Why I joined WhitePages.com?

People change jobs all the time. For me, it’s happened four times in my illustrious 15 year business career. Now that I’ve been at WhitePages.com for 3 months, I feel like I can provide a bit of insight as to why I would leave the Microsoft mothership and reenter the small business world.

Top three reasons why I joined WhitePages.com:

1) Impact and Influence: The opportunity to impact and influence the strategic direction of a rapidly growing company. WhitePages.com only has ~130 employees and that leaves robust opportunities for every single employee to contribute in ways that have meaningful impact. The accountability for results, the opportunities to impact big change and the potential to see ideas come to fruition was a big attractor. Plus, you don’t need multiple levels of approval to act on decisions.

2) Industry Growth: The online ad space continues to kick some serious ass….and it doesn’t look like the growth opportunities are going to stop. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), internet advertising revenue grew 26% in the first nine months of 2007 and is expected to finish up at $20B for all of 2007. As more $$$ continue to shift from traditional media (TV, print ads) to online, we’ll continue to see the IAB numbers skyrocket.

3) Business Fundamentals: WhitePages.com has crushed it over the past five years. Part of this growth is due to industry dynamics and part is due to leadership and execution. Our latest press release show us growing revenues by 23% in 2007 with even bigger growth numbers in 2008. More importantly, we have two critical components that make for a healthy business: Customers (22M unique visitors according to comScore) and Revenue (~$64M in 2007). We’ve also got a well established, seasoned Ad Sales Team with tons of online experience. And at the end of the day, business is all about making and selling.

Of course the people, the culture, and the brand-building opportunities were also big influencers of my decision…but we’ll leave further discussion on those topics to future blog posts.

Comments, questions, criticisms? Just leave a comment.

John
VP, Marketing