Quick Search

2007-11-14 - TCI Interview: Craig McGuinn

COO of Ward Media Inc.

Basic Information

Full name: Craig P. McGuinn II
Title: Chief Operating Officer
Company: Ward Media, Inc.
# years in biz: 5
Corp. type: Sub “S” Corporation, privately held
Business partners: Philip S. Friedman
Age: 40
Marital status: Married
# Kids: 2
Home town: Grew up in Brooklyn, NY
Place of current residence: Tuckahoe, NY (Southern Westerchester)
Company mission: To be the best "long form" lead generation company in the market through the use of 1) proprietary lead tracking software (LeadPOWER™) 2) operating the best education lead call center facility in the marketplace & 3) delivering the best customer service in the industry on BOTH the advertiser and publisher side.

Favorite quote: (I have two)

1) The Power of Attitude

Our lives are not determined by what happens to us, but how we react to what happens; not by what life brings to us, but by the attitude we bring to life. A positive attitude causes a chain reaction of positive thoughts, events and outcomes. It is a catalyst…a spark that creates extraordinary results.

2) The Essence of Determination

Learn to embrace change, and you’ll begin to recognize that life is in constant motion, and every change happens for a reason. When you see boundaries as opportunities, the world becomes a limitless place, and your life becomes a journey of change that always finds its way.

Most inspirational person: My wife Jennifer. She is an absolute rock. The few times in my life that I have had any doubt whatsoever, she has always been able to illuminate my strengths and convey to me that my will, skill & determination will overcome what is in front of me. When I walk out the front door I have already decided in my mind that “Today will be a great day” and, most often, it is and a significant amount of that is sheer positive mental attitude. Nothing is more powerful than the power of auto-suggestion (see “Think and Grow Rich” by Napolean Hill).

Interview:

1) Why was your company started? Phil Friedman founded Ward Media. He always had an entrepreneurial spirit. His father owned and operated his own business for 30 years. After helping Silver Carrot develop its Direct Marketing strategy, he left and started the company in 2001 under a different name and then reincorporated in January 2002 as Ward Media, Inc. to develop opportunities in the direct marketing and email marketing arenas.

2) What industry publications do you read? I read mostly business publications as they give me insight into overall trends. They include Businessweek, Inc., Entrepeneur and Barron’s. As for industry, I read OMMA & of course, TCI ;)

3) How often do you travel? Where? Too much. I just presented two breakout sessions at two west coast trade shows 10 days apart in Las Vegas (http://www.targusinfo.com/summit/schedule.asp) and then San Diego (http://www.eduventures.com/pdf/mslc_agenda.pdf). I am in Chicago very often, most recently when Ward Media was honored as the 131st fastest growing privately held company on Inc. magazine’s “Inc. 500” list. We have several large accounts there and Ad-Tech presents there as well as the IAB Leadership conference this past March. Now that we’ve broken ground on our Florida call center I will be heading down there every week for twelve straight weeks to train and organize that effort.

4) Which trade shows does Ward Media attend? Do you exhibit? We exhibit at Eduventures and will begin exhibiting at CCA as our core focus right now is long form lead gen, specifically education. However, our email business is picking up very strong due to recent heavy investment in deliverability & white listing so we may expand where we exhibit in 2008. We attend Adtech San Fran, Miami & NY, Affiliate Summit, Targus Info Lead Quality Summit

5) What is your overall goal for the business? Right now we are totally committed to covering the entire spectrum of education lead management from origination of the lead, proprietary tracking, building out a call center for lead verification/fulfillment/hot transfers and even enrollments as well as expansion of our search efforts. There is simply WAY too much market share there to continue to grab at our level of expertise and it is still expanding as evidenced by our 1,404% 3 year growth rate. We love long form lead generation and specifically in a portal environment. We are currently looking at opportunities to transition the education model over to another lucrative segment.

6) What is the most difficult thing about owning a business? Having to worry about everything. When you have a job you worry about your work being done. When you own a business you worry about everyone’s tasks and every big account and every big vendor, etc.

7) How many employees does Ward have? 13 full time and two part time

8) Are you hiring? What positions? Yes! Call center reps (for the new call center in Coral Springs FL.) sales, exec. asst., and tech programmer.

9) How do you market your business? (We don’t, on trade newsletters & websites, in magazines, via an in-house newsletter, banners, other website promos, PR, etc.) To date we have done very little. We are now beginning to exhibit and utilize PR

10) How many advertisers do you have? Hundreds of campaigns, but we do aggregate some through agencies, so we deal with dozens of actual clients

11) Do you own your own sites? Which ones? www.degreestreet.com, www.degreevenue.com are the flagship sites. We will be re-introducing some old co-reg sites in 2008 though, www.dreamcargiveaway.com & www.ultimateshoppingspree.com.

12) How much traffic do your sites get per month? 300,000 hits

13) Do you have your own lead scrubbing and delivery technology or do you license it? If you license, from who? Both. In house scrubbing and Targus Info

14) Do you specialize in something else besides lead gen? We monetize data files and have a rather large affiliate network for email campaigns.

15) Have you tried any new lead gen methods? If so which ones (search, microsite, abandonment, telecpa, redirect, opt-2-pop, i-frame, etc.) we have recently been driving more microsite and tele cpl’s

16) Do you broker your advertiser’s offer to get them more leads? We have an afilliate network of education portals & career sites that we utilize coupled with our powerful lead scrubbing and lead tracking capabilities through LeadPOWER™ to deliver superior quality than those vendors could otherwise deliver without us.

17) If so, how many affiliates/publishers do you work with? Over a hundred easily.

18) How much does your largest advertiser spend with you per month? It varies as there are bigger months of the year than others. Probably $300K right now, however, it has been (and will be again) close to $1,000,000.

19) Give us your 30 sec sales pitch to potential advertisers. We have the most powerful, proprietary data mining tracking system in the market. That, coupled with a clients ability to deliver back end conversion data by sub-sub ID, produces the most powerful lead you can deliver to your phone reps. We also operate at an incredibly efficient level (averaging over 7 digits in revenue per full time employee annually) which allows us to get you more, and/or higher quality, leads per dollar spent. Lastly, we have the hardest working, customer service focused staff you’ll find anywhere and, from what we hear, it is a pleasure doing business with us.

20) What do you feel are the true benefits of online lead generation? The data sourcing is unreal. You can precisely target like never before over offline lead generation. You can know that your lead will definitively be 25-35 yrs. Of age, female, in the Houston, TX area and specifically looking to go back to school to become a chef. To target at that level offline is, quite simply, impossible. Nothing beats online lead generation. We could find left-handed dentists in Minnesota that live near a baseball field if you wanted us to J

21) If you could change something about the coreg biz what would it be and why? Better targeting, plain and simple. Weeding out the window shoppers from the buyers. I like what Active Response Group does as they have the ability to ask some questions up front during the collection of the demographic info and show or suppress offers based on those questions. Also, everyone should offer drop-downs for additionall questions as well as double opt whether through a pop at that point in time or a follow up email. Email is best as you can be sure that someone didn’t fill it in with someone else’s info. Of course, it will cost more, but it should always be an option.

22) Who is your ideal client? We prefer a highly educated client that is willing to test and try new things. Some schools have allowed us to add additional questions to their form and track backend performance on this basis. This is immeasurably helpful to us and them from a learning / optimization standpoint.

23) How many clients have you sent to collections? Any scammers you’d like to make others aware of? Not very many, however, there are two very worth mentioning and avoiding at any & all costs:

Irv Fryberg is a total deadbeat, WayBeyond and Creoscope. Both of these companies beat us for about $100K, however, that has been pretty much it over a long period of time. Irv is just a thief, Creoscope never followed up on an agreed upon payment plan and subsequently stopped responding to us completely, so we were forced to sue.

24) How has the business evolved since it was started? We essentially evolved from an email publisher to a full service agency and soon became lead focused after landing a few school clients and building our tracking software platform around it.

25) What are the next steps for the business? Much bigger presence in the education lead gen. space and a powerhouse call center focused on being number 1 in call generated education leads in very short order. Beyond that our mail business is advancing nicely, some customization of our software for client licensing, additional Agency of Record deals to go along with our first one landed in 2007 and possible expansion of the portal concept to other arenas.

 

Interviewed by: Lindsay Mure-O'Neill, Editor-in-Chief of TheCoregInsider.com 

© 2007 The Coreg Insider