If We Can, You Can

Author:

Alan Timothy

Business:

i-snapshot

Published:

10/11/2008 11:14:00

In 1997 we’d grown to somewhere between £3.5-4 million. Because the market for database marketing was catching up with us, we needed something different; or at least needed to evolve. I came to the conclusion that America was the home of all this stuff, plus the fact that I fancied a holiday, so I started looking on the internet for an American partner.

As it happened, there was a story in one of the magazines about an American company who were looking to come to Europe, so I phoned them up and said, “You’re looking to come to Europe. I’m in Europe, why don’t we have a conversation?”

We met them in February ’97 and they took their first stake by September ’97. They then exercised the option to buy it all by the Christmas of ’97 and we completed early ’98. I hadn’t set out to sell the business; I was initially looking for a partner so I could make the business better, but selling it is what I did in the end after they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

I stayed on as European Managing Director. In Cincinnati, their main client was Procter and Gamble and they’d come up with a piece of technology to run larger data sets that they believed Europe would like.

They brought the technology over, spent a million pounds doing it, and then two things happened. Procter and Gamble Europe said Cincinnati might think we want it, but we actually don’t. Also, the technology didn’t actually work in Europe.

There was supposed to be three independent layers to the technology, except they put the US address management system right through the middle as the binding piece. Unbeknown to the Americans, the American address system doesn’t work in Europe, but they built this one piece of system with it running down the middle, hoping for it to take off in Europe. We brought in some very large bits of kit, put on a development team of six people, for a system that didn’t work and that Procter and Gamble didn’t want!!!!!

I flew to Dallas to break the news to them that the system didn’t work. They really didn’t have any idea, and yet they’d spent all this money and had half a million pounds worth of kit sitting downstairs that wasn’t going to do anything.