The company I work for, Litle & Co., has been honored with three Stevie Awards in years past. This year The Stevies (as they’re more casually known) asked me to chair the final judging committee for Best New Product or Service. Nearly 50 Finalists made the cut in this one category, spanning a broad range of industries.

One of my duties in chairing this committee has been to recruit other judges. I aimed for a well-rounded, diverse group of judges who’d bring a variety of perspectives and expertise to the committee. I’m very proud to have brought together the following friends and associates, and am truly grateful for their participation. The judges for the 2012 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service Best New Product and Service category are as follows:

• David Beisel, Partner at NextView Ventures
• Matt Douglas, Founder & CEO at Punchbowl.com
• Melissa Dowler, Co-Founder at Long Haul Films
• Michael Dunn, CTO at Hearst Interactive Media
• Andrew J. “Flip” Filipowski, Executive Chairman & CEO at SilkRoad Technology
• Jane Henry, Owner at LOOMLAB
• Tara Hunt, CEO & Co-founder at Buyosphere
• Aaron Irizarry, Experience Designer at Hewlett Packard
• Michael LeBarron, Senior UX Engineer at Rue La La
• Kaitlin Maud, Co-Founder at Rain or Shine Studio
• John McCurdy, VP Business Development at Invest Northern Ireland 
• Kevin Mitchell, Senior Director of Programming at National Amusements
• Beth Monaghan, Principal at InkHouse Media + Marketing
• Randy Parker, President at SMBapps
• Jen Reddy, Vice President of Global Marketing at Communispace
• Evan I. Schwartz, Director of Storytelling at INNOSIGHT
• Rusty Williams, Co-Founder at Troopla

The gala dinner and awards will be held at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas on February 27th. I’ll be there and can’t wait to meet the finalists and the winners as well as other judges. See you there!

*Disclaimer: Litle & Co. is a customer of a couple of the Finalists, two of which I personally use in my day-to-day job, so I’ve recused myself from judging those specific companies or subcategories.

They are centered on the power of the web, the Internet, to create bonds of unity that surpass echelons of establishment. For those attending the Web 2.0 Expo (#w2e), there’s nothing extraordinary about anything that’s going on around us. Over the last decade, we’ve been drivers of dialogue focused on the increasing “power” of the individual, of the disintermediation of traditional approaches and avenues to accomplishing things in less time and with thinking and resources that move faster.

In my presentation, “From Intent to Expression”, I spoke about how the payments landscape in the Web 2.0 world is changing, rapidly. What started more than a decade ago with e-commerce and then with the advent of solutions such as PayPal is now a systemic advance disabling traditional purveyors of payments and commerce. The web has, to a large extent, democratized the human voice across the political and the economic condition.

Today’s headlines are complete with rising discussions of indifference toward the norm. This comes at a time when the convergence of human commercial and media consumption has been fueled by digital enablement, giving further rise to innovations that strip away the skins of convention. Convergence is being met equally by disruption never experienced before in commercial enterprise. The time, and importance of, knowing one’s consumer has never been so great. And, at a time when dissatisfaction with the traditional firmaments of finance is overwhelmingly profound, the spoils stand to go with those bridge builders who have both the empathy and the energy to create consumer solutions that match, even exceed, the needs of their lives—emotionally, socially, commercially and financially.

The crux of my discussion is this: those spoils will go most to those who know their digital consumers best (despite having never seen their face, except by way of avatar). To those who know their consumers’ preferences and payments the best. To those, ultimately, who leverage the richness of the digital age to surround their customers through payments—the actual expressions of consumption, need and want. All of this is rooted in data. Data that I and my colleagues believe is the root of a new era we are calling payments intelligence. The cause and meaning of payments intelligence will become increasingly pronounced in the months and the years to come.

Here is a link to my presentation. I invite anyone to share feedback and observations.

As a side note, we were most impressed with our AirBnB stay at Villa Migliorini, just outside Florence, my new favorite city. Our hosts, Stefano and Pamela, could not have been warmer, cooler, more hospitable people and the accommodations could not have been more interesting – a 14th century villa, a restored hayloft to be precise! Pics of Villa Migliorini’s haylof here.

After futzing around in sales for a bit, I jumped into the high tech industry in the mid 1990′s and worked in a wide range of roles for Fortune 500 companies like DEC, GE Capital, Bell Atlantic, among others up until late 1998 when I joined a Cambridge, MA based dot com. That variety of work in the high tech and Internet industries provided me with incredibly valuable exposure, experience, and skills. It also fanned the flames of an entrepreneurial spirit that I think I’ve had all my life. After surviving several rounds of layoffs at the dot-com, my day came on January 4, 2001. The next morning, I woke up and told myself I was done being “an employee” and decided to start my own company, using the skills, experience, passion, gusto, and entrepreneurial energy that was now almost uncontainable. Hindsight being 20/20 of course, I started that company for a mix of the right and wrong reasons. The second company, CitySquares, I started for all the right reasons. I don’t need to walk you through my next 10 years, so I’ll jump ahead.

On January 4, 2011 (10 years to the day), I became “an employee” once again, not at a company of my own founding, but as Litle & Co.‘s new Vice President of Marketing. It’s been six months in this new role; at a successful, profitable, 200 person company, with a 12 person Marketing team, and I can say with both pride and joy that I’m very happy.

Having a solid decade of hard-nosed, scrappy, sometimes bloody, mostly enjoyable, and relatively fruitful entrepreneurial experience has given me an entirely new perspective and approach to being “an employee.” The kind of professional maturity, growth, and development that being an entrepreneur provides simply can’t be gained with any schooling or, I believe, traditional employment.

Point 1: I just can’t work my ass off, put in long days, week after week, month after month, year after year, all while putting up with someone else’s bullshit, stupidity, and politics with no real upside and payout at the end. So, being an entrepreneur puts me closer to the end-game, puts me in the drivers seat, and because I’m in charge, my success or failure is almost entirely up to me.

Counterpoint: That sounds really nice, and I said the same thing 10 years ago. The reality is that while, yes, you do end up in the drivers seat, you are in charge, your success or failure is almost entirely up to you, you still need others to get there. Unless your Tim Ferris, you’re going to need some partners (of some form), some staff, legal and financial services, and if you have half a brain you’ll leverage an advisory board. You might even need capital, and hence you’ll end up with interested shareholders, perhaps a board of directors. So yeah, now you’re the one creating the bullshit, the stupidity, and politicking. While you’re the one in charge of your success or failure, you’re also the one in charge of everyone else’s success or failure too. How’s that for pressure? How’s that for long days, weeks, months, years? The likelihood of “success” is no greater or lesser because you are in charge, if anything you just created more obstacles for yourself. It really boils down to one thing: how you define your success. Success means different things to different people, I’ve opined on this quite a bit here on this blog. So think about what you really expect out of this move you want to make, and sit on it for a while.

Point 2: I’ve got a killer product and I don’t want my employer to have a piece of it – it’s my idea, so I’m going to start my own company.

Counterpoint: Really? The only way is by yourself? I’m glad Christopher Columbus didn’t say that, or Neil Armstrong. Even Leonardo DaVinci had help from the Catholic Church. So OK, you’re the genius with the killer product, but you need to do product stuff right? Cool, and congrats on that title by the way, it’ll come in handy when the going gets tough, or when real business matters need attention – cuz you’re pretty much off the hook. Oftentimes you hear the “product entrepreneur” say, “I just need a partner, someone who can help me raise the money, move some product (aka ‘sell’ the product) while I build it.” There is nothing more annoying to me. If you’re an entrepreneur, you need to do that stuff too, jerk! So, because you’re the nerd with the new gadget you get to scurry off into a corner somewhere while everyone else protects you from the bad people who want to make money off it? How dare they! Maybe you should go start a non-profit then, or build it and give it to a third world country – all so you can sleep better at night and keep your moral high-ground. Face facts Wozniak, you need to get some skin in the game too. Being an entrepreneur is about making business decisions, not product decisions. You don’t get to bake your cake and eat it too, while others sell the cakes, clean the bakery, and stock the shelves. You need to develop some real business skills, skills that will pay off for you in the end. If you don’t develop those business skills, everyone else will figure out a way to take your toy from you while you’re picking your nose. Trust me on this, those bad people who want to take your toy and get rich, they got skills – they’re trickier than you are. You might be a genius, but they’re snakes. Smarten up, and think twice before you hit the streets with your fancy new toy. In fact, given all this, if you really don’t have the chops, really don’t have what it takes, maybe you wanna reconsider talking to your employer about it – but talk to a lawyer first (you know, the bad people who do law stuff).

Point 3: I have big dreams, man. I wanna live this life, I wanna go places and see things, but I wanna do it in style – like on my own yacht, with my friends. You know, I wanna be a pimp!

Counterpoint 3: Playa please! I can’t even respond to you without wanting to punch your mouth. Ya know what – you’re right. Go out there, baller, get that money. I’ll be right here when that album you were gonna drop falls through the cracks, or when your steroids website costs more to build than it ever generates in cashflow, or that “super connected” club promoter ends up being shady and stops returning your calls. Yes, lightning does strike and some people in this world (out of 6 billion) do get rich quick. But if you get struck by lightning, it ain’t gonna make you rich, it might make you a bit brighter though… we can only hope.

Point 4: I just can’t work for someone else. I need to work at my own pace, in my way, with my style.

Counterpoint 4: You must be a millenial. I bet you went to a Charter school too. Hey, I mean that with respect – you are indeed one of god’s special creatures. This world is going to be a much better place once those baby boomers and gen-x’rs are outta the way. I honestly don’t know what to tell you, Moonbeam. I think you have some really really hard lessons ahead of you, and you’re going to find out that mommy and daddy learned the hard way too. They tried to protect you, they really did, but they were kidding themselves and actually doing you quite the disservice. Where’s Tiger Mom? Can you spend a couple days with her? I think she’s onto something. No one appreciates the beauty with which you see the world, and no one quite understands that the world can be a better place if they’d only _____. I think you should lead the way. The fact of the matter here is that no matter what I tell you, no matter what anyone tells you, you are a special creature that needs to experience real pain and suffering before you will listen to anyone. Sorry, that was advice.

Point 5: Life is short, I don’t want to spend it working in a cubicle, or on a construction site.

Counterpoint 5: See above. Also, what’s wrong with work? You know, that’s just a part of life right? You realize that Julius Caesar worked hard, right? You realize that Bill Gates still works his ass off right? You know those special ops guys who killed Bin Laden, Team 6? Yeah, those guys work their effing asses off. Are you better than them? If you don’t want to work, drop out of society and backpack around the world. Or better yet, find something you’re truly passionate about, and find a way to make a living doing it. It’s simple. Now stop whining and get back to work.

I’ll stop there. I hope I’ve made my point. Entrepreneurship is really effing hard, and when people go into business for themselves (be it their own bakery, their own manufacturing company, their own high tech company, ad agency, whatever) – it’s work, it’s hard work. Entrepreneurship is no yellow brick road, Dorothy. It can be, yes, it has the potential to yield wonderful results. You really need to consider the reasons for becoming an entrepreneur. That’s what needs assessment, not how you’ll do it, but why you’re doing it.

Am I better off now than I was when I started? Oh hell yeah. Did I fulfill the dream I had when I started? Oh hell no. But that dream changed with time. I started down the entrepreneurial path when I was 25. I’m 35 now – I’m a different person, with different values, different perspectives, different dreams and goals.

After 10 years of entrepreneurship, personally speaking, I’m a much happier and healthier person, no doubt, and I’m a better member of society. Professionally speaking, I feel like I’m just getting started.

What amazes and shocks me no less than ever before is how little people know about our country, about current events, the political climate, economic realities, America’s place in the global community, etc. Now look, I don’t want to come across all high and mighty, but I think that be being well informed, learned about these things is a responsibility that we have as citizens and members of our community. For me, it’s no different than being an informed consumer, or an informed driver, or an informed employee. Yet ask the average American to name the three branches of the US government, and they struggle – and I mean, they really struggle. Ask the average American to name the leaders in government, or where Libya is on a map (heck, even it’s continent), or what the hot topics in politics are, and you’d be shocked (or maybe not) at the lack of awareness.

Here’s where it get’s shameful for me. Ask the average American about Charlie Sheen, and they have answers. Not only do they have answers, they’ve got a scoop. Ask them about American Idol, about Ashley Judd’s memoir, about all sorts of (in my opinion) useless pop culture news, and you’ll find them to be very well informed. Ask them about what it really means to buy locally, to participate in public service, to be charitable, to really be active (if not well informed) in their community, and yet again you’ll get blank stares.

The state of America’s society is in a shameful, embarrassing, arrogant, naive, and simply sad place. I wonder, though, how long we can keep this up? Is it just where the pendulum happens to be right now? Am I not being fair, not seeing the full picture, looking in the wrong places? I’m sure I am, to a small degree. I’m generalizing, I know that, but I’m not far from the mark.

Is the media to blame? Entirely? Really? It’s totally the media’s fault? Is it also the fault of the media that teachers make a small fraction of what the average white collar worker makes? Who’s fault is it that firemen and women aren’t getting their pensions? Who’s fault is it that celebrities and professional athletes are who our children look up to, instead of astronauts, scientists, the First Lady, or Army Generals?

I think I know who’s fault it is. It’s my fault. It’s your fault. It’s your neigbors fault, your brothers, your sisters, your parents, your friends, colleagues. We are to blame for the state of America’s society, political climate, economic condition, joblessness. We are to blame for the disgusting behavior of people like Charlie Sheen. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. The more bullshit we consume, the more bullshit we produce. If you eat shitty food, you shit stinks to the heavens (pardon the crude analogy). If we, Americans, spent even one hour per day consuming less of the things that do not matter, and consume things that do, imagine how many hours of importance it’d produce?

The empire that is America is about to come crashing down. I mean that, truly. I don’t think I’m overreacting at all (and rest assured that America is an empire), I think I’m stating what informed people know. When it comes crashing down on us, we’ll be so fat, stupid, hopped up on sugar, porn, celebrity gossip, and mindless entertainment that we’ll end up looking like the movie Wall-E. No, seriously. Fat, dumb, deaf, and blind – staring at, consuming, eating, injecting whatever orgasm is put in front of us by each other, by the media, the corporate giants producing it, the greedy vampires orchestrating it and banking on it.

I do have hope though. I have hope that America is suffering from a momentary lapse in reason, good judgement, common sense, and that the medicine is coming – in some form, some shape, some place. Maybe America like a man suffering a mid-life crisis, rejecting his old ways, leaving his family, breaking his own rules, driving a red sports car, carelessly getting laid, recklessly imbibing, and avoiding the reality check that is coming, the reality that his kids now hate him, his dog doesn’t know who he is, his wife loved him and still does, he was lucky to even have the job he had, etc etc. I have hope that this pendulum is reaching that moment where it pauses and changes direction.

The pendulum will swing. It will reach the center, and find another extreme.

I feel better now. Thanks for reading and please, take what I write with just a small grain of salt.

Related articles

• The political-overreach pendulum (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Bill Maher: America Needs “A Class War” (mediaite.com)
• The Astounding Absurdity of a Government Shutdown (swampland.blogs.time.com)
• As Internet Use Grows, Is It Polarizing Political Views? (huffingtonpost.com)

One of the projects my team just took on at Litle was revamping the trade show booths. Litle is at something like 25-30 shows this year, exhibiting at them. I was disappointed with how little information there is on the web on designing a trade show booth experience. Not designing the booth itself, that’s not hard, but the experience of the booth – how to really make it effective. I liken this to a casino floor, or a car lot. A trade show booth is more than just graphics, a table, some freebies, or booth babes. So we were left to our own devices. Here are my thoughts.

It’s critical to understand the experience of your audience and match it to your goals. So, figure out what the goals are, prioritize them, and line them up with the audience experience.

The purpose of a trade show booth is to,

1. Generate leads
2. Inform and educate
3. Leave an impression of the brand (many times that precious first impression)

As I see it, there are three personas who interact with a trade show booth.

1. The observer: This is the person who stands on the outskirts of the booth. She stands back about 5-10′ feet from where the action is, reading the graphics, avoiding the sales people, glancing over at the freebies, and deciding whether to move in or move on. The observer is barely a prospect.
2. The burglar: This is the person who dives in for the freebies, a business card, collateral, moving like a tight end, weaving between people, careful not to make eye contact, and sliding out of the scene as if he was never there. Obviously this is a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea. The burglar is a prospect.
3. The engager: The engager is truly interested in learning more. He or she will step in, listen to a conversation or start a new one, ask questions, and truly engage. The first question from the engager is almost always, “so what is [company name]?” The engager is a lead. Oftentimes the engager is a customer (this is a good thing).

The game is this this: you must convert these folks into leads: the observer to a lead, the burglar to a lead, the engager to a more qualified lead, the customer out of the way (but not all the time). The layout and experience of your trade show booth must allow for this to happen naturally. You must convert these people, and do so comfortably.

Think about where a conversation begins at your booth. If your booth people are too far inside the booth, then these people have to work harder to get what they want. Game’s over before it even starts. If your booth people are located on the edges of the booth, positioned properly near the freebies, the collateral, or other content, you’re making it easier to engage with the prospect. However, if this engagement is happening right in front of the booth, crowding it, and doesn’t make room for new engagers, then there’s a bottleneck. That’s a problem. You need to create throughput.

Just as where the conversation starts is important, so is where the conversation ends. And connecting those points together is critical, it must be seamless. You should be prepared to move the conversation, literally, downstream, out of the way, deeper into the booth, making room for more prospects. If you have a customer at the booth, that’s fantastic, especially if it’s a happy customer. Keep this person nearby, but not in the way. Ask her questions about her experiences, make sure people nearby are hearing it. Get her to engage with your prospects – seriously. Why not? If she’s a customer, and a happy one, she’d be happy to do it! Hey, now you owe her one.

Some tips for creating the booth experience:

1. An open concept allows for the conversations and interactions to breath, creating a feeling of openness, ease, flexibility. There’s no rush and it’s not confining.
2. Lighting is also important. Many booths have fancy spotlights to highlight graphics or create effects, but most sales people doing booth duty don’t face those lights, their backs are to them. The booth attendees are the ones who face the lights, and often times they’re blinding. So if you must use lights, use them wisely. Test them as if you were a visitor.
3. A place to rest. Most attendees have been on their feet for several hours, concrete floors, carrying a laptop bag or similar. They’re tired, grumpier than they let on, and probably thirsty. Give your attendees a break, let them sit down, catch their breath, have a drink of water, and do so in a relaxing format.
4. Inform the entire time, organically. Consider where you want people to begin their interactions with you; at the corner of the booth? Out front? Well, have some information nearby, and make it easy. Don’t make them work for it. Where the conversation begins is where you also need to have some customer logos nearby, perhaps behind you on the screen, on the wall, on a slick. Then, once conversation evolves, its your job to move them down the assembly line, out of the way of new prospects, towards the next level of content. Wherever you move the conversation, have information. Let them pick what they want, but be aware of what they’re responding to. Wherever the conversation ends, have information handy, especially business cards, but most importantly have business cards stapled to collateral – this will provide some context when they’re going through their piles a day or two later. You want your card to end up next to the keyboard, not in the wastebasket.
5. Don’t be shy and don’t be pushy. The impression you leave you on these people will be, in most cases, their first impression. If you’re sitting down, playing with your iPhone, not making eye contact, or just plain ignoring people, they’ll forever associate your brand with laziness. Contrarily, if you’re standing out in the aisle handing out freebies and roping people in like cattle, they’ll do everything to avoid you and rest assured they will note your brand – they’ll remember. Just be casual, be easygoing, have a smile ready. Hands out of your pockets, at the ready for a handshake. Look alive, but not manic.
6. Fake it if you have to: If you have three people doing booth duty, sometimes a good idea is for one person to not where the company colors. When the booth is quiet, and people are just strolling by and not stopping in, have this decoy person engage with the booth, fake it. Just don’t do it in a way that gets you caught. Don’t put on such a show that if the person swings by later and you’re now working the booth you look like a total jerk. So be smart about this.

Out of all the points above, if I had to pick the most important part of designing a booth experience, it’d be the layout itself – how you position yourself in the booth, how you position the furniture, the content, etc, all lends itself to the experience. Think like a casino, but don’t create a labyrinth. Think like a merchandiser, but don’t create a boutique.

Mojo (pronounced /?mo?d?o?/) is a term commonly encountered in the African-American folk belief called hoodoo. A mojo is a type of magic charm, often of red flannel cloth and tied with a drawstring, containing botanical, zoological, and/or mineral curios, petition papers, and the like.^[1] It is typically worn under clothing.

We all know when we say, “we have mojo” or “we need to find our mojo” we’re not talking about a magic charm, we’re talking about getting our groove on, our swerve on, etc. But what the heck does that even mean?

We know when we don’t have mojo, right? We know when we need to find our mojo. Yet when we have it, sometimes we don’t know it – we’re just groovin along. Then we fall off and say, “shit, we gotta get our mojo back.”

When I try to define it, I think mojo embodies…

• Confidence
• Execution
• Freedom
• Success
• Momentum
• Teamwork
• Positivity
• Perseverance
• Enthusiasm
• Knowledge
• Perspective
• Control
• Focus

That about sums it up, eh? If you can get all that at the same time, either as an individual or as a team (or organization), than you’re unstoppable. Mojo also implies that you can’t easily be derailed, taken off course.

Can you have mojo without some of those attributes? In my opinion, no – you need all those things. Without perspective you don’t have mojo; without positivity you don’t have mojo, etc.

How do you get mojo? How do you go from where you might be now, to a place where you got mojo? I suspect mojo starts with some fundamental things. You must have some perspective before you can start building mojo. You must be focused on something specific to build mojo. What else? What do you think? Let’s build on this.

I recently started my new job (yes, a job) at Litle & Co., just north of Boston in Lowell. Litle employees a little less than 200 people. It’s a very innovative company that powers the payment processing for brands like Gilt Group, GoDaddy, Overstock, and many others. I’ve known a number of Litle employees for over a decade, including a couple of the executives. As Litle’s new Vice President of Marketing I’ve been asked to affect change not only in Marketing, but within the organization as a whole. Now, I get to take so many of the lessons I’ve learned as an entrepreneur for the past 10 years, and apply them to an established, profitable, growing company as a member of the management team. I’m humbled, flattered, honored, as well as excited, enthusiastic, and passionate. And I know of no other way to go about it.

I’ve been doing my own thing for 10 years – exactly to the day actually. It was January 4, 2001, when I was one of the last people left at an Internet startup in Cambridge, MA, and laid off. I woke up on January 5, 2001 and said to myself, “I’m never doing that again.” So I embarked on a 10 year journey of entrepreneurship, starting with Atomic in the first five years, and concluding with CitySquares over the last five. On January 4, 2011 I started in my new role at Litle – doing it again!

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past several months reviewing all I’ve done, won, lost, learned, and earned over the past 10 years. I’m now in my mid thirties. I embarked on this journey in my mid twenties. How much things have changed. It’s hard to quantify who and what I’ve become, and frankly I don’t think it’s interesting reading. So let me put it like this: For a variety of reasons I did not graduate high school. I was asked to leave actually. I wasn’t thrown out, to be clear, in the classic sense. Rather, I was asked to leave and advised to “start my life.” That was a very sad day. I’ll never forget it. I’ll never forget the feeling I had when I drove by my old high school on graduation day – choked up about what I was missing, about what I’d never experience. Choked up about what my friends were experiencing, about what they’d never forget. Jealous, yes, but sad, regretful, disappointed in myself. Not long after I went out and got my GED, something I’m embarrassed to admit here publicly. A few years later I tried my hand at college, at Bunker Hill Community College. That lasted one semester, barely.

A few months ago I was speaking at Boston College to a classroom full of business students, studying entrepreneurship. It was my third time speaking at BC, at the request of a wonderful professor. One of the questions asked by a student was where I’d gone to college. It was very difficult to answer him. He, a student at BC, and me a high school dropout and entrepreneur on the cusp of selling his company. My reply was awkward, but truthful. I learned by doing. I learned by failing, by succeeding, by winning, by losing. I continue to learn that way. But that’s my way, not a way that works for everyone. He asked what my secret was, a question that also made me feel awkward, as if I had a secret, a genie in a bottle. My answer was simple: passion, but it’s not a secret. Passion, attitude, perspective, these are qualitative attributes that we all possess.

This blog has long been about entrepreneurship, pure and simple. For the foreseeable future I’m taking a long break from entrepreneurship. I’ve got a lot more on the job training to go through. I still have some rough edges that I need to smooth out. And I don’t have any patience for investors. Litle is providing me with fertile ground for me to continue spreading my roots. The company is at an exciting inflection point, facing challenges I can help with, no investors, unrivaled technology, talent, a legacy that won the #1 on the Inc. 500, a customer obsessed culture that won the prestigious Stevie Award last year and is nominated for it yet again. So Your Suspect will now allow me to express and inform on how I apply the lessons of entrepreneurship to a maturing B2B organization, to the Marketing organization within it, to how I interact with and among, learn from, and inspire the Chairman, the CEO, my colleagues, my peers, vendors, clients, etc. And let me tell you, barely two weeks in, I’m overwhelmed by how much opportunity there is to do just that and so much more.

This was a much longer post than I intended, but one that’s long overdue. As I contribute new content to Your Suspect, I will also revisit some of the themes of previous posts, and revisit my experiences with CitySquares, the events leading up to its sale, the sale itself, and the outcome for me, employees, and investors.

I leave you with that, and welcome your comments. Now, I shovel!

Related articles

• Are passion and energy requirements for the job? (customerthink.com)
• 5 Things I Wish I Had Figured Out in College (thegloss.com)
• The Passionate Leader (brandimpact.wordpress.com)
• Got Passion? (socialmediaexplorer.com)

As some of you likely know, it was announced in early December that CitySquares was sold to Backyard, a west coast based startup with funding from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, celebrity entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis, and self described greedy, blood-sucking venture capitalist Dave McClure. It’s not the investors that make Backyard exciting, to me anyway (although it certainly has a nice ring to it), it’s the founder and CEO Steve Espinosa. I’ve known Steve for a few years now, and at 22 he’s already a very well admired veteran of the Local space and I’d bet on him any day of the week. So it’s an honor to have sold CitySquares to such a great guy with an equally great vision.

Now that CitySquares is largely behind me (I will still be involved as an advisor), I’m moving on from Local. Plainly put, 2010 kicked my ass, and CitySquares’ prospects for regaining its edge wasn’t getting any brighter as this year passed for reasons I won’t get into right now (but I will once the dust settles). As Greg Sterling penned on his site announcing the acquisition of CitySquares,

Given the noise and competition now in local Saren is not unahppy about exiting the segment for now…When CitySquares launched, for example, there was no Google Places, no Facebook Deals, no Groupon and no Foursquare (et al).

There’s a whole lot of truth in those two sentences. More truth than you know. I can proudly say that CitySquares pioneered hyper-local search. No one was doing local search at the neighborhood level until CitySquares came along – and I mean really doing it at the neighborhood level. And to this day, I will boldly state that still, no one has the mashup of hyper-local geospatial data and local business listings that CitySquares.com has. Alas, the mobile platform is the future of local search, of hyper-local search. OK, it’s not the future, it’s the now! So of the many things I can hang my hat on as I close the door on my CitySquares.com chapter, this is one of them.

Another thing I can hang my hat on are my relationships with countless people, of so many background, cultures, and talents. I’m proud to call many entrepreneurs, investors, employees, associates, vendors, partners, across the country and in many corners of the globe colleagues, acquaintances, even friends. CitySquares took me places I never imagined going, both literally and figuratively. I’m most proud of this.

So it’s with both excitement and with sadness that I say goodbye to 2010, and with open arms that I welcome 2011. I will be making an announcement about my next step within the next week or two. In short, it’s a big change for me, and a change I’m thrilled about.

Before I sign off for the year, I’d like to wish you a very healthy, happy, prosperous 2011. See you on the other side!

Au revoir