Measuring Competitive Intelligence

KAREN LAKE: Brandy, could you start by giving our radio audience a brief overview of what your company offers online companies?

BRANDY THOMAS: Cyveillance is the leading provider of extra site ebusiness intelligence. That's the whole concept of being able to look outside of your site to understand how the rest of the Internet is effecting your business for good or for bad.

KAREN LAKE: How did you come up with this idea? Why did you feel there was a need?

BRANDY THOMAS: Purely by luck. In a past life, the other cofounders and I were management consultants. We spent the majority of our lives collecting quantitative data to help businesses develop better strategy and implement better tactics. With the growth of the Internet, it was critical that as the numbers got astronomical - for both investments and returns - companies had to start to basing their tactics and strategies on pure quantitative data and non-empirical evidence.

KAREN LAKE: What benefits are gained by knowing these types of things?

BRANDY THOMAS: There are five or six key issues recurring out there. The first is that this whole online community is creating disruption in traditional distribution channels. This is the whole issue of the brick and mortar companies and distribution methods. The Internet erases geographical boundaries. Brick and mortar companies don't know how to handle this.

The second issue is how to measure the effectiveness of their businesses. Offline metrics don't apply anymore. The Internet is a huge dynamic environment. Traditional measurements don't tell you how you're doing on the Internet. You're not measured by profitability. You're not even measured by revenue anymore. You're measured by strange things like clicks and eyeballs and click-throughs.

Competition is a big one for a lot of our companies right now. People know the competition exists, but if they understood exactly what it was, they could more effectively react to what's happening out there. It's not that people don't know that the competition exists.

KAREN LAKE: Who are your top three competitors in the marketplace?

BRANDY THOMAS: We have an interesting group of competitors. The first is just internal competition. That means going to these companies when they don't have the first clue of what they need and don't need. A lot of companies still don't understand the Internet or how it effects their businesses. They have not put together a business plan. They've hired people who have been great in other areas of the company, but they haven't yet understood all the intricacies and levers of making Internet strategy great. So that's our first set of competition - the lack of knowledge of a lot of people out there.

The second set of competition is the consulting houses. The first thing a lot of people do when they get into these new jobs and realize they have a lot to learn is hire a big consultant that can do the work for them. That's great and I am a true believer in consultants, but consulting houses don't have access to quantitative information to make good strategy and good tactics and to understand how implementation works.

Our third set of competitors is the clipping houses that'll act with other kinds of resources available. Clipping services are like search engines. They scour the Internet for what's happening. The problem is that the Internet is so big and growing so fast. Simply monitoring the net is not going to give you the type of analysis you need to feed into your strategy.

KAREN LAKE: If the clipping services can't do it, how can you?

BRANDY THOMAS: One, because we're great. For the past several years we've been developing a technology called NetSapien. I have to brag about it because it just got put into the Smithsonian for cutting edge technologies to help businesses in the new millennium. It surfs the Internet like a human would except at Internet speeds. It's not out there looking for keywords or text or any particular graphic. Anything humans can know, guess or infer by looking at a web page, the technology can do with the same accuracy. Except instead of doing a hundred or a thousand pages a day, it does tens of millions of pages a day, which gives you the real quantitative data and the real quantitative base to make decisions from.

KAREN LAKE: You said, "surfs like a human." How can a computer surf something and know and guess and make implications?

BRANDY THOMAS: That's the beauty of the technology. We have several patents pending from about three or four years of hard-core work with this technology, combined with understanding what it is that businesses are looking for. Instead of just looking for text or keywords, it looks at keywords, it looks at text, it looks at actual language. It also looks at graphics and the placement of graphics, videos and what having a particular graphic or video on the screen indicates as far as the business strategy of that company.

KAREN LAKE: What are the most common reasons that people come to you for a solution?

BRANDY THOMAS: Fear of the unknown. Three years ago if a company wanted to get onto the Internet, they would have hired a college student for $25 an hour to put up a website. It doesn't work today because the numbers are just scary. It's not a million dollars at stake or a billion dollars. It's a trillion dollars. If you look at the Forrester Report, they're saying ebusiness is going to be $7 trillion in the next five years. Well, the whole GNP of the US is $7 trillion right now. What that tells you is regardless if they're off by a two times or three times factor, the bottom line is that the Internet is not adding business. It's cannibalizing current businesses. You don't have a choice anymore. You can either play or someone can play you. So businesses are coming to us saying they don't want to be in a position in three years where they failed do whatever it took to win this game.

KAREN LAKE: So people come to you saying, "Help me find a way to be successful so that I can compete against the others that are out there that are offering the same type of service."

BRANDY THOMAS: Exactly. It started with people saying, "Help me because I think someone is doing A, B, or C." But now it's, "Help me make sure I'm positioned appropriately for whatever's coming down the stream."

Here's a great quote from a book I'm reading: "Companies right now are facing radically dissimilar competitors on the Internet. They don't know who they are all the time, they don't know what they're doing, and they don't know how to compete against them because their models are so radically different than anything they've faced before."

KAREN LAKE: It sounds like you are a consultant, but armed with this tool, NetSapien, that helps you analyze some of that data and give information on a realtime basis.

BRANDY THOMAS: That's a great summary. There's not a lot of difference between consulting firms. They may have different processes or setups, but basically you have a bunch of very smart people who concentrate on trying to make your business better. What makes us different is that while we have the smart people who try to make your business better, we also have a technology that gives us access to information that no one else has. That information can tell you things like "Do you know who all your suppliers are on the Internet?" or "Do you know about your distribution on the Internet - who's selling your goods and at what prices they're selling them and how they're marketing your positioning?" The answer in almost every case is no. Unless you only have one or five distributors, it's impossible today to understand what your thousand or five thousand distributors are doing without using something like NetSapien and Cyveillance to help you understand the landscape.

Team Building in the Information Business

KAREN LAKE: How do you find your consultants? What are your secrets? It's very hard in this market to find those people without paying them half a million a year.

BRANDY THOMAS: We are absolutely competitive in what we pay. At this stage and with the speed at which we're growing, we do not have time to train thousands and thousands of people to do consulting. So we look for people who've been successful consultants in other types of businesses and we train them to use the information that we collect. You don't have to hire fifty consultants for fifty new clients. For us, the technology does a lot of it. The technology gets you to a certain point. Our consultants do the final bit of analysis on the data information. They spend their time analyzing the data, making recommendations, and helping companies implement those recommendations. Just doing the research takes up a lot of the time of most consultants. But that's already done for us through NetSapien, our proprietary technology.

KAREN LAKE: Brandy, what are some of the most common misconceptions about your business model?

BRANDY THOMAS: One of the two most common misconceptions is: "You guys are a clipping service. You're going to tell us in realtime who's saying what about us on the Internet." That's not what we do at Cyveillance. We specialize in how the Internet is affecting the bottom line of your business, whether it's revenue, market share, or customer brand loyalty. We collect all that kind of information and tie it to your personal business model.

The other misconception is: "You're a trademark or copyright scanning service." Certainly we do help companies protect their brands by understanding who is misusing that brand. That's just alerting a company, not helping them to discern how it's affecting their revenue, market share, customer brand loyalty. Understanding how those violators are affecting a particular company's opportunities or increasing the risk is more of what we focus on at Cyveillance. Just collecting data is not helping a company understand how that data's impacting their business.

Metatags and Legal Issues

KAREN LAKE: Can you talk about metatags, those hidden keywords that many search engines read to determine their rankings? How do how they affect companies and why are they are important?

BRANDY THOMAS: Right now as far as I've been able to discern, there are only three ways to make money on the Internet. You can make it through an advertising model, a subscription model or merchandising model. That's pretty much it in the B to C (business to consumer) space. There are hybrids and there are combinations, but they all boil down to one of these three categories. We talked about new metrics for the online world. One big metric that people use to measure themselves is this whole thing of eyeballs - who comes to our site? But the big question is who's not coming to my site and why are they not coming. Metatags, framing, taking someone's content from a page are ways other sites use to divert traffic. When your traffic has been diverted, you've lost eyeballs and that hurts your advertising model, your subscription model and absolutely hurts your merchandizing model.

KAREN LAKE: Give us a real life example.

BRANDY THOMAS: The Washington Post is a client of ours. When we first started working for them, they were very interested in finding people who were violating their intellectual property rights, taking their metatags, their domain names, taking pieces of articles, reprinting articles on their own sites. They were concerned about it from an intellectual property delusion point of view. They're right. It actually is an intellectual property point of view. But if you think of their business model, they make money from an advertising model. That means every time someone comes to their site, they make some number of pennies from advertisers on the page. If another site is out there taking the Post's metatags or an article or logos and trademarks, when a customer looks for that information, they may go to the other site instead of to The Washington Post site. Again, it is trademark delusion, but the real issue for The Washington Post or any company like that is that they lost some eyeballs. For an advertising model an eyeball is direct revenue loss.

That's a big deal and every company on the Internet has this problem because it's a land grab for space out there. People are doing whatever they can to get as many customers as they can to come to their sites, even if they have to step on the sites that should be getting the eyeballs.

KAREN LAKE: Ziff Davis did an article about metatag abuse and how many brand names are linked to porn. What's happening there and how can people prevent such things?

BRANDY THOMAS: Cyveillance did the first and only comprehensive study on porn about a year ago. We looked at several million pages on porn and how big brands are linked to it. If I recall, Disney was the biggest victim of pornography on the entire Internet. The pornography industry on the Internet is one of the most sophisticated industries there is.

KAREN LAKE: They've been doing it longer than anybody else.

BRANDY THOMAS: If you think about it, pornography's led every major communications media from VCRs to CDs to 8-Tracks.

KAREN LAKE: I've never heard anybody say that. I didn't think about that. What a wonderful country we live in.

BRANDY THOMAS: I guess it's equal opportunity for all.

KAREN LAKE: I don't understand how that affects Disney.

BRANDY THOMAS: The pornography industry is finding a way to make earnings and profitability. They live and die by people coming to their sites. Disney is a well-known brand on the Internet. Pornographers have found a way to leverage Disney's brand better than Disney has in several different respects. They use Disney in their metatags. They use Disney logos. They go after the same people that Disney does to get traffic on their sites.

Disney is such a big company that they can't possibly attempt to shut down every pornographic site that uses them. Disney's mistake is they don't know how to find the ones that are hurting them most.

We often hear that "someone told me that there's a site doing something bad to me." My answer is, "So what. That's not going to help you to focus." Resources are very expensive. Companies need to focus their resources on the biggest bang for the buck. If Disney does not find every porn site using their logo and find out which ones are getting the most traffic, then what they are focusing on is a pure guess. That's a big mistake for them. That's not economical. It does not make business sense. Disney is a huge culprit in that. A lot of companies follow in their footsteps. Disney has let it get out of hand.

KAREN LAKE: What is the legality of putting your competition's brand in your metatags. I know that a lot of small businesses do that thinking that nobody's going to care and they're not going to get in trouble.

BRANDY THOMAS: I'm not a lawyer. We focus on the business implications: How badly is this hurting you? And how easily can you stop it? If you try to stop everyone who uses your name in a metatag, you're going to have to hire an entire department and they're going to meet a lot of frustration. We introduce it to prioritize which sites out there are hurting helping your company the most in some cases and then which ones you can do something about. If someone simply mentions you in a metatag, you're going to expend a lot of energy trying to get them to stop. But if they're using your name in a metatag, generating revenue through an advertising model and selling your goods on their site that are pirated or black market, you have a much bigger and stronger case. The key is not just a metatag. It's the conglomeration of several activities you need to measure and understand, coupled by how much traffic or how much business they're diverting.

Venture Capital Tips

KAREN LAKE: You just received some significant venture capital funding. Can you talk about how that happened and what works and what doesn't work with investors?

BRANDY THOMAS: It's like going to Vegas and gambling. When it was time to get serious, I made it a game. I made phone calls and had to contact at least twenty people a day. It's a big lesson in humility, especially the first round. Subsequent rounds get significantly easier.

You have to find someone who truly believes in your story. When venture capitalists, institutional investors, invest in you, I think they invest in several different pieces. First, they believe in the market space you're in. Especially in today's economy, they have to believe the market space you're in is truly huge, a billion dollars or two billion dollars.

Second, they have to believe in your management team. Do you have people in place with the experience to make this a successful venture? They see great ideas every single day. There are millions of great ideas, but what differentiates a great idea from a successful company is execution. Execution is about people. So can you build a management team that has the ability to execute? Finally, do you have any real barriers other than funding? Do you have a technology in place? Do you have a process that you've patented? Do you have some secret that prevents someone else from doing it as well as you're doing it?

Those are the three things that you have to make sure that you can articulate clearly, quickly and concisely when you're looking for funds. After that it's a bunch of networking. It's contacting as many firms as you can, getting in front of the right people, with a clear, concise and compelling pitch.

KAREN LAKE: That's very powerful. I love the Vegas analogy.

BRANDY THOMAS: It's about as lucky. We thought about taking payroll and going out to Vegas and betting on black.

KAREN LAKE: Exactly.


911 for Competitive Intelligence
KAREN LAKE: Brandy, let's move to your ebusiness intelligence services, starting with your tactical solutions where people come to you with a current problem. Can you talk about some of those issues: who's diverting traffic from my site, who is selling my goods and services, those kinds of things? What are the real solutions and what types of companies are coming to you?

BRANDY THOMAS: I'm going to rename tactical services "emergency" services.

KAREN LAKE: They've got a problem NOW.

BRANDY THOMAS: They say, "I know the Internet has all these implications, but I have an immediate problem." It could be something like diverted traffic, as in "I'm trying to do an IPO tomorrow, I'm judged on eyeballs and I need to make sure I get as many eyeballs in the door as humanly possible, as quickly as possible."

We talked about pornography earlier. Disney could come to us, they're not our client, and say, "This pornography's gotten out of hand. We need to find the biggest and worst pornography offenders and stop them today." It's about people who have an immediate issue on the Internet today. "I have a big competitor coming up to play. I'm about to invest a lot of money into my marketing strategy. I need to understand who they're going after, where their sites are, what the distribution channels are right now." That's what we call the tactical emergency services.

911 for Competitive Intelligence

KAREN LAKE: Brandy, let's move to your ebusiness intelligence services, starting with your tactical solutions where people come to you with a current problem. Can you talk about some of those issues: who's diverting traffic from my site, who is selling my goods and services, those kinds of things? What are the real solutions and what types of companies are coming to you?

BRANDY THOMAS: I'm going to rename tactical services "emergency" services.

KAREN LAKE: They've got a problem NOW.

BRANDY THOMAS: They say, "I know the Internet has all these implications, but I have an immediate problem." It could be something like diverted traffic, as in "I'm trying to do an IPO tomorrow, I'm judged on eyeballs and I need to make sure I get as many eyeballs in the door as humanly possible, as quickly as possible."

We talked about pornography earlier. Disney could come to us, they're not our client, and say, "This pornography's gotten out of hand. We need to find the biggest and worst pornography offenders and stop them today." It's about people who have an immediate issue on the Internet today. "I have a big competitor coming up to play. I'm about to invest a lot of money into my marketing strategy. I need to understand who they're going after, where their sites are, what the distribution channels are right now." That's what we call the tactical emergency services.

Branding and Competitive Intelligence

BRANDY THOMAS: Operational services are more proactive. The questions are, "How do I manage something? How do I manage my image on the Internet?"

KAREN LAKE: When you say the word "image," what does that mean to you?

BRANDY THOMAS: From an operational point of view, it's how you manage your brand on the Internet. It's not about someone who stole a logo. It's about what people are saying about you. How does the Internet perceive you? That's done through managing your fans. It's done through managing your partners, your suppliers, your vendors. It's done through managing what's happening on your competitors' sites about you. It's how people formulate an impression about you on the Internet.

KAREN LAKE: When you say "managing your fans," what does that mean? I've never heard that expression before.

BRANDY THOMAS: People tell you the Internet environment is difficult to control. Companies that think they are going to build, maintain, and grow their brands on the Internet by themselves are deluded. The reason I say that is because you have fans, you have vendors, you have suppliers, you have competitors. Everyone is out there, and they're working for you or they're working against you. If you can find a way to leverage those people to help you to spread your message, spread your brand, and help increase your presence on the Internet, you're going to win this game each and every time. If you think everything's going to happen through your site, and your site is the center of the universe or the center of the web, and no one out there has any effect on it, you're going to lose very badly. You need to understand who's out there and make sure they are following what you're trying to do - they're following your strategy and they're maximizing your impact on the Internet.

KAREN LAKE: What would be a specific example of how you could manage fans or suppliers? What are some of the changes that you've seen with the clients that you've worked with?

BRANDY THOMAS: Viacom is not our client, and I think they've done the worst job on the Internet as far as managing. I'm a Star Trek fan through and through. In the very beginning there were a lot of people that believed in the Star Trek brand that Viacom had built over the years, Star Trek. They spent a lot of their hard-earned time promoting their own Star Trek sites. Some of them did a good job and some of them did not do as good of a job. Viacom randomly sent lawyers the sites with no rhyme or reason and tried to shut them down. That was absolutely the worst thing they could have done. Viacom literally did not have a case to stand on because they did not go out there with any kind of rhyme or reason.

KAREN LAKE: Did it affect how the fans felt about Viacom?

BRANDY THOMAS: It absolutely did and about Star Trek. It was spread like wildfire across the web.

Lego is an example of a company that did a great job. Lego is not a client. Lego said they had a certain image they wanted to portray so they found out who their fans were and helped them to build better independent sites. They gave their fans content that they could use. I don't know what the legal word is, but they almost licensed these people. They made them part of the overall Lego community. They used these people to spread the Lego message, to spread the Lego brand. They got many more loyal fans from that. They got a significantly improved image on the Internet. They found a way to resource and leverage people who wanted to spread and help Lego as a company.

KAREN LAKE: How can you measure image?

BRANDY THOMAS: Actually on the Internet it's very easy to measure. You can find all the sites that use Lego in them? Within that, how many sites are saying positive things? Are any of them increasing the distribution network? Are they saying negative things about the company? If so, what are they saying and are they having an effect? How many people have visited them?

It goes back to building new metrics for the online community. The web is nothing but a huge communications medium. The only difference it has from TV and radio is that it's interactive. There's two-way feedback, which makes it a lot more complex. Conceptually you're trying to grow revenues, increase market share, build customer brand loyalty.

Lego significantly improved their customer brand loyalty. If you're looking for sites about building blocks, instead of one central Lego site there are several sites talking about Lego. They're all sending the same marketing message that the Lego people put out to build their brand.

KAREN LAKE: Because Lego has given them text and images and logos.

BRANDY THOMAS: They focused their message. It isn't just coming from Lego. It is coming from their fans. Now instead of their fans hurting them unintentionally, they're helping Lego. Lego's found a way to build a user base that spreads the word. I'd much rather hear from a user than from a company. You don't find a lot of Lego hate sites. You find a lot of "I love Lego," and you see the logo in the right colors. You see the brand message and logo put out to play. You see people build virtual user communities. They have done a phenomenal job at that. I'd say 99.9% of the companies out there have not figured that out yet. Instead they're trying to stop and stymie the universe or they're letting the universe go. Either way it's just as bad.

Proactive Ebusiness Competitive Intelligence

KAREN LAKE: Let's go on to the strategy solution where people are saying, "I'm not just trying to solve problems, I'm trying to go forward. How can I drive traffic to my website? How can I generate additional revenue?" What's the advice that you give to somebody who is in that mode?

BRANDY THOMAS: There's a huge difference between ecommerce and ebusiness. Ecommerce is nothing but a distribution means. Ebusiness says the Internet is strategy important to my entire company. It's not just about my distribution channel. It's not my marketing. It's not my sales. It's not my HR. It's not my operations. It's not my IT department. So when a company understands how to integrate the Internet into their entire operation, then we talk with them about strategic solutions because the information they need back from the Internet affects several groups across the organization. They may need slightly different data, but they need access to the same kind of data so they're making solutions concurrently. And they make informed decisions. Then they can measure the results going forward.

Another big mistake companies make is throwing resources behind something whose results can't be adequately measured in realtime. Strategic solutions go back to companies who have realized the Internet is important to their entire company operation and are going to make the commitment to be successful on the Internet. When that comes into play, we talk about how to build an effective strategy, how to implement tactics and how to measure results going forward and make changes if they're not getting as high a rate of return.

Price Strategy and Legal Issues

KAREN LAKE: One of the things that I wanted to ask you about, Brandy, is performance matrix. We didn't talk about site owner and product authenticity. What do those two terms mean to you and why are they important to your clients?

BRANDY THOMAS: It depends on the kind of business and the issues that you're facing. Site ownership is one of the ways to start measuring how important a particular site is to you. It comes back to people tending to care a lot more about, for instance, commercial sites than they do about fan sites because commercial sites drive and generate business. And it's easier to measure. So understand how important a site is to you.

Product authenticity is no different. Maybe you care a lot more about a site that is distributing non-authentic or non-authorized products than you do about authorized products. This is the key question that we always ask our clients. Sometimes they say, "Can't we just sign up for your services over the web?" or "Can't we just do it on a quick and simple phone call?" The answer's usually no because the very first time we walk in we bring in our experts, our consultants, our analysts. They try to understand the problems that potential clients are trying to solve or the opportunities they're trying to exploit. If clients can articulate that, then we can worry more about what metrics they need to capture to understand how they're doing against that particular problem. So we take a lot of time trying to understand what drives them as a business. Is it their goal to get more traffic to their site? Is it their goal to sell more goods over their site? Is it their goal to get more people to see their site? Is it their goal to control their distribution channels? If you can articulate your goal, our strategists can say, "In our experience companies with similar goals and objectives have collected this kind of information. Once it's collected, this is what they've done with it. This is how it's helped them." Our metrics are simply a means to an end. Each and every customer has a different goal.

KAREN LAKE: How do price points, domain location and framing affect the formula?

BRANDY THOMAS: Home Depot is a big client of ours. Several months ago they were very upset that people were on the web undercutting their prices. I don't know if it was a legal contract, but Home Depot was trying to make sure that they maintained the lowest price point and the biggest and best product selection in the world. Home Depot wanted to devise a more effective strategy. That's how a price point would affect things.

We talked about framing in relation to The Washington Post. Framing is simply a way that people can divert traffic. There are probably twenty-five to thirty ways to do this. Some of them are more egregious, more effective or more controllable than others.

KAREN LAKE: How do you deal with framing? Are there legal issues there? Can you do anything with somebody who's framing?

BRANDY THOMAS: Absolutely. A precedent has been set. I'm not a lawyer so I'm not going to tell you all the legal issues, but precedent has been set with framing. With metatags, it's a lot more difficult to do anything. But when someone frames and uses metatags and a logo, it becomes a lot easier to stop or regain traffic if you determine that the competing site has generated enough traffic to make it worth your while to pursue. It goes back to all these things. If you take them individually, people get the wrong idea. Nothing that you mention means that much by itself. It means a tremendous amount, however, if you combine it with three or four other things to get you to the point of saying, "I'm trying to make sure that I'm generating the most traffic on my site." Then I could tell you there are the twenty-six different metrics you need to measure to make sure that you're achieving your goals.

KAREN LAKE: Your company literature talks about policies and inappropriate content. Those weren't surprising to me, but why is customer service on that list? What does that have to do with the whole formula? Did they just need to make the list even?

BRANDY THOMAS: That's probably about it. I like to have symmetry.

At Cyveillance we build knowledge libraries. We base them on what our clients are saying their end goals are. We've developed ways to collect information and figure out which information to put together to get you to your goal. At some point we developed a solution where customer satisfaction was indeed a metric that one of our customers needed to combine with some of these other metrics to get to their end goal.

For example, Barnes & Noble doesn't have a clue why Amazon is beating them on the Internet. They're not our clients, but I know this because if I look at their strategy, it's wrong. They're competing on things like price. Guess what? That's not what Amazon is competing on. We talked about erratically dissimilar competition. I don't know a lot about the book industry, but you'd probably compete on things like location of your storefronts, pricing and advertising space. That's not what Amazon did. Amazon built the strongest, best affiliate program the Internet had ever seen. Amazon didn't go out there and price. They had amazing customer service. You could look at all the fan sites and analyze what they were saying. They didn't say Amazon had the cheapest prices. They said it was easy to buy a book. They said it came every single time. They didn't get call backs three days later saying the book wasn't in stock. People never came back and said they cared about the price. Amazon telegraphed everything they did. Barnes & Noble did not have that information so they competed on price. Barnes & Noble threw out a bunch of advertising, both online and offline. That's not what Amazon did. Barnes & Noble did not compete effectively with Amazon because they didn't know how to read the web. They collected the wrong metrics. All they had to go on was sales (which are posted), hits to a page, (which are posted and easy to get), and some high level empirical evidence of what five or six different sites were saying about Amazon. That was absolutely the wrong strategy. It's no wonder they are doing so badly in comparison, but they're not unique. Companies that don't take this stuff seriously are losing. They're not gaining what they should gain. The Internet is a great space.

Closing Advice: Business Model

KAREN LAKE: What advice would you give a friend on what he or she should look for when starting an Internet business or overlaying a brick and mortar business to a click and mortar?

BRANDY THOMAS: First, don't reinvent the wheel. A lot of people have spent a lot of money and time understanding what works and what does not work on the Internet. Find a proven model. You can improve it, but understand what's worked and what has not worked before you try something brand new. There are not a lot of new things on the Internet today. You need to understand which retreads work and which don't before you waste all your time and money and effort.

Second, go out there and find the best, smartest people you can possibly get no matter what they cost to come and help you out. Because that's going to ultimately drive your business forward, whether you're starting a new business or you're trying to integrate your business into the Internet. Finding smart people today who don't have Internet experience is a mistake. If you can find someone who's smart and has Internet experience, you'll carry yourself tremendously farther than having only one or the other.

KAREN LAKE: How do you find smart Internet people? There are not enough of them.

BRANDY THOMAS: There are not enough, but if you can, get them. One of the things I heard way back when about recruiting is you don't go finding people who are looking for jobs, you find people who are happy in their jobs. The first generation Internet people are out, the second generation of people is out and now you're talking third generation. There are a lot of those who are very, very good at what they do. If you can find someone who's good and has actually seen and done it before, you'll carry your business significantly farther - faster than you ever believed possible. So you just have to find them wherever they are and find a way to get them.

KAREN LAKE: That's great advice. Thank you so much for joining us.

BRANDY THOMAS: Thank you very much. I had a good time today.