BuyerZone.com

Company: BuyerZone.com, Watertown, MA
Company Description: BuyerZone.com has helped millions of businesses save time and money on their most important purchases since 1992. Facilitating more than $2B in B2B transactions since 2003, BZ's Quote Request service uses an intelligent matching process to connect each buyer with the most appropriate providers within a comprehensive network of top local and national suppliers for more than 100 products/services.
Nomination Category: Individual Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best Turnaround Executive

Nomination Title: Sam Zales, CEO and President of BuyerZone.com

   1. Tell the story about what this nominee achieved in 2004 (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:

When Sam Zales joined BuyerZone.com as President and CEO in July of 2000,
the purchasing guide publisher turned Internet company was immersed in the dot
com bubble.  Having just completed its second round of venture capital financing
totalling $21 million, the company was on pace to achieve close to $1 million in
revenues with almost $20 million in operating loss.  While promoting an exciting
vision of serving businesses with an end-to-end purchasing solution, BuyerZone
had already spent much of its total cash investment on broad and expensive
marketing campaigns such as billboard ads and print campaigns. 

The businesses that did respond to these costly promotions found themselves
visiting a site that offered an almost non-working e-commerce engine, an
extremely slow and unusable functionality, and a buyer-seller matchmaking
service that was sparsely populated with few suppliers and limited product and
service categories.  The company needed a turnaround in order to merely survive,
let alone have a chance to see return on invested capital.

Over the next three and a half years, Zales utilized a philosophy of “maniacal
focus,” scaling back operations and staffing levels, and committing resources to
the key sources of competitive advantage the company had built to that point. 
BuyerZone trimmed its service offerings to provide two simple sources of value to
customers: award-winning content to make businesses smarter about making
purchases of high-value products and services; and an easy-to-use, free Request
for Quote service that efficiently matched buyers to sellers to facilitate
transactions.

Assessing competitive offerings and noting different paths taken by larger-funded
companies offering online-negotiated purchasing services (CMGI’s-backed
BizBuyer.com, and publicly-traded Onvia), Zales focused development on a model
that allowed businesses to “meet online and transact offline”, much like Lending
Tree’s successful model in the consumer space.  By focusing internal efforts on
developing a supplier base of top national and local vendors to respond to
Requests for Quotes, Zales helped BuyerZone create a unique and effective
customer acquisition channel for suppliers while providing a revolutionary cost and
time-saving purchasing process for small and mid-sized business buyers.  Noting
that subscription fee and pay-per-closed-sale business models were having
difficulty creating long-term sustainable revenue streams for intermediaries, Zales
made an important decision by establishing a pay-per-lead model as BuyerZone’s
main revenue source.

With the completion of these strategic changes in 2000, BuyerZone - the leading online marketplace for business purchasing – was born.

What started out on a small scale steamrolled into a fast growing business,
highlighted by a set of critical values Zales sought to instill in the BuyerZone
team: strong understanding of customer needs, disciplined execution and project
management, rigorous testing and analytical assessment of program results, and -
most importantly - fostering a spirit of cross-functional teamwork that created a
passion for winning among staff members. 

Zales formulated a company motto for the early period of growth: “WOW MOM” - Week over Week, Month over Month improvement in results.   Tremendously loyal, talented and aggressive team members (18 total from 2001 to early 2003 with 0% turnover, down from a high of 83 employees in 2000) stuck through the rebuilding and turned around a startup business, all during an era marked by Internet company failures.  A mid-2001 company board meeting resonated the mood of the
entire company when investors asked Zales to consider “a next opportunity to run
a great company rather than trying to fix this one,” assessing a sale of the
business to an another unprofitable Internet company that soon would close.  “The
18 people on our floor are gamers, I’m a gamer,” Zales told the investor, “and
we’re going to create a success.  Stick with us.” 

Achieving profitability in 2002, BuyerZone has since been named to Deloitte’s
Fastest 50 New England Technology companies for three consecutive years, has
processed more than 2 million leads among its network of more than 2,500
supplier partners, and has facilitated more than $2 billion in purchases over the
past two years.  In 2004, the company expanded its scope yet again, as company
founder Mie-Yun Lee spearheaded a market entry to the industrial, manufacturing
and construction industries.  Once a small marketplace for strictly office products
and services, BuyerZone is now a thriving matchmaker for buyers and sellers
across more than 100 high-end product and service categories including forklifts,
modular buildings and property management software. 

Further expansion for BuyerZone lies in its ability to quickly scale by
replicating its already successful business model to new categories of product and service purchasing.  The company’s mission is to revolutionize the purchasing process by providing the best solution to connect buyers and sellers.  It is clear that with a customer-focused business model, disciplined execution, leadership built from Old Economy values, and - most importantly - a team of dedicated, passionate staff
members, BuyerZone has an opportunity to build a business that can truly change
the nature of buying and selling.

More information on BuyerZone is available at http://www.buyerzone.com.

   2. 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]:

Press Releases Re: Financial & Company Successes:
http://www.buyerzone.com/corporate/about_buyerzone/pr092904.html
http://www.buyerzone.com/corporate/about_buyerzone/pr022404.html
http://www.buyerzone.com/corporate/about_buyerzone/pr072403.html
http://www.buyerzone.com/corporate/about_buyerzone/pr111402.html

   3. Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about this nominee:

Sam Zales
President and Chief Executive Officer

Sam Zales joined the company in 1999 and was named President and CEO in
July 2000. Since that time, Sam has led the company to profitability and rapid top-
line growth and focused the  company's efforts, enabling it to successfully attain
market leadership.

Sam brings nearly 20 years of strategy, marketing, sales and product development
experience to the company. Prior to leading BuyerZone, Sam served as Vice
President of Card Marketing at American Express where he was responsible for
the highly successful launch of the company's corporate purchasing card. During
his nine-year tenure at American Express, Sam also led the successful
development of numerous customer acquisition and retention marketing programs
for both the company's Corporate Services and Consumer Card divisions. Before
American Express, Sam worked as a management consultant at Bain and
Company in Boston.

Sam graduated with a B.A. with honors from Dartmouth College and holds an
M.B.A. with distinction from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of
Management.