One of the hardest parts about ending a year is finishing everything you set out as your annual goals – while planning for what you’re going to accomplish the following year. It’s as if we were baking a cake by turning the heat up on the oven and adding more ingredients at the same time.

Right now we’re in the midst of finalizing the 2008 plan of record [POR], which we’ll then need to get approved by the board. We’re also closing out any last potential sales, and completing development of all of this year’s programs.

This year’s planning feels significantly more sophisticated than 2007′s. We’re continuously refining what makes sense to track and what’s wasted energy.

As part of our process this year, we looked at the business from a number of perspectives:

• What was the growth from 2006 to 2007, and how would that compare from 2007 to 2008. This is a good gut check on the speed at which we’re accelerating. Are we increasing from previous years? Staying the same? Declining our growth?

• We also modeled out what it would look like if we maintained current staff and systems [scenario 1] and then what the business would look like if we invested in certain areas like innovation and the sales group [leading to scenario 2].

And then once we get it approved…It’s time to make another cake.

[As wonderfully documented by Megan G.]

• Greg Bowne invites you to: “Tie one on for the Holidays!” Men and women alike are encouraged to adorn themselves in dress ties this month. Join Greg on the cat walk at the BeeHive for a holiday party fashion show.

• Sing happy birthday this month to M. Monks (12/6); J. Rutledge (12/14); L. Deliso (12/15); A. Carmel (12/18) and last, but not least…A. Cohen (12/20). Bacon truffles for everyone!

• Welcome to the jungle…Laura (Analyst); Nicole (CommDev) and Luna the friendly dog.

• Aaron Brown passed the cup [Seth Minkin painting of a trophy] today to Keith Waterhouse for his ability to work diligently with the IRS, close the books and plan the budget. Kudos Keith!

• Current employee population: 75 full-time and 3 consultants/part-time. 9 open positions. Spread the word!

Meeting Focus: HR Overview of the current employee situation, per a request from the last company meeting

• 2005 – 41 employees; 2006 – 67 employees; 2007 – 77 employees

• Breakdown: 7 executives; 17 principles (including executives and group leaders/dept. heads); 53 staff

• Overall, our turn-over rate is VERY LOW in comparison to other businesses our size/scope. Typical is 15-20%, and we’re running about 12% [post the company debate about the way the initial #s were calculated] Nearly 67% of our employees have been at BzzAgent for 0 – 2 yrs.

Other Stuff

• Don’t forget to RSVP to the holiday party on 12/17 at 5:30. Spouses and significant others are welcome. Just don’t bring a random for the free food/booze!

• Feel free to bug McGlinn & Fletch about your holiday entertainment ideas. They’re party animals.

ANONYMOUS QUESTIONS [submitted by employees pre-meeting, and answered publicly]:

Any plans to enhance our benefits next year?

Comp. committee is on it. See David’s response below.
Conference Rooms – why don’t people book them?

3 rules:

1. Reserve in advance.
   
2. Don’t book rooms with AV you don’t need.
   
3. Status doesn’t matter. [ET members should move too!].
   

How can we manage/respond to Agents better?

Sonicare caused a flurry of above-normal inquiries; we should be back to normal shortly, but we’re monitoring and figuring out the best way to optimize for the future.

Don’t bother Fletch when his door’s closed, he’s trying to figure out the best 401K plan for us.

The fax machine is old, and it must be near a window so someone can throw it out?

It’s actually the fax machine we bought for 3 companies ago, so consider it painful for nostalgic reasons. But let’s solve. Eric?

What do I tell people I do?

Please memorize: BzzAgent is a word of mouth media company that allows marketers to harness, manage and measure honest real world conversations among everyday consumers.

What’s new with Frog?

Kyle: November is the strongest month to date with a 60% rise in activity. Sales are o.k. but we’re focusing on 2-3 new client frogs per week to reach the $X million dollar goal. New features aimed for February including possible forums and specific categories. Possible facebook widget/component. 600 agent Frog submissions to date. Thank you Brian Dame for your contribution!

Have we completed our transition to a media company?

We’re getting there. We’ve completed our inventory and slotting platform, have dozens of agencies handling creative, have automated many of our processes and are experimenting in Frog with CPA payment options, but there’s still much work to be done. Bottom line, we made tremendous progress in ’07, and we’re in a great position for next year. Cheers!

A little more than a week ago, I spent the day at an “offsite” with my fellow executive team members. The purpose of the meeting was to create a set of company goals for 2008. The meeting was scheduled to take place from 8:45 am – 5 pm at a hotel in Boston, near the office.

If you’re anything like me, the prospect of spending more than 8 hours in a meeting of any kind, with anyone, doing anything, is enough to make you want to run screaming for the door. And I was not alone in that feeling. In fact, it had seeped into the sub-conscious of at least one of the fellow participants. I met Kurt, our CTO, out on the sidewalk when I arrived. He shared with me a dream he’d had the night before that when Dave arrived at the meeting, he told us that the offsite meeting was all a rouse and that we were actually spending the day together at Canobie Lake Park.

That didn’t happen.

The strange thing for me was that I was actually looking forward to this meeting. Now some might be inclined to stop reading right here, convinced that these are the ravings of a madman. I’ll ask your indulgence to explain my attitude going in.

I’m still a relative newcomer at BzzAgent. I was hired as part of the new “executive team” — a group of people to help build on Dave’s vision of a new kind of media platform for word of mouth. Of the 7 of us, most are “second generation” — only Dave + Kurt were there at the beginning, and 3 of the 7 all started last Sept (myself included). So, a big part of this year for us was getting to know each other and getting aligned as a team. And that has not been the smoothest process.

With any new team, there is some period of adjustment. We all came in with our own ideas about what needed to be done, how it should be done, who “owned” what, where the company should focus, what’s working, and what’s not. Sometimes we haven’t seen eye-to-eye on these things, sometimes personalities and styles clashed. Sometimes it’s been downright uncomfortable.

But leading up to this meeting, I have felt a shift in our regular meetings. They’ve been getting more productive. And not in the way you might think. It’s not that everyone suddenly agrees, but people seem to be getting more comfortable being honest, speaking their minds, and listening to other’s points of view. It still occasionally makes for some uncomfortable moments, but we seem to be more comfortable working through that discomfort and getting to what we really need to address.

And that’s what had me looking forward to this meeting — the idea that we could get really clear on what we’re setting out to accomplish in the year ahead, and all be pulling in the same direction.

In that way, this meeting didn’t disappoint. We first de-briefed on the feedback we’d gotten from our recent board of directors meeting, which quickly led us to where we need to focus our energies as a company for next year:

• Stay focused on how we can deliver value to our clients
• Continue to improve our ability to measure the impact of our BzzCampaigns
• Keep delivering great Campaigns to our Agents, and look for new and innovative ways to enhance the experience of being an Agent

We certainly didn’t all agree on how we should execute. Far from it. But there was a different level of engagement. Maybe it’s trust. Maybe us “new folks” are finally getting to know the business in a different way. I can’t quite put my finger on any one thing, but it just feels different. Better.

We still have a lot of work to do coming out of the meeting — over the next few weeks we will refine + formalize these concepts into specific goals and priorities that will be reflected in the budget for next year. But while the work is far from complete, I’m encouraged by the way we’re working together. Who knows, maybe we’ll even be able to just blow the whole thing off next year and spend the day at Canobie Lake Park.

Our third quarter last year will go down as one of the most difficult times of the business’s history. The one bright spot was adding some significant new members to our executive team, but outside of that we fell short of every financial goal we had.

12 months later, with even more substantial goals to hit, it’s a different story:

——– Original Message ——–

Subject:	BzzAgent September 2007 Flash, August 2007 Financials
Date:	Mon, 01 Oct 2007 18:02:36 -0400
From:	Dave Balter
Organization:	BzzAgent, Inc.
To:	BzzBoard

BzzAgent Board -

Attached, please find a Flash report for September 2007, as well as the full financial statements for August 2007. We will go over these in detail on our call on Wednesday. Some highlights:

• We finished Q3 with a total of $XX million in sales vs. the projection of $XX million. This is great news specifically because Q3 is a very tough period for marketing/media firms – we’ve seen a decrease from Q2 to Q3 for the past 3 years, but were able to break that trend this year. Note 151% growth quarter over quarter from Q3 2006.
• Our cash position remains strong at approx $X million ahead of plan
• *Client* third program is a reorder for 40,000 Agents, a great indicator of our ability to help clients measure the value of WOM, and integrate it with other media [note plenty of repeats for the month of Sept.]
• We still have work to do on Frog; our full time product manager just started, and we just hired a full time sales person, which should help. We’re also working to continue the traction in the UK with our new guy.
• Revenues are ahead for the year at $XX million vs. our plan of record at $X million.
• Our pipeline is also strong, at $XX million [$X million weighted] for the quarter – lots of people working their tails off.

Any questions, let me know!

Dave

Since early 2003, BzzAgent has had an Advisory Board.

In the early days, before we had an official Corporate Board, we met a few times and we worked with a number of individuals to help us with specific projects such as patenting our WOM process and the best approach to certain partnerships. But as the company accelerated, and we’ve added board members, executives and staff, it’s been immensely difficult to utilize this group of experts. Individually, each would gladly help if we reached out, but as a whole this cluster is relatively distant.

We continue to keep our Advisory Board informed [along with our early investment partners], mainly through the distribution of a confidential BzzAgent presentation prepared for each quarterly board meeting. The hope is they read it and offer suggestions regarding business strategy, make introductions and otherwise help us grow.

After the August Board Meeting, we sent the deck with one strategically placed - and totally false - slide in the middle:

We figured it would be a good way to see who was actually reading. The response? Only 3 out of 15 individuals responded [two of them didn't offer advice, but rather appreciation for the joke]. A number possibly read and didn’t find it humorous or didn’t care enough to reach out, but it’s doubtful.

While we haven’t been proactive about connecting with many of the Advisory Board members, it begs the question about what we do from here. We’ve been complacently sending along this data for historical purposes and the hope that people remain somewhat connected to the business, but maybe this is a sign we should quietly disband the group and go on our merry way?

——– Original Message ——–

————————
Gang,

Here’s the notes from today’s company meeting (7/11/2007). Please note that I haven’t really taken such detailed notes in the past 10 years, and Dave sometimes mumbles. I’ve done my best here, so please be understanding if I missed a bit here or there. Thanks.

/kurt

===== START OF MEETING ======

Announcements
=============

Mike Dawson is now full time! Welcome aboard, Mike!

Sandy Machson the new Human Resources person is in the office Tuesday and Thursday, please see her for all your HR needs.

New Employees
=============

BzzAgent would like to extend a warm welcome to Sara Margolis to ComDev and Courtney Moores to the Analytics team.

Open Positions
==============

Sam Clemens is looking for a Product Manager (for Frog). If you know of anyone who you think would dig working at BzzAgent, please get him their resume, ASAP. You could ask Sandy about our Recruitment Bonus.

Michael Deliso July 23
Heather Williams July 24
Michael Magnano July 19
James McDonnell July 31
Marie Bova July 4

Happy Birthday, everybody!

Tom Beecher
===========

We are very, very psyched to have Tom Beecher join our Board of Directors. Tom works at a company called Imagitas. With his help, Imagitas grew from an $11 million per year company to well north of $100 million per year. During his time there he held positions in Marketing, and ultimately went on to become CFO, and ultimately CEO. Welcome Tom!

John Bigay Presentation
=======================

John’s excellent presentation was entitled “Marketing a New Media Company”. I won’t go into too much detail here, but the presentation touched on various aspects of the WOM marketplace, how it is beginning to grow and fracture a bit, and things we all can do to make BzzAgent stand out in the (growing) crowd. We all, collectively, make up the BzzAgent brand.

You can find John’s presentation on the BzzServer in: [omitted...]

Anonymous Questions
=========

Q: Could more managers send SOTD (Song of the day) requests?

A: We’ll work on it.

Q: What is going on with the UK office in terms of growth and expansion? Will we be hiring more staffers to accommodate the influx now that we have a partnership with WPP?

A: WPP is just one of several partners that are working with us in the UK. Yes, we are looking to grow the office over there, Dave travels there regularly, meeting sales people, meeting with clients and in general getting our foot in the door over in the UK.

Q: What are the sales goals for Q3 and Q4 and a recap of Q2? I think we beat our goal, but could you give a summary?

A: In Q2 we did just over $XX million in sales. Our goal for H2 (2nd half of 2007) is somewhere around $XX million. This means that our next 2 Quarters need to be as good, if not better than this one. We have had a few good quarters in a row now, which feels great, but we’re heading into Q3, which is generally challenging for all media and marketing companies, not just us.

Q: How will frog help with sales?

A: Frog is designed to help us on several fronts,

1. It is more of a scale play, allowing us to drive traffic to help us solve a critical need of online clients.
2. Frog maintains our margins with low touch, which means we can hopefully be running many more frogs at once, with less work for everyone involved.
3. Frogs can be used as valuable ‘add ons’ for our core campaigns, further boosting client return.

Q: What other goals and target numbers do we track besides sales?

A: The Executive Team tracks many, many different numbers that we use to keep track of how things are going. Although an exhaustive list would be too lengthy to include here, these goals/measurements include:

• Network Size
• Number of Asleep Agents
• Hiring against Plan of Record goals as set by the Board
• Campaign Templatization Goals
• Technical numbers, such as average time it takes the website to generate a page

Q: My manager doesn’t always express his/her appreciation of my work. How
do I voice my concern? I welcome constructive criticism, but I feel like just getting a “good job” or “nice work” would really make my day.

A: Many different things were discussed, including the creation of a company wide Positive Reinforcement Policy. Other suggestions include: Talking to Sandy, the new HR person, and Greg suggested treating everyone you work with as a customer.

[ed note: I wonder, when was the last time you told your manager that you appreciated his/her hard work? As far as life has shown me, nearly everyone in the entire world feels this way at one time or another, including your boss. I suggest 'paying it forward', by telling other people how much you appreciate their work (when you do), and the laws of karma will carry it right back to you (when you deserve it).]

Q: Seems to be a trend of rushing important projects to release. Things
seem to be getting pushed to the public before they are ready, where the chance of failure, bad first impression and poor performance are much higher. Isn’t it sometimes better to take a step back, tighten up a project and get it right rather than get it done quick?

A: Jono: In the earlier days of BzzAgent, we were nimble enough to throw ideas against a wall, and see which ones stuck. Now that we’re larger, it’s more difficult.

[ed: One of the problems of growing into a larger company is that there are more cooks in the kitchen, more fingers in the pie, more riding on a positive outcome. Many times deadlines are set to what seem like arbitrary dates, but the skill of choosing a date when something will be DONE and then sticking to it is probably one of the most important skills to have in life. In my experience, more often than not pushing a target date out will not necessarily result in a calm, measured approach to meeting a goal, but rather will push out the last minute rushing to complete tasks. Deadlines are also very important when many things must be coordinated for a launch, such as PR, client communication and many other things. Heck, Microsoft pushed Vista back like 7 years (repeatedly), and we must ask ourselves: Is it 7 years better? For the answer, please talk with Jake or Erik, they'll be happy to answer.]

Q: I do not agree with having a volunteer exercise as a company outing for 2 reasons.

1. We should all volunteer anyway and
2. It would detract from the reason for having a company outing- to learn, grow and develop as not just a company but as individuals jointly invested in the same objective.

A: Point taken. Perhaps we can have a cookout after doing some volunteering?

Q: If the company was sold tomorrow, how much longer would Dave plan to stay on board actively doing the work he does now (in terms of years)?

A: When a company is bought, generally, it is because of the great work the founder, executive and staff have been doing. Many times, it is a condition of the sale that the founder stick around for anywhere from 1 to 5 years. And many times they want to. It varies greatly. Dave has no plans to go anywhere or start another company anytime soon. While he has ideas about what he’d like to do next, he is singularly focused on BzzAgent right now.

Q: WHERE IS VAL’S DUNKIN DONUTS ICE COFFEE KOOZY, HER ICE COFFEE IS SWEATING ALL OVER HER DESK AND IT’S QUITE UNSIGHTLY.

A: Um, I don’t know, but I bet I know where you could get another one?

New pressures everyday.

We hit our bookings target for the first quarter post institutional investment. But we have some lessons to learn about other areas of the forecast and how we communicate to the group…easy to solve, but time-consuming.

——– Original Message ——–
From: COO
To: BzzAgent Board / Team
Subject: BzzAgent monthly reporting snapshot (3/31/06)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 17:05:24 -0500

The February financial report (including a flash report for March) is attached in the new monthly reporting format.

Bottom line: we are pleased to have hit our Q1/06 bookings target and pipeline looks good for the higher target in Q2/06.

Page two of the attached PDF summarizes the reporting schedule of which the attached is a part. The next reporting package will be sent prior to the May 11 board meeting.

——– Original Message ——–

I think I may be missing something but I don’t see us as having hit our forecast plan. Could we schedule a call next week to discuss and get some more granularity?

Second official board meeting with new VC Directors aboard this past Thursday at 8 AM sharp. We sent out the presentation, financials and a variety of other documents on Monday for review.

At 10:46 PM the night before our 8 AM, we receive an email from one of the Directors with some suggestions. One of them was this:

Great suggestion – so I cobbled together the doc below pre-meeting. One reason we took new partners: to learn the complex – and extremely simple – skills that will make us better executives and BzzAgent a stronger business.

As a company, we make a practice to provide options to some of our employees – specifically those who deliver exceptionally in everything they do. They don’t have to always succeed, but they have to constantly be focused on helping create the next-level company we aspire to be.

Sometimes, we play catch up on option grants. This “option catch up” game often happens at business inflection points, or a moment when the business is about to go through a significant change. At these times, we want to be sure that employees who deserve options get them at the price before the change.

We’re going through one of those now, so it’s time to sit down with a few employees who met the criteria of deserving options as partners in our business, and explain to them that we’ve provided them with a grant.

Here’s page 1 of our option doc. You can get a feel for how we structure the option plan. the goal is to ensure that employees continue to perform at exceptional levels – and if they do, to protect them and maximize the value they can receive!