Rolling Up Mystery Shopping: Market Force CEO Karl Maier (Part 6)

Sramana: What do you want to do with the company? Are you going to continue down the roll-up path?

Karl Maier: That is part of the strategy. From day one we have had a two-pronged strategy, and the first prong is to consolidate. We will continue down that path. We do not need equity to finance acquisitions now. The second path is transformation. We are investing in new products and solutions.

We have developed a strategy map which shows our aspiration five years down the road. We want our customer intelligence applications embedded in at least 25 of the largest business-to-consumer companies, which spend on average $3 million a year with us. Today, our top 25 clients spent about $1.6 million with us.

If we are able to meet that goal, we will be a $100 million revenue company. In order to reach that, we are doing to have to continue with acquisitions and organic growth; we grew 18% organically last year. My belief is that if we can be a $100 million revenue business in the next two to three years, then we will be the true leader in the space and we could take the company public. We may also decide to continue to grow the company because the market will support more growth.

Sramana: What does your team look like at this point? You have meshed several different companies. What does your executive management structure look like?

Karl Maier: I have five direct reports. One of my direct reports is Janet Eden-Harris, who is the chief marketing officer and senior vice president of strategy. She has had large jobs in the past. She was the CEO of a social media company that she sold to J.D. Power. She is in charge of all of our marketing initiatives and how we position the company. She is also responsible for lead generation for the salespeople and the strategy. She has a marketing team and a strategy team that works for her. I met her through common investors four years ago, and we recruited her.

Todd Siegler is our senior vice president of corporate development, although he does much more than that. He has responsibility for all of our M&A and partnership activities. He is a lawyer by background and serves as our general counsel. He currently has a technology [team] that reports to him as well. He is one of the early folks here, and was our first employee in May 2005.

Our vice president of sales is someone whom we also hired and someone whom I worked with before, Patrick Gaul. He has been a sales executive for 30 years. He has worked at big companies like AT&T and with smaller companies like VIA Networks. He has all the hunters and farmers reporting to him.

Shauna Callahan heads our finance. She has all of the finance teams reporting to her. She has a private and public company background and has consolidations in her background as well. She started her career at Arthur Andersen when they were still around.

Mark Cosola is our senior vice president of operations. We hired him almost four years ago. He started his career at Arthur Andersen and was then a consultant for a while. He was a Six Sigma trainer at Home Depot and ran integrations and acquisitions for American Retail.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Rolling Up Mystery Shopping: Market Force CEO Karl Maier
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