Decoding the new economy

The Roadrunner Effect

Your business can keep running even when it’s gone over the edge of a cliff.

Fans of the roadrunner cartoon will remember how in almost every episode one of the characters, usually the coyote, would run over a cliff.

A few seconds after running off the cliff they’d keep going and then, just as they realise their mistake, they’d plummet into the deep canyon.

It’s similar for businesses – you can be a long way over the cliff’s edge before you realise you’re about to take a big fall.

Yesterday’s post about Sensis and the squandering of ten billion dollars is a good example of the Roadrunner Effect in business.

Sensis annual revenue and profit 1999-2013 (millions of dollars)

While it was obvious from the early 2000s onwards that the Yellow Pages model of expensive small business advertising listing was doomed, Sensis boss Bruce Akhurst did an admirable job of keeping revenue flowing.

Even more impressive is that the division managed to book close to a 50% gross profit most years during that period even when the revenues started to decline.

A large part of Sensis’ success was in screwing more money out of its client base with enhanced ads, new categories and a better digital offering that tied into Google’s Adwords program.

Unfortunately for Akhurst and his management team, economic gravity eventually claims even the luckiest or best run enterprise and Sensis was no different as small business started realising Yellow Pages advertising had become largely ineffective.

In many respects Sensis is a good example of a once profitable business that fails in the face of technological change – the new technologies help it become more profitable at first, but eventually a changed marketplace kill the business.

The question for those enterprises and industries is how long can the owners, managers and employees keep running before they realise the ground has dropped out from beneath them?

It could even be entire countries that suffer from the Roadrunner Effect, it certainly appears that the game was up for the European PIIGS long before it became obvious to the governments and citizens. This may prove true for Australia as well.

Either way, it’s worthwhile for business owners and managers to consider whether there’s a cliff face ahead even when revenues are accelerating.

Google schmoogle – how one telco destroyed 9 billion dollars in shareholder funds

How one company blew nine billion dollars in shareholders’ equity is a lesson for every business on the value of timing and wise management.

How one company blew nine billion dollars in shareholders’ equity is a business lesson on the value of timing and wise management.

As a rule, telecommunications executives are an arrogant bunch and none are more so than Sol Trujillo – formerly of American West, French provider Orange and finally Telstra, Australia’s incumbent telecommunications operator.

History shows that Telstra’s board, largely made up of dim-witted political appointees, had little idea of what they were getting when they hired Trujillo in 2005 but they soon found out as the brash American’s less than diplomatic style quickly alienated politicians and industry commentators alike.

Trujillo though wasn’t particularly concerned about the sensibilities of passes for Australia’s business and political elites, he was happier to take on bigger players on the global stage and one of those was Google.

Google Schmoogle

Like telcos and media companies around the world in the mid-2000s, Telstra had a problem with its directories business as the World Wide Web was eroding the value of the Yellow and White Pages franchises.

At the time many analysts were agitating for Sensis, Telstra’s directory division, to be sold off as a separate business. In 2005 it was valued at ten billion dollars which was a tidy sum for the telco as it rolled out its Next G network.

Trujillo though had a better idea – Sensis would claw back the market by taking Google on with their own search engine.

Sensis Search was born in November 2005 and the Telstra CEO dismissed questions about the wisdom of taking on the search engine giant with the comment, “Google Schmoogle.”

Three years later, Telstra quietly accepted defeat with Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst announcing a ‘commercial agreement’ with Google.

Nielsen NetRatings at the time showed Google search being used by 9.3 million Australians compared to just 184,000 users for Sensis Search.

In Telstra’s 2008 annual report, Sensis earned 2.1 billion dollars. On a 2.5x valuation, the division was worth five billion to Telstra’s shareholders at the time the search engine was closed down..

The Dying Yelp

Despite the setback, Sensis was able to struggle along for another decade on the back of its strong cashflow and legacy market position although income was steadily falling.

In a desperate attempt to shore up its declining revenues, the company picked up the failed digital ventures of Australia’s newspaper duopoly and licensed operations from overseas startups like Yelp!

Few of these acquisitions made sense and none of them were properly integrated into the declining directory media business.

Finally a year ago, Sensis admitted they live in a digital era with Managing Director John Allen admitting what most industry observers knew a decade earlier;

Until now we have been operating with an outdated print-based model – this is no longer sustainable for us. As we have made clear in the past, we will continue to produce Yellow and White Pages books to meet the needs of customers and advertisers who rely on the printed directories, but our future is online and mobile where the vast majority of search and directory business takes place.

But it was all too late, the market had been lost along with the bulk of shareholders’ equity.

Today Telstra announced a 70% sale of Sensis to US based Platinum Equity for $A454 million. The value of the entire business being $650 million – 7% of the division’s value nine years ago.With over nine billion Aussie dollars squandered on hubris and a failure to recognise a changed market place, Sensis stands as a good example of how valuable timing and good management are in business.Sol Trujillo though did very nicely, and the dim witted men who sat on Telstra’s board in 2005 will never be called to account for wasting so much of their shareholders’ money.

It’s too late, baby – when digital reality bites

Sensis decide to move on from a print based model to digital advertising – a decade too late.

Yesterday Sensis announced it would restructure for digital growth by sacking staff, offshoring and “accelerate its transition to a digital media business”.

The directory division of Telstra has been in decline for years, a process that wasn’t helped by then CEO Sol Trujillo embarking on his expensive “Google Schmoogle” diversion.

A decade later, Managing Director John Allen has announced another 650 jobs to go from the remaining 3,500 workforce.

John’s comments are worth noting.

Until now we have been operating with an outdated print-based model – this is no longer sustainable for us. As we have made clear in the past, we will continue to produce Yellow and White Pages books to meet the needs of customers and advertisers who rely on the printed directories, but our future is online and mobile where the vast majority of search and directory business takes place.

Carol King put it best – it’s too late, Baby. These are words that should have been said a decade ago.

Eating the Old Man’s lunch

Optus’ purchase of Eatability is ironic given Fairfax’s and Telstra’s failure with Citysearch.

Optus today announced the purchase of restaurant review site Eatability for $6 million.

Eatability is one of the services that’s destroyed the business models of both the phone directory business and that of newspapers.

Thirty years ago the Sydney Morning Herald launched its Good Living section and it became the way people went found where the good places were to eat.

Diners wanting to make a reservation at the hip eating places being reviewed in Good Living picked up the phone book.

Now they do neither, they go to web sites like Eatabilty or Yelp where they get reviews, contact details and everything else they need about the venue.

Which killed the advertising revenues that newspapers and phone directories depended upon.

The sad thing is both the newspapers and Yellow Pages could have owned this space. Citysearch was setup by Fairfax to address the online market and it was sold to Telstra when the newspaper chain struggled to make it work.

Citysearch today languishes neglected and nearly forgotten under the Sensis umbrella. Optus now owning Citysearch’s biggest local competitor which must bring a hollow laugh to those involved in the early days of Fairfax’s digital experiment.

Whether Eatability thrives under Optus remains to be seen, but it illustrates just how incumbent strengths like telephone directories are being eroded in the online world.

Old men have to start moving quickly if they don’t want upstarts eating their lunch.

Towards the Zettabyte enterprise

The data explosion is here, are you ready for it?

Toward the Zettabyte Enterprise originally appeared in Smart Company on May 31, 2012

Two hundred years ago, the idea of equivalent power of hundreds of horses in a single machine was unthinkable; then steam engine arrived with what seemed unlimited power and that, followed by electricity and the motor car, changed our society and the way we do business.

Back then it was inconceivable that the average person would have the equivalent of several hundred horses of power in their household, today most of us have that sitting in our driveway.

The same thing is happening with the explosion in data, it’s changing how we work in ways as profound as the steam engine, electricity or the motor car.

A couple of surveys released this week illustrate the how business is changing. The Yellow Social Media Report 2012 and the Cisco VisualNetworking Index both show how business and our customers are adapting to having high speed internet at their fingertips.

The Cisco index illustrates the explosive growth of data across the Internet as more people in Asia and Africa connect to the net while users in developed countries like Australia increase their already heavy usage.

In Australia, Cisco see a sixfold growth in traffic between now and 2016. As the National Broadband Network is rolled out, they see speeds increasing substantially as well, with Australia moving from the back of global speed tables up to the front.

Many people are still struggling with the Megabyte or Gigabyte, but very soon we’re going to have to deal with the Zettabyte – a trillion Gigabytes.

For businesses, this means we’re going to have to deal with even more data, it’s clear our hardware and office equipment aren’t going to deal with the massive traffic increases we’re going to see in the next few years.

Even if we have that equipment, it’s another question whether we have the systems, or intellectual capacity to use it effectively.

The Sensis social media report shows consumers are expecting not just rich data but also 24/7 online services.

A worrying part of the Sensis survey is that businesses aren’t keeping up with these demands; something that jumps out with the survey is that while 79% of big businesses have a social media presence, only 27% of small businesses have bothered setting one up.

Australian small businesses have basically given the turf away to the big end of town.

The real worry with these statistics is that small business just isn’t taking advantage of the tools available to them — not only are they leaving the field open to bigger competitors, but there’s a whole new generation of lean new startups about to grab markets off slow incumbents.

While the big companies are vulnerable, it’s the smaller businesses who are the low hanging, easy to pick fruit. If you’re in a profitable niche segment this is something you’ll need to keep in mind.

In the near future we’ll be dealing with inconceivable amounts of data, the businesses that understand this will thrive while those who don’t probably won’t even understand what has hit them.

Milking the dead cow

How Sensis killed itself and the lessons for Australian business

Many big Australian businesses seem untouchable as they dominate their markets to degree almost unknown in most other developed countries. As the story of Sensis shows, Australia’s big duopolies may not be as strong as they appear.

The last few months have been tough for Sensis; revenues last year fell nearly 25%, the once strong business was folded into the latest incarnation of Telstra Digital Media and now the CEO Bruce Akhurst has departed after seven years.

What could have been a dynamic business is now shriveling away, what went wrong?

Milking the revenue cow

Bruce did a good job of keeping revenue coming in during a period that the then owners, the Federal government, wanted to maximise the book value of Telstra before its sale.

Year upon year Sensis could be relied upon to squeeze more money out of the businesses advertising in it.

Management were focused on extracting revenue from the existing client base rather than responding to the obvious threat from online search.

Expensive distractions

When senior management decided to respond to the online world, they were sucked into unnecessary and expensive distractions; the most notable being the 2005 launch of Sensis Search where the then Telstra CEO – the disastrous Sol Trujillo – famously sneered “Google Schmoogle”.

Three years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, Sensis admitted defeat. By then the small business advertisers who were the life blood of the directory market had woken up to the reality their customers weren’t using the Yellow Pages anymore. Sensis had missed the boat.

Clunky processes

Whenever I spoke to small businesses about Sensis through the 2000s there was the same complaint, “I don’t have time to deal with their sales people, just let me tick a box on a web page or send a fax!”

Purchasing space was difficult for customers, their 1950s Willy Loman sales model should have been automated in the 1990s and never was.

Instead Sensis was locked into a high cost sales model and added friction for advertisers which they shouldn’t need, not only were they expensive but they actually made it difficult for their customers to place orders.

Should Sensis have been sold?

At its peak in 2005, Sensis was valued at between 8 and 10 billion dollars as a stand alone company.

Many, including myself, believe that breaking Sensis away would have been the best result given Telstra were at the time focused on protecting their fixed line copper wire monopoly and the directories business was not getting the management attention or capital investment it needed.

History shows though that we might be wrong.

Commander Communications was spun off from Telstra in 2000 and like Sensis had inherited an almost monopoly position in the small business communications market.

By 2007 Commander was out of business thanks to a combination of incompetence, management greed and an inability to recognise the changing communications marketplace.

The Australian disease

Commander’s biggest problem was it saw its customers as cash cows, just as Sensis did. This exposes a much deeper problem in Australian industry and management culture.

Over the last thirty years Australian government policies have seen duopolies develop in almost every key sector of the economy.

All of these duopolies share the same “customer as a milk cow” philosophy which, along with the rampaging Australian dollar, has dragged Australia into being a high cost economy.

The banking industry, while not a duopoly for the moment, is an even more debilitating example of the cash cow syndrome where small business has been crippled by excessive interest rates and fees – particularly since the 2008 crisis.

Sensis’ demise is systemic of a culture that fixates on extracting maximum revenue from customers; concepts like innovation, R&D or adapting to market trends don’t have a role in this mentality.

Milking cows is a fine business, but sometimes you have to think about the health of the herd.

Comparing local review and search sites

How do the local search services compare?

With the Australian launch of local search and recommendation site Yelp, it’s worthwhile comparing the different sites to see how well they worked.

The sites work in different ways, some – like Sensis Yellow Pages and True Local – are online directories that search just the title and description of business.

Yelp, Foursquare and Word Of Mouth Online, are socially based and derive their searches on the content and number of community reviews. Their algorithms, the formulas to figure out what customers are looking for, are more complex than the basic online directories.

Most complex of all are the hybrid searches, notably Google Places and Facebook Places, that build local upon their search and social media data.

Each model has it’s own strengths and weaknesses which shows when we do a search. Due to time restrictions we only did two.

Looking for brunch in Neutral Bay, NSW

The first search was using what somebody might be expected to search for on a casual weekend or holiday morning. Neutral Bay and surrounding suburbs have plenty of cafes catering to the brunch crowd so it should be expected to return plenty of hits.

Yelp

The new contender only found one local result and the rest being on the other side of the Harbour Bridge, including one at Bondi Beach which may as well be in the Upper Amazon to the average Sydney North Shore dweller.

Interestingly, entering neighbouring suburbs changes the first two or three results to that suburb but the subsequent listings are the same remote locations as for the Neutral Bay query. This might indicate popularity with the current Yelp users or may be part of the package merchants get when they pay for a listing.

True Local

News Limited’s True Local disappointed one cafe in the district was identified and the number one result was in the city.

This poor results are probably due to the word “brunch” not appearing in the local cafes’ descriptions or titles, but this is a serious weakness for True Local, particularly in a district where they dominate the local news media.

Google Places

Surprisingly, Google Places returned an extremely poor result with no local businesses found.

Again, this is probably due to the failure of business owners to ensure keywords are entered in their business description and it illustrates how Google is allowing an opportunity to pass them by.

Facebook Places

Nothing. Nyet. Zip. No brunch for you.

Yahoo!7

Another poor result that has just scraped information off the web. It shows the weakness of the Yahoo! and Channel Seven joint venture which, like News Limited, is letting opportunities pass.

Bing/NineMSN

Probably the most disgraceful of the results, NineMSN returned two cafes for the whole of Sydney, a city of four million people.

The second result entailed, according to Bing’s directions, a 38km drive timed at an optimistic 23 minutes involving $9 in tolls and an illegal u-turn.

NineMSN’s performance shows just how irrelevant Microsoft has become in the online space and their Australian joint venture partner is more interested in selling big integrated campaigns to advertising agencies.

Given NineMSN and Bing are the default browser and search engine on nearly two million computers sold in Australia each year, not having a local business strategy is squandering a massive opportunity.

Citysearch/Sensis

Founded by Fairfax, Citysearch could have been a great success combining the assets and readership of Fairfax’s metropolitan and local newspapers coupled with their experienced sales teams selling advertising space and subscriptions. Good management could have done this.

Sadly Fairfax was being run by Professor Fred Hilmer and his army of power suited McKinsey consultants and Citysearch was eventually sold for a pittance to Sensis, who have allowed it to shrivel away as the zero result for our search shows.

Eatability

Eatability was a genuine surprise, returning no brunch establishments in the area. The only thought is that no cafe in the neighbourhood has the word “brunch” in their keywords. Still a very poor result.

Urbanspoon

The web version of Urbanspoon returned the most bizarre result, correctly finding one local cafe but misinterpreting the address as being in Bankstown on the other side of Sydney.

Urbanspoon’s iPhone app returned a far better range of results in surrounding suburbs although it only found one cafe actually in Neutral Bay which wasn’t the one incorrectly found on their web app, which didn’t appear at all.

Word of Mouth Online

Word Of Mouth Online delivered the best result of the web pages with two of the first three results being relevant. Of the other seven, they met the criteria of being within a 5km radius of the location which in Sydney can be a 12km drive.

The results would have been better with more local establishments but it appears the keyword “brunch” hasn’t been used by many of the WOMO reviewers.

Note: After the review I was contacted by the founder of WOMO, Fiona Adler, it appears some of the reviews have have been updated in the meantime. I’ve changed the results below, but the left the one above as it was correct at the time of the review.

Foursquare

Like Yelp, Foursquare relies heavily on users’ contributions and this shows in the flaky, almost useless results for our search terms on a web based search.

Foursquare’s iPhone app was far more efficient, identifying a range of good venues in the area which were ranked according to friends’ recommendations.

Sensis/Yellow Pages

Again, “no brunch for you.” It’s almost scandalous that Yellow Pages has no entries at all for “brunch” for an inner Sydney suburb.

Redoing the search

Clearly the term “brunch” is problematic in all the services, so as a check here’s the relevant first page results for other search terms on each of the services;

Service	Café Neutral Bay	Breakfast Neutral Bay	Lunch Neutral Bay
Yelp	7/10	2/10	7/10
True Local	9/30	0/30	0/30
Google Place	10/10	0/10	10/10
Yahoo!7		not relevant
Bing/MSN	3/10	0/10	0/10
Citysearch	6/10	3/6	4/4
Eatability	40/50	8/8	23/31
Urban spoon	3/3	0/0	0/0
foursquare	3/20	1/20	1/20
WOMO	8/10	2/10	5/10
Sensis	7/10	0/10	0/10

As we found with the earlier search, Yelp was somewhat inconsistent and no doubt the social aspects will see it improve as more users come on board, the results are highly dependent on the terms used by reviewers and this will affect the search results.

True Local’s score was surprisingly bad, the search for “cafe” found 12 places but three are long closed. “Breakfast” listed B&B accomodation and “lunch” found outlets in the city and Eastern Suburbs.

Google Places also disappointed on “breakfast”, picking up some B&B establishments along with some city cafes. This is almost certainly due to keywords missing in descriptions.

Yahoo!7 doesn’t get a rating as all it does is scrape other sites and often refers you to other search services. They are just going through the motions.

Microsoft and NineMSN’s service again failed dismally; the “cafe” result was poor, “breakfast” looked for B&Bs and “lunch” amazingly didn’t find a thing in Neutral Bay.

Citysearch’s results for “cafe” found nine places, three of which are long closed which indicates the lack of maintenance their database receives. Encouragingly, Citysearch was one of the best performers for lunch and dinner, albeit only on four and six places found.

Eatability had by far the most impressive number of results, however a large proportion of the places have closed and are not flagged as such. This probably indicates a lack of maintenance by the owners.

WOMO was good and like Yelp their results are highly dependent on the words used by reviewers, so key words could be missed simply because reviewers didn’t use them.

Sensis performed well on “cafes” except that three of the ten listed were closed. The lack of results on “breakfast” and “lunch” is due to no places having those words in their name.

Conclusions

This comparison is not scientific, being based on a narrow search and small sample size, but there’s a few things we can take away from the experiment.

Search is still young

Right now, search is still a crude tool.

From the results, we can see that the keywords used by reviewers and businesses matter. If the public are looking for “brunch” and that isn’t on your cafe’s website and online listings, then you won’t appear.

Over time that will change as the web and search engines get smarter but right now search is still at a basic stage in its development.

You have to be there

Customers are using these tools to find what they need and if a business isn’t listed, then they can’t be found. Setting up a profile and getting some favourable reviews is important.

The business who are being pro-active are the ones who are succeeding.

There’s a lot of opportunity

It’s no surprise that older organisations like Fairfax, Sensis and Microsoft are failing to understand local search. What is suprising is how poorly the newer players like Google and Facebook are doing.

This opens up a lot of opportunity for services like Yelp and Foursquare in adding value to the data already available through services like Google, Facebook and Sensis.

Yelp’s tie up with Sensis makes a lot of sense from the US company’s point of view; they get to ride on Sensis’ sales team, maybe some licensing fees and – most importantly – they can access the richest, albeit not always accurate, database of Australian businesses.

For small, local business there’s a lot of opportunity as well. By getting online and registered on these services, it’s possible to become more visible and improve your competitive position.

The market’s young and there’s a lot of potential for disruptive players. It will be interesting to see how incumbents deal with the threat.

Tag: sensis

The Roadrunner Effect

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