113: Fueling Small Business Growth with CEO John Oechsle of Swiftpage

Background on John Oechsle of Swiftpage:

John Oechsle is the President and CEO of Swiftpage. He is a recognized international business leader with a 30 year track record of building highly profitable and sustainable revenue growth for emerging companies and established global leaders. Most recently he was the Executive Vice President of Strategy and Product for DigitalGlobe. During his tenure, he was instrumental in shaping the future of the company and driving revenue growth through the launch of a number of very successful product lines.

Prior to DigitaGlobe, Oechsle served as the Senior Vice President of Technology and Content and Chief Information Officer for IHS Inc. He has held key leadership positions in the US and internationally with Johnson & Johnson, the Kellogg Company, and LandAmerica Financial.

H. John Oechsle received the 2011 Bob Newman Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Community by the Colorado Technology Association. He also received the Titan of Technology Award in 2009 and the Technology Executive of the Year Award in 2006 for Colorado. Oechsle also served as the 2007 Board Chair for the Colorado Technology Association.

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

[3:27] John Oechsle is the president and CEO of Swiftpage, which provides CRM, software, marketing automation software for small businesses.
[5:34] John explains more about CRM and ACT.
[8:58] John introduces the 4 C’s of information. These 4 Cs are Currency, Correctness, Consistency, & Completeness, which are vital if you want to have a good relationship with your customers.
[13:30] John was a football athlete when he was in high school. He was also into computers, which is why he got a computer science degree. After graduating, he went into consulting.
[15:26] When John left his consultancy job and joined Kellogg's, he defines it as a major turning point in his career.
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[22:33] John delves on how it is to work abroad and understand the culture of other countries.
[23:38] John finally achieves his goal to become a C-level or C-suite within a company called Land America Financial, which is based in Philadelphia.
[25:02] John was offered a job to fix a bankrupt company, which they successfully cleaned up, helped make successful acquisitions, and increase its revenue. John considers this experience as a wild crazy ride that will eventually lead him to Swiftpage.
[32:32] Swiftpage started out as a small email marketing company. John, who was an investor for Swiftpage, came into the company to help them grow.
[33:54] John talks about how he helped Swiftpage from zero revenue to $4 million in revenue overnight.
[40:58] In 2009, Sage decided to acquire Swiftpage. John convinced the owner of Swiftpage to accept the deal. However, the deal didn’t push through.
[43:15] In 2012, Swiftpage decided to make John their CEO. During one of their board meetings, John went to the bathroom and when he came back, he was voted as the CEO. At first, he didn’t want to become the Swiftpage CEO.
[45:28] According to John, every small business needs the 4 pillars of digital pillars in order to grow. These digital pillars are presence, traffic, conversion & retention, and optimization tools.
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[50:07] John tells a very interesting story about how they were able to acquire ACT and SalesLogic. This major deal tremendously skyrocketed Swiftpage into the stratosphere.
[1:01:59] It took several phases and many years to clean up and transform ACT and take it to the next level.
[1:11:35] John tells the listeners what qualities they need to have in order to be successful as an entrepreneur.

Fabulous 4 Questions:

📖 📚 Favorite Book(s)? My favorite books of all time are the Malcom Gladwell books, The tipping point, Blink, Outliers, What the dog saw and David and Goliath. I find myself rereading them because I pull new information out of them every time I do!!
🙌😎 Favorite Amazon.com purchase? I am an Amazon Prime junkie!! I buy almost everything from there. My favorite purchases are just the basic personal hygiene products. I love that they just show up just when I need them!!!!
🌱💸 Favorite Tool that's GROWN your Business? I’m going to go old school here, but I would say data warehousing has by far helped us grow specifically the use of Tableau.
💭💡 BIGGEST Challenge keeping your Business from GROWING? Brand awareness. Everybody knows the Act! Brand but they remember it from 10 years ago. Since we acquired it in 2013 we have dramatically changed the product and getting the world to take a look at it again is what we focus on every day!

Key Point from the Interview:

“When you wake up in the morning, if you’re not super jazzed to do what you’re doing, man find something else because life is too damn short”

Resources Mentioned:

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