When Peter Horan was approached last fall by a recruiter for AllBusiness.com, the answer was no. He liked his job as president and CEO of About.com and wasn’t ready to think about a change. The response was the same as the recruiting moved up the ladder; Horan was intrigued but not enough to leave About. “We stayed in touch; they kept looking,” he recalls. (He saw enough potential in the company to introduce its execs with a development exec at About; the result was a revenue-sharing deal for a dedicated section announced last month.) The sale of About to the New York Times Company and the ensuing transition kept him in place. But when he and wife Pam decided to move back to the west coast, he called to ask if AllBusiness still needed a CEO. The answer was yes, and, as paidContent reported first Monday night, Horan is CEO of AllBusiness.com. (Richard D. Harroch, the VC attorney and co-founder who reacquired the company from GE for an undisclosed sum believed to be spare change, remains as chairman.)
Horan discusses acquisitions — yes, they’re in the market; hiring; the business plan and more in extended entry….
Now, as Horan prepares About for a new CEO, he’s deep in plans for AllBusiness.com, a six-year-old site that made millions for its founders and initial investors but is now very much a startup. He suggests it could be as valuable as MarketWatch in four-to five years time.
Horan’s task: to reinvent the static web publisher as a vigorous business that not only has potential, but fulfills it. He’s not starting from scratch — or as he calls it, “white paper;” after all, the site has thousands of pages of content and most of the $10 million raised from VantagePoint in a funding round last summer is still in the bank. AllBusiness has 10 employees now; he expects to have 40 or 50 within the next year, starting with the middle-to-upper management team. Some of the growth could come through acquisitions.
Horan talked about his plans with Executive Editor Staci D. Kramer today. Excerpts from their 20-minute conservation follow:
On being a start-up and the company’s current status: “It’s hard to define because, yes, in some ways we’re going to re-launch it. But, in other ways it’s alive and well. There are many forms of content on the site, everything from good how-to articles to forms and books and all sorts of advice. …It’s not as if we’re starting with white paper. There is traffic on the site. There’s revenue. The site exists and has momentum. They’ve kept the lights on, kept the site refreshed. They’ve actually done a number of things in the last year in terms of upgrading the design, adding some new functionality. Over the last year, they’ve done a deal with Yahoo, done a deal with the San Francisco Chronicle, done a deal with About.”
On investments: “Most of the investment is, in fact, still in the bank. What we’ll probably look at over the course of the next six months or so is strategic investment. We’d like to talk to some of the bigger media companies about combination distribution and investment deals.”
On defining the company: “The elevator pitch is that there are just really wonderful business news sites – the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, the New York Times — but most often what they’re doing is they’re covering fairly sizable companies and the coverage is not really actionable. If I’m running a mid-sized, small or fast-growing company, I don’t necessarily get a lot of actionable ideas. There’s an opportunity to create a really great business how-to site around information, actionable ideas; to use the internet to try to give executives in small-to-mid-size businesses the same sorts of resources and tools that their peers in big business have. If I have a 10,000 person company, I’ve got a legal dept, a facilities department, an hr dept; I have experts I can call. The beauty of the internet is we can create really interesting content supported by tools, supported by services that give (them) a lot of the same resources.”
On why AllBusiness might succeed now where it and others have struggled: “I’m not 100-percent familiar with what hasn’t worked in this space. When I go from the New York Times to AllBusiness, I will immediately become a small businessperson but, if you ask me, I’m a web publisher. Traditionally, there’s a professional orientation, which is how I think about my business more than its size. The interesting thing is to try to strike a balance between that vertical orientation and then every business has to figure out about office space, every business has to figure out about paying for employee health care, every business has to file a corporation form, and things like that.
It’s creating a fairly broad funnel of vertical content to attract folks but then also moving them into these horizontal services that apply to all businesses…A lot of the stuff that I’ll be focused on in the short term is creating almost content paths for what type of business you’re in and what the nature of your question is.”
On acquisitions: “We will be looking at acquisitions. There are a number of interesting sites could scale to AllBusiness really quickly and could add good functionality for the readers so we are in the market to talk to folks about acquisition. รข
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