February 28, 2008 - Serial entrepreneur John Pino last month gave up day-to-day responsibilities at StarCite Inc., the meetings technology company he spun out of McGettigan Partners in 1999, grew with venture capital financing and merged with rival
OnVantage last year. As part of a planned transition, Pino relinquished president and CEO titles to Mike Boult in 2005. Now, the StarCite founder and board member has turned his focus on an as-yet-unnamed startup for the meetings sector, slated to launch by summer.
Management.travel talked to Pino last week about the new venture--his sixth startup--as well as the state of corporate meetings consolidation and his thoughts on leaving the company he founded. Pino has been involved in corporate meetings consolidation and management for more 30 years. An excerpt follows.
Why are you leaving StarCite, and what's next?
For me, the thrill has always been in the development of something new that couldn't be done. I thought I would have gotten it done a little bit sooner. The company is not on auto pilot, but the model is pretty proven, and the path from a business direction is clear. It's time for me to move on. What I'm up to is an industry-specific social network to aggregate planners of all types of events into a global community that provides business advantages. The difference between what I'm trying to do compared with social networks is that it's not pure social, it's social with a business bent. I think there's a huge need for it.
I have my eyes targeted on a number of firsts. Not to say that none of this has ever been done in other ways, but how it would be relevant for our industry would include profiling, online resumes, skills, experienced-based references and access to tools that are subscription free. Another idea is what I call the skills marketplace--where corporations or entities that need project-based help can find help. Then there is a rating system from planners, not the normal Mobil 4-Star stuff, but something that is planner based. Last, but not least, is the RFI [request for information]. The biggest rap from suppliers has always been that by the time someone does an RFP, they already know where they're doing it so I, as a supplier, can't influence them. With the new venture, planners can do eRFIs; it's preliminary. I may not have dates, I may not even know what year I'm doing a program, but I want to open dialogue with appropriate suppliers around the world, because I have an interest with this particular property, supplier or city. It's permission-based, qualified lead generation. I hope to launch as early as late second quarter. I've been investing heavily in the technology, so it's coming along. It's a completely independent company, but certainly collaborative [with StarCite].
In a press release about its 2007 results, StarCite noted that it counts 150 Fortune global 500 companies as clients. With thousands of companies out there, why aren't more corporations managing meetings today?
Most companies think they do manage their meetings. Some manage them with no technology; some with their own home-built stuff. If you ask companies, very seldom will you get an answer that they don't manage them. But for what we would call the new way of doing business, the adoption has not been as fast as any of us had hoped.
You have to look at it in two segments: The first is larger corporations. We published 150 clients, but we've got well over 400 companies doing business with us. We only count those that have significant contracts. Within many larger companies, there has been an initiative for 10 years to consolidate meetings. Most of those companies do believe they are on a path, and they are moving toward that. I'd love to see them go a lot faster, but there have been a couple of reasons [for slow progress]. While the technology has been out there, we have to be honest, it hasn't been an integrated solution with a lot of the things that corporations use to run their respective busineses day to day. Those things are starting to happen, like integrations and connections to other technologies and back office. That has not gone as fast as any of us had hoped.
The second issue is in the definition. So many companies do believe they are managing it, some of them don't see the urgency for going to the next step. What is occurring now is you see a lot of benchmarking efforts. If you look at the other market, the small and medium-size business market, those guys just have not seen the need. They just don't spend that much money on it, they're not aware of, nor are they researching or have the professional staff internally to look for better ways of procurement or efficiency. Marry that with the fact that StarCite and all of our competitors have not really had great solutions for the small and medium-size market. We do have one now, but we haven't for the past six or seven years, as our focus was clearly on large-spend corporations and helping them manage that spend.
Within some companies, we're hearing a debate over where meetings should report in order to maximize the value of the meetings management operation. What's your view?
There is no one answer to that. If the company has as part of its go-to-market strategy a lot of events, than those events should not go through travel. They should not, because travel manages things in a different way. These are places where it's going to affect your business and needs to be managed as a way of growing your business, protecting your customers, etc. Those companies generally have an area that is different from corporate travel. It is either a professional meetings department that reports through marketing, or it reports today, more and more, through procurement. I also believe that travel management can and should manage meetings spend that is not huge. When you look at meetings that are internal, for training and things like that, those are just subsets of the normal travel budget in my mind and should be managed as such.
During your career, you have helped companies launch new products, motivate sales forces and announce bad news. What's your favorite memory of an effective corporate meeting, one that was perfectly executed to deliver the message?
One that jumps to my mind was an event for the Archidiocese of Philadelphia, where they were elevating a priest to a cardinal. What I didn't realize was the space that they had for the ceremony was restricted, and the Vatican had confirmed way more people than could fit in the building. I always viewed the Vatican as some sleepy organization. When we heard that we had 1,000 seats too short for the ceremony, I started running around trying to do a live broadcast and bring in cameras. What just blew me away, was how beautifully within 24 hours they orchestrated a much more high-tech event than any I had ever worked on with corporations. Everything was live broadcast. The Vatican is one of the most high-tech organizations in the world.
What was your biggest mistake starting a tech company?
With technology, and it may hold true for any company, there are so many uncertainties. You really have to have a contingency plan for more than the first 12 to 18 months. The one mistake we probably made was a mistake that everybody made in 1999: making the assumption that you had unlimited capital. Despite what the rest of the world tells you, you have to go with your instincts and understand that the business needs to stand on its own legs without outside dependence on any kind of capital; I don't care if it's bank debt, venture capital, whatever. To me, that was the one thing I would try to do differently. Of course, the environment in 1999 was very different. That is the number-one issue: do you have enough capital for contingencies to get you through to your plan?
