bizAZ Magazine Article

What is the Key to Proper Management Structure?

Interview with Chad Little, President and CEO of myGeek
by Sarah Bannan

March/April 2006 Issue

In 1999 we opened in the niche market of reverse shopping or reverse auctioning where consumers would define what they wanted and merchants would bid on their business. When our doors opened, we had four senior managers who were brought on with the idea that we would build out underneath them. Two days after we closed our series-A venture financing the bubble burst, and the market immediately went to nothing.

Our plans changed because our capital needs changed, and we changed our attack in terms of how we tackled the marketplace. myGeek chose to alter the model of how we were going to approach the fundamentals of our business. Through that decision we completed a downsizing and then a rebuilding.

Today all the senior managers who were with us in the beginning are no longer here. We now have "working managers" divided between three main branches: advertising sales, operations and finance, and technology. All senior managers have done the same job that everyone else has and earned the respect of their peers by being in the trenches themselves.

The underpinning of everything is accountability and the delegation of accountability as the organization grows. Managers are the ones taking ownership, and at the end of the day they are ultimately going to meet or not meet the goals that are set and have been agreed upon.

We are not a content company. Instead, we are a company that provides technology solutions to our clients. As we grow we are very dependant on those three main branches, but technology is and always will be the core and central part of what we do. Our mission statement is to provide our clients with innovative solutions that maximize their advertising revenues. It is the solutions that come from engineering that provide this. The rest of myGeek is advertising sales. We will continue to grow in both areas through new, innovative solutions that come out of the company and allow is to obtain more advertisers.