Intranets.com

Company: Intranets.com
Company Description: Intranets.com is a provider of online collaboration services for small businesses and groups inside large organizations offering a secure collaboration suite to share business information quickly and easily. Intranets.com is privately held, profitable and led by a team of professionals who are committed to providing a secure, customizable, intranet solution supported by world-class customer service.
Nomination Category: Company, Office & Product Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best Business Turnaround

Nomination Title: Intranets.com Best Company Turnaround

Tell the story about what this nominated company achieved in 2003 (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

In early 2003, Rick Faulk, CEO of Intranets.com, called for a company meeting. 
He carried an unusual silver briefcase into the room, unlocked it and revealed
several bundles of cash – the company’s first official profit.  Since that afternoon,
Intranets.com has achieved revenue growth in every consecutive month and easily
beat its earnings estimate in 2003.  However, it took a lot of hard work, motivation
and good old fashioned sweat to get there.

During the the dot com boom, Intranets.com offered a free hosted intranet solution
to an underserved market -- small-to-midsize businesses looking for a cost-
effective solution to collaborate and share information online.  Soon, through
providing a mission-critical service combined with targeted marketing campaigns,
Intranets.com secured more than 600,000 active users and was relying on
advertising revenue to drive profits.  But, the slumping economy was slowly
tightening its grip.  Once lucrative advertising revenue streams were drying up and
many of the company’s competitors faced bankruptcy.  After making difficult
layoffs and taking a hard look at the numbers, Rick Faulk and his management
team had to make a tough choice about survival: Liquidate all company assets
and throw in the towel for good or take a risk and reinvent the company from the
ground up.  Faulk and his team chose the latter.

In a culture where the first concern of many dot com’s was a swift IPO,
Intranets.com was built the old fashioned way.  From the beginning, the company
conducted in-depth market research campaigns to better understand its target
market, built long-standing relationships with its customers, and designed a
product tailored to alleviate a very specific pain-point for small-to-midsize
busineses, project teams and other work groups.  This became a critical
competitive advantage as other companies struggled to meet the needs of
customers in a new economy. 

Therefore, with detailed customer usage statistics and data in hand, Faulk stood
before his board and asked them to take a leap of faith and give up ALL current
revenue streams for a new and untested source – a subscription based business
model.  The board, although wary of the dot com bubble burst and other “free-to-
fee” disasters, put their trust in the Intranets.com’s management team and
accepted his proposal.  Although they now had the official go-ahead, Faulk and his
team were just beginning. They aggressively rebuilt the company’s business
model, charged every employee with contributing directly to the bottom line, and
challenged the management team to offer an unprecedented level of customer
service.  The combination was an immediate success.  During the conversion,
Faulk’s team was able to retain a substantial customer base and quickly
transformed a dying revenue stream into a new and sustainable profit.

In 2003, all of the hard work began paying off.  For the first time, Intranets.com
became a profitable hosted service provider.  In fact, it now resides as one of the
largest paid subscription services on the web, touting 180,000 users from more
than 7,000 companies.  While its focus is primarily on the small-to-midsize
business market, the company has also landed high-profile clients like NASA,
Home Depot and Keller Williams Realty. 

Faulk and his team piloted the company to $6 million in revenue in 2003 and they
are on track to reach $10 million in 2004.  An increase of more that 50%. In
addition, the company is adding several new product enhancements designed to
extend its lead in the online collaboration space.

List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: List each link on a separate line, begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.website.com]:

http://boston.bizjournals.com/boston/entrepreneur/2003/11/11/
http://www.masshightech.com/displayarticledetail.asp?art_id=63777&cat_id=99

Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader of this nominated company:

Rick Faulk, CEO of Intranets.com, sets the strategic direction of the company and
manages all aspects of the company's operations.  Prior to his role as CEO, Faulk
was VP of Marketing at Intranets.com.

Previously, Faulk was VP of Corporate Marketing at PictureTel and also served as
the VP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at Shiva Corporation where he was
instrumental in growing Shiva's worldwide revenues by more than 50 percent.
Faulk also spent four years as VP of Corporate Marketing at Lotus Development
and founded First Software, a software distribution company, which he grew to
more than $175 million in revenue.