Building Localist a golden chance
Digital marketer brings new media to old ways.
Wednesday, January 25 2012 || News || BY William Mace, Businessday.co.nz
Glubb's staunch, managerial gaze anchors a distinctively sleek head which sits, unencumbered by a tie, atop an untucked shirt and jacket combination as he sits in a small central Auckland meeting room.
It's not an unexpected juxtaposition from a digital marketing man who has been handed the job of designing and building what is essentially a government-backed, advertising-based, tech start-up: Localist.
Maintaining the cool, calm and creative persona of a marketing guru while persuading the bosses of the monolithic NZ Post organisation to follow new media to the frontiers of the known business model can't be an easy task.
But that's what he was hired for: NZ Post is losing its traditional addressed mail market and is branching out into slightly more marginal business opportunities.
Despite an impending management restructure and rumours of another round of funding being sourced from his NZ Post paymasters, Glubb is confident the future of e-commerce is in creating content and places for that content, including product and service recommendations, to be created and shared by online communities.
Such communities are increasingly connected to mobile smartphone networks and so are in need of a location-sensitive directory search tool.
In addition to creating a usable and relevant product, it's the recognition of the Localist brand as a place to share and access information that the company's success hinges on in an increasingly crowded online directory market.
Glubb has plenty of experience measuring the success of such ventures for his bosses at some of New Zealand's biggest corporations, including Bank of New Zealand, Telecom, Telstra and most recently the ''frying pan'' that Yellow Pages Group became.
When Telecom sliced the directory business off in 2007, Glubb believes Yellow's brand was worth about half the eventual overall sale price of $2.24 billion.
The leveraged buy-out by private equity interests - Hong Kong-based Unitas Capital and Canada's Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan - has been an unsuccessful purchase so far, with Yellow writing down its value this year to about $750 million.
As marketing director for two years prior to sale, Glubb was heavily involved in sprucing up the brand for sale.
''My job was re-branding the organisation and knocking it into shape in terms of the products we had in the market.
''Clearly with a pending potential sale, it's like selling a house, you want to make sure the business is looking 'spic-n-span' and as good as it can.''
Glubb was grilled and interviewed by all the various private equity groups on the business and where it was going. The business ended up selling for $2.24 billion - an amount Glubb describes as a ''fantastic deal for Telecom''.
He agrees with what has been widely reported; that the buyer - a private equity consortium consisting of CCMP Capital (now Unitas) and Teachers' Private Capital, the private investment arm of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan - paid too much at the height of a private equity boom.
This was immediately undermined by the 2008 debt market crisis which gave lenders the jitters and severely affected advertising revenues.
''The guys who bought that business were smart people and good people to work with but they bought at the wrong time at the peak of the market, and interestingly there were a whole lot of people prepared to pay $2 billion-odd for it - probably about 30 businesses interested in buying, and about four at the end, so it was hotly contested.''
Now he's working for the opposition trying to cut Yellow's lunch - although he says the company has ''got its act together'' in the last two years by removing some of its ''debt mountain''.
Glubb says it wasn't his plan to take up the Localist chief executive role when he began consulting for NZ Post on some new business ideas.
He spent nine months trying to answer NZ Post's questions; is there an opportunity? What would you build? What would it cost? What would success look like?
''Then they basically offered me the opportunity at the end of that to set it up and run it, which certainly wasn't the initial plan but when you get the opportunity to build a business yourself it's too good an opportunity to turn down.''
The offer wasn't exactly out of the blue when you consider Glubb's career as one of Australasia's most progressive digital media marketers.
He studied anthropology and history at his hometown Otago University, amidst a musical awakening in the city which Glubb fondly refers to as ''the Dunedin Sound''.
