The story Global Rev Gen
Strikes, Strokes and 15 years of change. This is the story of the company I founded in 2009. It’s been quite a ride… and the hard-earned success I am most proud of.
Last week I shared a window into my first 7 ventures…
This is the story about the only one of them that is still around today - not only existing, but thriving.
This is the story of Global Rev Gen “GRG”.
Our 1st website was built on flash and had this cool spinning globe with awesome music on a dark background.
Our 2nd website is below – that one was my favourite – we were very irreverent at that time.
The Name
I originally wanted to call this business REV GEN (because it would help other businesses generate revenue), but revgen.com was taken, so I purchased globalrevgen.com instead.
This was not only pragmatic, but fortuitous, as GRG ended up helping businesses all over the planet generate new revenues in new and innovative ways. GRG was also global - in terms of its people - from day 1.
The first employees were Serbian, Australian, Indonesian, Chilean, Indian and Filipino. We have always had people of all colours and diverse backgrounds in our company.
The People
Today, the four owners are a white skinned Canadian/German (thats me), a nicely tanned Chinese/Australian, a white skinned Australian, and an olive skinned Lebanese.
The CEO is beautiful tanned Chilean.
The Head of Brand (and Growth) is a huge black African/Canadian.
The Head of Client Service is a debonaire Filipino.
Our Head of Operations is Serbian, other division heads were/are Filipino, Indonesian, Chinese… the list goes on.
But there has only ever been one culture. The GRG culture.
A culture generated by a irreverent, politically incorrect, and yet truly multi-national, multi-cultural, all inclusive, gender equal, non-binary group of amazing humans.
Interestingly, we were all of those things before it was fashionable or mandated to do so. We did it simply because thats how things should be.
How?
The Culture
GRG always prioritised “people over profit”, and “value to our clients and profit to our company, in that order” - as I used to say back when I was the fearless leader.
We were also hybrid and remote workers from day 1.
While we had offices over the years in places as diverse as my apartment, to a Sailing Club on Sydney Harbour…
…to an ex dental clinic in Serbia, to a business center in The Philippines…
…to a grown up office in downtown Sydney…
but it all started in the apartment I bought in December 2009. I still live there today.
The Start
In December 2009 (at 26 years old) I quit my job, bought an apartment, started a relationship, and Founded 4 companies —all at once. As I wrote last week.
By late 2010, 3 of those 4 companies had failed (as had that relationship) but GRG was winning, big time.
Today GRG works for two thirds of the Universities in Australia and helps brands, from startups to listed corporates, advertise and market themselves in over 50 countries around the world.
GRG employs people from 10+ nationalities across 3 continents (with descendants anglo-saxons, like me, being the minority group) and has established the very best company culture I have ever experienced. Anywhere.
See how we have evolved from this: GRG company video from 2014
…to this New leadership announcements in early 2024 - what an evolution, I am so proud of them. All of them.
The Story
In early 2010 I discovered that Australians only accounted for around 3% of global internet traffic, but that many Australians were active on international websites or platforms owned by companies in the US, Europe or Asia.
I also discovered that the owners of those websites and platforms did not value their Australian traffic. They would sell me access to their Australian eyeballs through advertising - and would let me “buy” that advertising on a performance basis ie if the people who saw the ad clicked through and converted into a lead or customer, then I would get paid and I would then pay the media owner.
I made this work for a small challenger brand called Quickflix (a copycat business to Netflix) which back in 2010 was all about online DVD rentals.
Via my relationships I networked my way to the incumbent in this space, Bigpond Movies who offered online DVD rental as well, but who were owned by Telstra, Australia’s largest telco, giving them a distinct advantage and a trusted brand.
I proposed to sell them 40,000 new customers for $30 per new signup. In other words, a $1.2M contract.
They offered to run a trial with me for $10,000, see how things went, and go from there.
I declined.
I told them that “all of my work is front loaded, and all of my profit only kicks in when things are up and running. I am offering to do work completely at my risk, so you only pay when I get you a new customer.. but you have to buy as many as I can send to you otherwise we don’t have a deal.” - I had nothing to lose.
They accepted, and signed a $1.2M purchase order for 40,000 new customers.
F&%K YEAH!
I needed help, so I called my best friend and asked him to quite his job and come work with me to deliver on this contract.
I also offered him half the equity in the company so that we would be equal partners (I was working on 3 other ventures at the time after all, so I felt this was more than fair given the opportunity I had created).
He thought it over, and then on his birthday in 2010, quit his job. I am so glad that he did, because he made the company work, while I made it grow. We are business partners and friends to this day.
A month later, he showed up at my apartment and we figured out how to use a new performance tracking system called HasOffers. It took us about 4 hours to get the first tracking pixel to fire (mainly because of a rendering issue on the Firefox browser which meant that a key button was barely visible on the screen). It was brave new territory and we were learning as we went.
Bigpond Movies was already working with a big well established agency and two smaller affiliate networks. They were getting around 2000 new customers per month.
Within three months however, we were delivering 3,000 new customers per month, and we were not cannibalising any of the existing volumes – we were finding them truly new customers because we were buying ads from international media vendors instead of just Australian groups.
Bigpond Movies were flabbergasted and asked us how we were doing this, to which I responded “tactical media buying to target local audiences across global networks”. It was a real innovation. (These days all of that kind of stuff happens automatically, but back in 2010 it was a goldmine)
3000 signups x $30 = $90,000 per month… which is what we were invoicing them.. and making a healthy 30% gross margin and healthy net profit per month. We were rich!
The Finger of Fate
I literally asked my business partner “what do you want to do for the rest of your life?”. There was never gonna be another rainy day.
But then, the hand of god or the finger of fate intervened..
We were at a fancy restaurant, with our accountant, literally cheers-ing our heady success - when I got the call “Telstra is shutting down Bigpond movies, online DVD rentals are being replaced by streaming”. My response included a bunch of expletives, but also included “WTF is streaming!?!”
By the end of 2010, we had won and lost our 1st million dollar client.
This made us reflect on what we were – were we an agency? where we are performance network? But one thing was clear – the tactic we used to access global ad inventory to target local audiences was a winning strategy.
Look Global, Target Local.
I was reading an article in newspaper which said that Australia's three largest exports were coal, iron ore… and higher education.
I thought about Australian Universities running marketing campaigns in other countries… I decided that we could use the same methodology to target people in any country, by buying that traffic from global media groups. In other words, I thought we should repeat our successful strategy but just target people in Vietnam or Brazil or Kenya instead of people in Australia.
I cold called a number of Australian Universities and Educational providers. Most rejected me, were disinterested in what I had to say, or simply did not pick up.. but one guy did.
He was the Global head of eMarketing at a multi-billion dollar listed education group.
“What do you want?” He said.
“Well...” I said “Australia's three largest exports are coal, iron ore and higher education. My agency can deliver against the need for Australian education institutions to target local audiences in diverse countries - by buying traffic from media groups in North America and Europe. We have done this to great effect for Telstra’s Bigpond Movies.”
“Come in for a meeting.” He said.
That was a pivotal moment and turned into our first higher education client. We learned all about that industry and focused on it, deliberately targeting the international marketing departments of Australian education institutions. A great niche.
Today GRG works for well over half of the Universities in Australia, helping them with international student recruitment marketing. GRG is also starting to win the Domestic campaigns of these same Universities and presenting new innovations on stage as a keynote speaker to rooms full of hundreds of higher education marketing professionals. Amazing.
But it didn’t always go to plan.
ONE
STRIKE 1
The day my bank account hit $0 in the first year of GRG. I could have easily decided to stop, and just go get a job.
STROKE 1
That same day I added up all of my available credit card debt, saw that I could self-fund GRG for 9 more months (these days we call that “runway”) while paying my new mortgage. I had decided that the worst case scenario was that in 9 months I could go and get a job (with a bunch of debt on my shoulders.)
I am so so so glad that I took that chance.
I have never looked back and history has absolved me, because GRG is a great success.
(I would never do it again though! Too risky! ;-)
TWO
STROKE 2
Deliberately focusing on building an outstanding company culture which prioritised people over profit, and client outcomes over company profit.
Our culture was rarely politically correct, always irreverent but always super supportive of everyone around us. We wanted to be friends with each other, our clients and our media vendors. We still are to this day. (Political correctness has evolved with the times, much to my personal chagrin. ;-)
STRIKE 2
People also held us back as a company.
We were too forgiving of underperformance and wasted time, money, timeline and opportunity cost on people who said all of the right things but delivered little.
In a company everyone must contribute more - much more - than they take.
We learned those lessons the hard way and allowed ourselves to be taken advantage of many times over the years. (I have learned from this.. again, and again… and again. I think the message is finally sinking in ;-)
THREE
STROKE 3
The insight to apply our tactics to the Higher Education sector, and double down on international marketing for Australian Universities.
STRIKE 3
Covid19.
Having double down on international marketing for Australian Universities meant we had 2/3rds of our revenues from this sector.
Covid nearly put us out of business. BUT…
“Clients did not leave us, staff did not leave us… and we did not leave them. We saw it through as a result of our culture and our relationships.”
- Jacqui Balsamo, CEO, GRG
And I am going to add in a 4th strike and stroke…
FOUR
STRIKE 4
Deciding to build our own software platform to cater for our diverse needs around CRM, sales, publisher management, campaign management, client invoicing, publisher reconciliations, time tracking, team capacity, etc etc
I could be forgiven because our need for systems and processes for all of these things was clear, as it still is today. The difference is that today we can licence these software platforms for $15 per user per month from billion (or trillion!) dollar companies. These were simply not available 15 years ago. My mistake was to try to build these systems internally.
I had not yet learned the lesson of being clear on what business you are in.
We were not a software development company, we were a marketing agency. Instead of running this project internally I should have spent that time and money with a specialist development company - who were in the business of building software platforms.
STROKE 4
GRG has always been highly process oriented.
There were absolutely times that we did not have our processes nailed but our intention from day one was always to be organised, to have visibility on activities, time, and key metrics that told us if we were on or off track.
Over the years this philosophy has served us incredibly well and continues to serve us to this day.
Why?
Because it allows us to prioritise people over profits, and ensure we deliver value to our clients ahead of profit to our company.
We have seen valuable team members who left GRG to work elsewhere return to work at GRG once more.
In short, we take care of our people - and we can do this because we can see what is going on within our organisation. Carefully managing time, yield and team capacity against the work under contract and in our pipeline is the key.
From day 1 we had also outsourced SEO, SEM and Analytics to a small specialist agency. We built trust over years and eventually merged, acquiring a business - and a business partner and friend - with equity in GRG.
This acquisition gave us a strong tactical advantage which was proven when we won and delivered multi-million dollar search campaigns as a result for listed companies.
These days, that kind of M&A activity is called “inorganic growth” because GRG grew staff, client base, capabilities and revenues through acquisition.
Over the last 15 years GRG has suffered Three Strikes but luckily each strike was years apart, otherwise we might not have survived them. Had two of them converged we absolutely would have gone out of business.
Over the last 15 years GRG has also experienced Three Strokes. The interplay of these three strokes has been the source of our success. And a grand success it has been.
We started in the tough economy following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.
We grew quickly in Australia, Europe and Asia.
We failed to expand into the US, despite much time, effort and money.
We had many great clients (whom I thank from the bottom of my heart) and some who did wrong by us (whom I remember by name to this day).
We saw:
the rise and fall of Daily Deal sites.
the rise and fall of Social Gaming, like FarmVille.
the launch of the AppStore.
the development of in-app tracking.
consolidation of global advertising inventory across ad exchanges and real time bidding.
the fanatical “buying likes” on Facebook.
when Facebook changed the rules forcing brands to pay to show posts to the Facebook fans they had just bought.
the rise of Instagram.
Weibo’s audience transfer to WeChat.
rise of country specific social networks.
more advertiser demand for video than video ad inventory
And more..
MUCH more..
Ultimately, over the last 15 years GRG has seen the internet and media landscape change from a situation where we were buying traffic from 100+ media vendors all over the world in 2010, to 2024 when most of the worlds ad spend goes to Google, then Meta, then everyone else.
From a time when BigTech was emerging to a time when BigTech is under the anti-trust hammer.
Most recently we have witnessed the rise of AI and, in typical GRG style, taking the bull by the horns spawned a world first AI innovation. But more on that another time…
Thanks for reading.
SK