After a period of silence, amazingly enough readers keep coming to my blog through a variety of ways. I am glad to see so many people are interested in mobile marketing. My apologies for the lack of new posts, I have been really busy (haven't we all :), and I just haven't been able to find the time to do my blogging.
I spent a few months as the EVP of Mobile Marketing for a Direct Response Marketing agency. I was hired to repair & finish their existing non-functional text platform & to expand their mobile service offerings. Their main focus was on one product at that time & everyone was anxious to get it up and running. The app allowed the end user (any customer) to purchase direct response marketed products via a few simple text messages. It sounded doable to me so I accepted the job. During day one on the job I knew the system was just not built right & after a week of thourgh inspection & testing I knew the platform and app needed to be rebuilt from scratch. Our only other option was to lease access to another messaging platform and run it that way. Leasing a platform was my suggestion due to VERY limited resources from IT made available to me. All of this was unexpected to everyone involved & this now meant the one product they were banking on being the hottest new thing in direct response would now be delayed.
Having worked in mobile for a few years now, I have a good grasp on what will work / won't work before an app has even begun to be built, what demographic of people will participate, & ultimately what will make it a great experience for the customer. With that information I knew that this product was focused on too narrow of an audience to be an instant hit. We were realistically looking at a slow growth app. Yes it would work great for a few companies with the right demographic but not for the masses. Anyone with a decent sense for business knows that the a small target demographic equals less sales. And for any one service with that growth model, money must go in long before it is returned & profitable. Now we are at a crossroad, their projections are obviously quite different then mine!
All of this combined with their incredible resistance to acknowledge that while it was a great effort on their part to build what they had, but it was just built incorrectly, began to make me wonder why I had left a nice secure position heading up a mobile division at another company. This rebuild of the system was not a want of mine, rather a necessity for this product to work and no one wanted to listen to it. I spent almost 3 months asking for IT time & or a budget to allocate to this project. They hired me to direct the creation of an app that people would actually use, not one that would be abandoned 1/2 way through because of confusion and system errors. Why release a product that way, why not wait until it's built right so it can be easy to use & an enjoyable process.
This meant we would basically need to start from scratch or recruit the help of another company, my suggestion was to lease a messaging platform. We could re-create the product with only the lease fees rather than $10's or $100's of thousand dollars & time to build it ourselves. In any event, solution after solution that I brought to the table was met resistance mostly in the form of requests for excessive paperwork justification. All of this, constant travel, non-relevant meetings (and much more but I don't think you need more details, you get it now) further brought me away from the very thing they hired me to do, get them mobile...
Eventually they let me go, no performance warning, no chance for me to explain in the proper setting with the 4 C-Level execs above me what was going on... Hey, they now knew 1,000% more about mobile than before I came on board (they couldn't even get a short-code provisioned) & probably realized it was going to be a lengthy, expensive process & mobile wasn't going to make them the millions from this one product right away like they thought it would. So, one day a phone call came that they no longer needed my services and were offering no severance pay. I was just another executive recruited away from a great job and spit out. A few threatening letters followed in the coming weeks about lawsuits if I slandered them or even continued to work in mobile... Nice, huh? They tried telling me the proprietary knowledge I learned working for them prevented me from working in mobile when they recruited me to teach them about mobile and certainly learned nothing new about it from them. I don't think that's going to keep me from working in mobile... Ha!
It was one of those nightmare jobs, almost everything that wasverbally promised to me during the recruiting, then hiring process didn't materialize, and the difficulties of an under-defined position were experienced 100%, I'll explain that: It's not like coming in as the EVP of Sales where you have a team, an established route for handling issues an very clear objectives... Mobile proposes a new set of challenges; I have to build, sell, train etc. and then also need something from every team; lot's of programming, graphics, sales, account management. It's a position that almost no-one is used to and no-one really understands how to fit into their resource planning. Basically, there is no set operating standard for a mobile position in many companies today, even ones looking to become mobile. I have run into this challenge working with clients struggling to unite multiple departments to get mobile to work in a cross channel environment (honestly where it works best), so I understood what was happening here. It was not fun & I didn't even have long enough to work through these position issues here. I left feeling used for my knowledge, experience, worn out from excessive travel, LONG hours, knots in my stomach from constant tension, and then in my opinion inappropriately let go & hurt to be honest. I should know feelings have no place in most places of work anymore, but still I was hurt & worst of all my family will suffer from an immediate loss of a paycheck.
I found out within a couple of weeks later one of my colleagues, a programmer I had worked closely with quit because of similar issues and I felt a little validation. At least I wasn't crazy, these sorts of things were happening to others and not just me.
What I realized from this experience was that now 3 agencies I had worked for had me running or building their mobile division, making most, if not all of the decisions, doing most of the selling and account management. I now know all of the little pieces that make up the incredibly complex mobile eco-system that very few know how to do to make an entire mobile division run (many know a specific piece, but the whole process from beginning to end is what I am referring to here). I decided to go out on my own and create a hybrid mobile agency, JStar Mobile. I'll post more on what my new project is and does later, just catching up on the last few months and wondering how many of you have gone through an experience like this? Post away my friends...
