Roger Barnette With MessageGears

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by on pay. Built in Atlanta, on pay is the top rated payroll and HR software anywhere. Get one month free at on pay.com. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:32] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have Roger Barnette with MessageGears. Welcome, Roger.

Roger Barnette: [00:00:42] It’s great to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:43] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about MessageGears, how you serve in folks.

Roger Barnette: [00:00:49] It MessageGears is a customer engagement platform. We work primarily with really big consumer brands like in Atlanta, Home Depot and Chick fil A. Send all of their emails through our platform to their customers. But we work with a lot of great brands like Expedia and Open Table and Geico and Indeed.com and and many more. And so for these brands put us at the center of their customer marketing activities. We let them personalize communications across email, SMS and mobile post messages at scale.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:23] So what was kind of the genesis of the idea? Where did you see the opportunity?

Roger Barnette: [00:01:28] Well, the opportunity really is that it’s hard to personalize customer communications at scale. When you have millions of customers, when you have lots of data on your customers, it’s really hard to get that data into traditional software to let them personalize it scale. And so we have a unique architecture. It’s a hybrid architecture solution that lets customers access their data within their data environment, yet send through a multitenant SAS cloud. And so it really gets the best of both worlds, allowing you to get rapid personalization without any data security concerns, but still send and personalize at scale and in real time. It’s been game changing for our customers.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:09] Can you share an example of how it’s been game changing? Like what was what were they previously? How were how were they previously benefiting from their email and now how are they kind of growing because of it?

Roger Barnette: [00:02:23] That’s a great question. So the most straightforward example is there’s a couple large US retailers that had the same type of issue where they would know what offer they wanted to send. Roger Barnett But because of the way their email solutions worked and their work with our competitors are really large software companies like Salesforce, Marketing, Cloud and Oracle Responses and Adobe Campaign. But the way all of these software solutions work is really hard to have them access everything you know about your customers in real time. And so when our brands, current customers were using one of those traditional marketing clouds, it would take them somewhere between three and five days between the time they decided Roger Barnett needs to see this particular offer. So at the time it made it into my email inbox and with message gears is virtually real time. As soon as you want to get it out the door, we make it easy and seamless, all the while cluttering your the number of software vendors you need to use to make that happen.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:28] Now, is the personalization. At what level of the personalization is it that I know that you were on the website. I know that you looked at the red jacket so I can make you a red jacket offer. And I know that maybe you’re not as price sensitive as somebody else, so I can charge maybe closer to retail. I don’t have to make an offer. Like what? What’s the type of personalization that comes with this?

Roger Barnette: [00:03:53] Well, it’s all of those things, but also including additional things like what have you done in the store? And maybe even more importantly, what type of engagement will you be most responsive to? Would you rather receive an email or a message on your phone through a mobile push or a message on your phone through a text message? And that contacts might be during what day of week and what time of day? You might be more interactive with your mobile phone on the weekend and the evenings, but during the weekdays, perhaps an email might might be better for you. I mean, what we see is across our brands is that when when they’re able to deliver an experience for their customers that surprises and delights and is meaningful, then marketing doesn’t seem intrusive. Intrusive, it seems helpful. And so but if they’re sending out a blast email to all of their customers at the same time on the same channel, because that’s all they’re capable of doing, then that’s when email becomes annoying and feels more like spam.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:59] And that’s kind of the art of this, right? You want to always have that balance and you always want to be obviously leaning to the surprise and delight rather than the just bombarding of messaging. That’s irrelevant.

Roger Barnette: [00:05:10] Well, that’s exactly right. And what what these big brands are seeing is that the challenge of personalizing across all your customers in real time becomes exponentially more difficult if you have 10 million customers instead of 10,000 customers. It’s kind of a paradox in that way that a lot of. Small businesses using tools built for small businesses like MailChimp, another Atlanta brand. It’s sometimes easier for them to personalize across all of their customers than these massive consumer brands that have so many more resources. But because you have tens of millions of customers and exponentially more data, it becomes that much more difficult to do to do that at scale.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:57] It’s that it’s one of those kind of blessing curse where you have so much data, but it’s just really difficult to leverage that amount of data in an effective way. And your solution kind of solves that.

Roger Barnette: [00:06:09] That’s exactly right.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:12] Now, let’s talk a little bit about, you know, this isn’t your first rodeo. So let’s talk about, you know, how you maybe have learned from previous adventures and have built the company culture that you’re proud of and and, you know, growing this enterprise software solution.

Roger Barnette: [00:06:32] I’m I guess you would call me a serial entrepreneur. I started my first software company when I was in graduate school getting my MBA at Emory with several co-founders that were there and sold that business in early 2000 to Ask Jeeves. I started another company in 2004 in Atlanta called Search Ignite, and we sold that business pretty early on. But I, I stayed around and ran ran that company and left after I would say after about 11 or 12 years and was very proud of what we built, you know, a global business with over 500 employees and over $100 million in revenue. But I left that company in 20. Late 2016 to come to message gears for a couple of reasons. One is that I really had the itch to build something new. I did not start message gears, but message Gears was still early in its growth trajectory. When I joined, we had about ten people. We have over 100 people right now. And also, I was really enamored with the technology and the people here. We had a very unique technology. We solved the problem that I just described in a very unique way. And I saw that we had the potential to really disrupt a very, very big industry where everybody was doing things the same way and it was really ripe for someone to come in and shake things up. And so I’ve been here almost six years, and and that’s what we’ve really tried to do. So you asked about.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:20] Yeah, I’d like to know more about the culture. So you come into this operation and, and now you’re going to put your stamp on things. So how did you kind of address the culture and what have you done to kind of create the thriving culture that most people are shooting for?

Roger Barnette: [00:08:38] Well, we we were very purposeful when I joined about the kind of culture we wanted to build here at Message Gears. I, in my previous entrepreneurial stints of growing companies, you know, I was very focused on. I’m building the business and on strategy and on the culture amongst the team that reported directly to me and I think less so around trying to create a seamless culture that permeates throughout the entire organization. And when you have a bigger company, you know, at times when I thought culture at previous companies I ran could use some tweaking, if you will. Know, the bigger the company is, the harder it is. And so one of the things that that I focused on first here, even before we really started thinking about how we’re going to focus this business, how we’re going to invest, what we’re going to do to to grow quickly. The number one thing the first thing we did on our first executive retreat was talk about culture and our company values and the kind of company we want to come to work for every day. And so, you know, two months in, we created a list of nine company values that message gears and the kind of business we all want to work for, all the kind of business we’ll be excited to work for, for years and decades to come. And my message to the team was, was a simple one. It was like, we’re going, we will grow as a company, and as we grow, we will have a culture.

Roger Barnette: [00:10:12] And we can either choose what that culture is going to be and purposefully drive to build that culture, or the culture will choose us. And then we might like the culture. We might we might not. So so we’ve really made the culture the center of our business and things like we innovate. You know, we’re we’re biased towards action. We’re action oriented and results driven. We make our clients successful. We assume goodwill, but are intolerant of corrosive behavior. We act with positive energy. Pretty basic things that I think on the surface everyone would agree on. But we remind ourselves of these values every week at our company meetings. When we’re interviewing employees, we tell them this is what we expect of them on a day to day basis. And occasionally we have to admonish and even let employees go because they don’t fit within the culture, which is really what’s expected of them and how they should treat their their fellow employees or our customers. So it really helps drive everything, everything we do. You know, we spend all of us spend an inordinate amount of time in our lives and certainly our lives that we’re awake and out of bed working. And, you know, my job for my employees is to make it as great of a work environment as possible.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:39] Now, in in today’s kind of employee climate, is that having kind of strong values and having a clear mission? Is that kind of a must have nowadays in order to attract and retain the type of people you want and need to grow your company?

Roger Barnette: [00:11:58] I certainly think it is. I would say that for message givers, it absolutely is. It’s very part and parcel with who we are as a business, how we define ourselves. And we have grand aspirations as a company. And this is our North Star. We are not going to lose sight of this and who we are while we’re expecting a lot of each other as we grow and continue to do pretty amazing things as a business. I will also say that our values I’m not one to say our values are the same values and mission every other company should have. There are a lot of companies that have very cutthroat cultures that work very well for them and are very successful, and I’m sure they attract a different type of employee that wants to go work at those types of businesses. But this is the kind of values and culture that works for my skills and the kind of company I personally want to lead. And so as long as we’re all aligned with these values, I think we can go out and do great things and outperform and be more nimble and get ahead of the pack as well as any other company.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:10] Now, you mentioned you’ve been part of the Atlanta tech scene for a minute. Can you share a little bit about maybe how we’ve kind of grown and and where you see us growing into the future?

Roger Barnette: [00:13:26] The tech scene here is certainly matured a great deal. I mean, I started my first company in 1997 or 98. You know they’re there. The. We are a more mature and vast. And welcoming and supporting tech ecosystem first for startups today than we ever have. And I try to be as involved in that as I possibly can through things like being a mentor at Techstars. And I’m on the board at the Atlantic City Council and, you know, sticking I try to stay in touch with earlier entrepreneurs in Atlanta to give back because frankly, when I was getting started, there were so many mentors that I found that were so generous with their time and advice for no other reason, except that they wanted to help out and give their time and advice. And so I try to do that. But what’s great about young, burgeoning entrepreneurs today in Atlanta is that it is a much bigger, more mature, more robust ecosystem. One of the things that really helps that is the fact that it’s easier now to raise money in Atlanta from anywhere in the world than it was when I started my first venture back businesses.

Roger Barnette: [00:14:51] I don’t know that there’s a lot. There are additional Atlanta based funds now than there were then, but not exponentially so or certainly doesn’t seem that way to me. But I think with the Internet and remote work. The venture capital ecosystem is absolutely exploded nationally and their desire to invest in technology hubs like Atlanta. It has grown dramatically. And so it’s just easier to raise capital no matter where the firms are. And I think that a lot of firms look at Atlanta as a place where they can probably get a little bit better terms than they can in Silicon Valley or New York or LA or some other or Seattle or some more expensive parts of the country. So I think it’s good for both the Atlanta ecosystem and for venture capital groups outside of Atlanta. Not to say that that the venture capitalists who are here and have been here for some time aren’t great because they’re all they all are. And they’re all really good and supportive of the community. But for the entrepreneurs and the founders and the CEOs, raising capital, access to capital is easier than it’s than it’s ever been.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:01] Now, any advice maybe for your younger self? You mentioned having gone through a lot of startups. If you were to advise yourself and your first startup, what some advice you would give that young man.

Roger Barnette: [00:16:17] That is a great question. My my first entrepreneur venture, I was in my late twenties and I was in very much a a shoot for the moon IPO or nothing mentality. And then my, my second startup that I started from a standing start, I had two young kids and and a wife that was working. And, you know, I was probably too conservative. I probably was saying, you know what? A sliding double or good solid base hit might be good enough for this next venture. You know, I think finding that middle ground of kind of shooting for the stars but but being grounded and and taking a practical approach, you know, trying to thread that needle, if you will, is something that’s possible. And I think I’ve gotten better at as I’ve as I’ve done more of these and I’ve gotten older and got more experience as a manager and leader. I do think you can always have making the appropriate amount of investments, funding, funding growth through losses, but with the right amount, understanding, you know, your runway and access to capital and keeping flexibility open for a variety of different outcomes is something that is is difficult, but is I think that’s the job.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:46] And if somebody is out there listening, that’s an enterprise level organization that’s looking for this kind of SaaS solution. What is the best way to get a hold of you or somebody on your team?

Roger Barnette: [00:17:58] Absolutely reach out to me directly. My name is Roger r0er at Message Gamescom and we would love to talk to you. If you are a brand that has millions of customers and you have trouble personalizing your communication with them at scale, we’re more powerful, we’re more data secure and we’re less expensive. We’d love to talk to you.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:20] And that’s message gears, dotcom to learn more.

Roger Barnette: [00:18:23] Yes.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:25] All right, Roger. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Roger Barnette: [00:18:31] I appreciate you. Thank you so much. Have a great day.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:33] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

Intro: [00:18:42] Today’s episode of Atlanta Business Radio is brought to you by on pay. Built in Atlanta, on pay is the top rated payroll in HR software anywhere. Get one month free at on paycom.