James Treacy, former chief operating officer of recruitment services giant Monster Worldwide Inc. (MWW)
(AP Photo/ Louis Lanzano)
I first met Jim Treacy last year through a trusted client and friend Vikki Ziegler. Within the first 20 minutes of knowing Jim we became fast friends. Jim was forthright, intelligent, and warm. He had a humility that didn’t fit the man’s accomplishments. He had reverence for our team at Silverback, and assured us, that he was there as a student of social media. He then articulated his vision for his business partner. I hung on every word for the next two hours. I cherish moments like that. When I meet someone that’s whip smart, and with that much business experience, I shut up and listen. I too had lived through the DOT com boom of the late 90’s and early 2000’s. But I hadn’t experienced half of what Jim had. As Jim and I spoke we realized that we shared mutual acquaintances. We bonded on our shared similar assessments of their personalities. I knew I liked Jim immediately.
It’s been my goal for my success features to include individuals that have seen more than monetary success. Those who could add a different assessment of the success they’ve seen in their lifetime. After seeing astronomical monetary success, Jim faced jail time and almost lost it all. While it’s easy to sit back and ponder how we would handle ourselves in a similar situation, I can’t help but think that it would break many. After meeting Jim, I can tell you that it has only made him stronger. He has a clear vision for his future. A strong moral compass, and an infinite thirst to keep growing, learning, and connecting. That’s the type of success I’m looking for. That’s the kind of success I hope finds you as you read this. Jim’s Q/A is a riveting look into the excesses, and successes of the DOT com world. Enjoy this one, it’s a gem.
Chris Dessi: You were the President and COO of one of the most wildly successful DOT com’s of all time. How did you get there? What was your path to internet stardom? Tell us about that journey.
Jim Treacy: It was 1994. I was 36 years old. To date, I had a highly-successful career – corporate officer since age 28, decent money, people under me – a veteran player in a headline-making hostile takeover and likewise for a billion dollar debt restructure. One day a headhunter called me up about a CFO position at a cash-strapped, advertising agency backwater called TMP Worldwide (today called Monster Worldwide – MWW). The position was beneath my accomplishment but I was feeling under-appreciated and bored where I was, so I took the meeting. They offered me the job immediately. I politely turned them down.
Months later, the entrepreneur, more riverboat gambler, who owned the bulk of TMP, called me up and invited me to dinner. During the meal he pitched me the CEO position, with equity ownership, of the company’s fledgling, money-losing, Recruitment Advertising division. The proposal was to team-up and do a classic debt-financed roll-up. He’d buy them; I’d fold them in. I accepted the challenge and, in just two years time, we turned that small unit into the world’s largest Recruitment Advertising agency.
During that frenetic build, I was introduced to the Internet. I had no idea what it was. Serendipity occurred during a late-1994, California, budget meeting. An acquisition we were folding-in showed me an in-development website, Career Taxi. It took an hour of some very patient explanation and demonstration for me to understand the huge opportunity being presented: If we could convince all the clients in my division to place their job ads on an Internet site we owned, rather than place them in printed newspaper help-wanted sections, we could go from being an ad agency to a publisher. Meaning instead of making fifteen cents on every client ad dollar (the other 85 cents went to the newspaper) we could keep it all. As they say, a no-brainer. I tripled their development budget, on the spot. Then, once back in New York, I spent the next several months, with help from others, getting the big boss (Mister Roll-Up) to understand the concept. When he finally got it, he bought up nascent career-sites The Monster Board and Online Career Center — both for a song — before 1995 was out.
The rest is history. Right time, right place and a huge existing client base to introduce our wholly-owned websites to — vision, execution, a bit of luck, etc. Over the next few years we went public, moved those clients online and melded our various career-sites into one big powerhouse, Monster.com. It became the number one, global, Internet career portal by a wide margin. Our eclectic management team, for a time, got to be Wall Street darlings. Most impressively, of the hundreds, maybe even thousands, of commercial websites launched during the late-90’s on into the great Dot Com crash of March 2000, Monster was one of the few significant, stand-alone, Internet businesses, alive and well out the other side of the meltdown (2002). Along with Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, Match, Priceline…keep going if you can. I don’t think you’ll get to much more than ten examples. I’d note we were added to the S&P500 Index during the crash, May 2001.
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