Bootstrapping a Language Product Company Using Services from London, Then Taking it Public and Scaling It to $450M: SDL CEO Mark Lancaster (Part 7)

Sramana: You have made a lot of acquisitions building your business. When did your rollup strategy start?

Mark Lancaster: As soon as we floated. When you go public, you have to understand what the public wants. Most of our shares are held by large institutions. The London Stock Exchange is much different than NASDAQ. They don’t want to see growth as much as they want profit. You need to make use of the money you raise.

We invested in technology by acquiring content businesses. We foresaw what would happen in the market. We started investing in web content management, campaign analytics, and software that would allow businesses really manage their customer experience. Companies produce a significant amount of content these days. Consumers are looking at PDAs and laptops all day. Whichever channel they are on, they expect to be able to get information. If you are on your cell phone, real estate is tight. Text is not as good as graphical information there.

We are now in the day of metrics-based marketing. Anything we do is tracked. If we can provide technology to companies and allow them to understand customer journeys and the profiles that individuals have, then we can provide them with the content that they need. No customer journey is the same, but if somebody is looking for a tent, then they will likely need a sleeping back. There are links that can be made everywhere. If you gather the information over different user journeys, then you can profile people. That is far more likely to give users an enjoyable experience. Companies are interested in selling things, so it is all about providing a good customer experience, so the individual will buy more products from you.

As we have evolved our technology and integrated it together, we have found that we have been successful selling multiple pieces of our technology platform which they are able to plug together. It could be loyalty programs tied to information rendering programs.

Sramana: Is that all driven through the acquisitions that you have made?

Mark Lancaster: Yes, it is much more cost-effective.

Sramana: How many acquisitions have you made?

Mark Lancaster: We have probably made 20 or so acquisitions. We have developed some of the technology from scratch and some have been via acquisitions.

Sramana: Did you acquire UK companies or did you acquire companies from all over the world?

Mark Lancaster: They are from all over the world. We figured out what we need, and we look at the best companies in those sectors who can provide that need regardless of where they are located. We then target those companies.

Sramana: Fast forward to 2014. Where is the business? It sounds like you have a full customer engagement platform. You still do a large portion of the revenues via language services.

Mark Lancaster: We are doing about £280 million a year now. I left the business in late 2010 to retire and let someone else take the business to the next stage. That did not work so I returned to the business in late 2012. I had to completely rebuild the business after I came back. We are a year and a half through that rebuild. We are doing a lot of restructuring to align it with the markets. You need to drive a business through passion, vision, and care of the staff.

Sramana: This is a wonderful story. I am happy to see a company like yours emerge in the UK. Congratulations!

This segment is part 7 in the series : Bootstrapping a Language Product Company Using Services from London, Then Taking it Public and Scaling It to $450M: SDL CEO Mark Lancaster
1 2 3 4 5 6 7