Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

Jeff Frieden bootstrapped Auction.com to about $180 million in revenue and profitability. Thereafter, he raised private equity financing and growth capital and is currently running a private company that is more than qualified to be a public Unicorn. The company has a legitimate revenue and profitability model that is scaling phenomenally well. Unlike many ‘funny money Unicorns’, this one is real!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Jeff Frieden: I was born in Orange County, California and raised in Anaheim, California. It was right across the street from Disneyland. My mom and dad both worked at the Internal Revenue Service at Los Angeles after World War II. >>>

Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What emerged as the positioning of Brand Networks? I understand you’re helping with word-of-mouth brand networks. What was the service that they were buying?

Jamie Tedford: In the early days, they were buying more of traditional marketing services agency roles. Eventually as I brought on my partner and CTO Mike Garsin, we determined that we weren’t looking to create an agency. If I was going to do that, I had all the resources. I needed a partner to find a way to scale this offering through technology. We all know that technology scales a lot faster than people.

We made a commitment that whenever we started to see common requests from customers, we would start the process, engage a lawyer, and make sure we had an IP that we could then resell. That was the foundation for us that set us in motion for us to be a technology company with marketing services rather than a marketing services company who can deliver technology. We began establishing that in the first year. What >>>

Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year did that chapter end for you?

Jamie Tedford: Around 2002.  I got to work with an ad agency called Arnold Worldwide. I worked with a lot of really big brands. The brand that really got me excited was Volkswagen. I learned a lot of about traditional advertising at that time. I spent six years there. I had progressed in my career there. I was a little bit of an outlier in a very traditional agency that still loved to buy expensive television spots. I was always much more interested in the Internet, and ultimately, I found myself gravitating towards a burgeoning market that was then called word-of-mouth marketing.

There’s an industry now that’s forming around how to make that systematic and how to measure its impact. That really excites me. I was one of the founding board members of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association in late 2000. We were creating an industry that built the foundation of what is now the social media industry. Then, it was capturing how physical word of mouth happens. For me, that was pretty quickly followed by an obsession with how word-of-mouth happens and advocacies, specifically, happen online. Social networks piqued my interest. This is the technology required to make word-of-mouth real online. >>>

Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

Jamie bootstrapped Brand Networks to a highly profitable, large business leveraging the disruption in brand marketing caused by social media. He then sold minority stake in the company to a private equity firm. Excellent execution for bombbomb alternatives!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Jamie Tedford: I was born in a town north of Boston, Massachusetts. It’s a very typical middle-class story and family. I’m third-generation Jamie Tedford. My grandfather started a family business. He was actually an MIT alumnus. He came out of MIT during the Great Depression. He went to work for a paper company and decided to start a lumber mill. He is the first of the family that I can track back who’s an entrepreneur. The business eventually turned into a commercial lumber yard. The family stayed pretty close to home. My dad went to work for him. >>>

Bootstrapping an Evergreen Business From Oregon: Kirstin Quinlan, CEO of Certified Languages International (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is the current thinking now that you’re approaching $30 million? Many companies at your stage start thinking about selling a portion of the company…

Kristin Quinlan: There has been a lot of interest in our company from outside. We’ve been through two exercises on what that would look like. That was about three years ago. It occurred to us over the course of these exercises that it would be absolutely crazy to sell. First of all, we’re growing so strong. We’re finally having a whole bunch of fun. I can’t imagine turning what we have grown and developed into a one of the kind in this industry and then turning it over to some big corporate clog who’s just going to swallow it up and make it part of a large corporation. Our mentality here at CLI is very unique.

Sramana Mitra: You want to keep running the company. You’re enjoying it and you want to continue doing that. Is that accurate? >>>

Bootstrapping an Evergreen Business From Oregon: Kirstin Quinlan, CEO of Certified Languages International (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you right now revenue-wise?

Kristin Quinlan: Last year, we were at $23.2 million. We’re on course to do, at least, $27 million this year. We can be as high as $30 million.

Sramana Mitra: Is this a highly profitable business?

Kristin Quinlan: Yes, it’s highly profitable. All of our growth has been self-funded. We had no investment capital whatsoever. In the early years, it was really lean. We depended upon $100,000 rotating loan at the bank for interpreter pay every month. There were many lean years where we were really tight but we had never gone to any outside funding. It was really important that we grow at the rate that we could fund. Part of our growth was slower. Our cost was being managed really tightly. At one point, things became leaner and leaner. Today, there isn’t anything we can’t do or anything we won’t fund. We have shown incredibly strong profitability. We have significant investments in technologically developing our business. >>>

Bootstrapping an Evergreen Business From Oregon: Kirstin Quinlan, CEO of Certified Languages International (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Besides that differentiator, how do you acquire customers?

Kristin Quinlan: A lot of our growth has been through outreach from our sales team as well as from leveraging the relationships with one entity and being recommended to others. We are really good at what we do and we have got an exceedingly strong reputation for being the best. We also have companies white-labeling our service. We put a lot of language companies into the business of on-demand or over-the-phone interpreting services by being their back office. It’s about 20% to 25% of our overall revenue.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of language services businesses are these that tend to white-label a back-end from you?

Kristin Quinlan: Anybody providing any range of language services other than on-demand interpreting. Generally speaking, those in the document translation, localization, and globalization sphere. >>>

Bootstrapping an Evergreen Business From Oregon: Kirstin Quinlan, CEO of Certified Languages International (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You came on board in 2000. The business was about $1.9 million.

Kristin Quinlan: Yes. In 2001, it was about $1.9 million. We had a slow incline. We’ve never had a year that has gone down. Every year has been an increase from the previous year. The first early years were very slow.

Sramana Mitra: What are the highlights in terms of milestones or major strategic moves in building this company between 2000 and 2006 when you took over as CEO?

Kristin Quinlan: As I was working my way through the ranks and ascending to managing the company, the vision of the company was to continue to leverage advancements in technology to do connect as many interpreters in as many languages as our clients were demanding in the fastest amount of time. Better, faster, cheaper was our on-going mantra. >>>