acquire small companies that are good strategic fits with our product line. I am probably one of the few people you talk to who thinks going public is great. Despite the recent pressures due to recession fears, I like being a public company CEO.

SM: Why do you like being a public company CEO?

KP: We have been able to grow business and attract good talent without having tons and tons of venture capital because we are an employee-owned company. At the time we went public, 66% of the company was owned by employees. I have a really high level of employee engagement and employee alignment. I almost never lose people to outside recruiters. People really like the culture here. It is a culture that is about being customer-centric, being winners, liking what you do and caring about the business and the people you work with. It is a nice mix, a really nice community we have built here. It is one that other stakeholders, like our customers, like to join and stay with. That permeates everything about the company. Being public is part of that. It helps validate that the company’s culture can remain independent, and it helps us set a foundation for growth that reaches out and spans 10-20 years from now.

SM: What kind of TAM are you looking at 10-20 years out?

KP: We went public at $23 million in revenue. We talked about a TAM for online and offline of over $1 billion. If the market is now approximately $1.2 billion, then with 20-25% penetration we start to look like we have hit mature market penetration in compensation.

One of the things that we have done over the last several years is examine other business categories. We spent some of our IPO proceeds last year acquiring companies in two areas. One was compensation management, where we acquired the IPAS Survey, which is the largest global survey of technology jobs pay. That enabled us to build out data resources to launch our own opinion data sets for foreign countries. We launched in Canada at the end of the last quarter. We will have other country data sets launching in the future.
We are also investing in competency models.

SM: What does that mean?

KP: Competencies are the skills, knowledge and attitudes that are predictive of success in a position. In a journalist you might have an attitudinal competency for curiosity. When someone is interviewing you for a job they might ask questions to determine how curious you are. Your measurement for curiosity would map into succession planning. HR people are looking to deploy competencies in their organization structures so they can ask the right interview questions and hire the right people, who are a good fit for what the organization needs them to do.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Pioneering Data On-Demand: Salary.com CEO and Serial Entrepreneur Kent Plunkett
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