Forbes Top 20 Most Promising Companies: 3Cinteractive (DailyVista)
DailyVista speaks with 3Cinteractive VP of Marketing, who discusses company’s rise, growth and marketing strategy
DailyVista prides itself on helping to connect our readers with some of the top rising companies in the U.S and Canada. What better companies to keep an eye on than those that were highlighted by Forbes on it America’s 20 Most Promising Companies list. You can access their methodology here.
In an effort to learn more about what made these upstarts special in Forbes’ eyes, DV spoke with some of the key marketing personnel for companies listed in the Top 20.
Today DailyVista brings you an interview with Jeff Michaud, the vice president of marketing for 3Cinteractive, a company that provides enterprise mobile solutions that allow a business to mobilize traditional business processes, commerce and CRM systems.
3Cinteractive, which was founded in 2005 by former MCI executives John Duffy (CEO), Mike FitzGibbon (President) and Mark Smith (COO), landed at No. 12 on Forbes’ list.
Michaud described 3Cinteractive – headquartered in Boca Raton, Fla. – as a company that lends its technology and expertise to Fortune 1000 businesses to help them leverage mobile solutions that improve business results. He said the company was excited to be recognized by Forbes and the honor has helped marketing by lending credibility.
“I think from my perspective being in a B-to-B space, a recognition like this provides us a level of credibility,” Michaud said. “That’s important to our organization. 3Cinteractive was a start-up in 2005. We’ve now grown into over 110 employees with tens of millions of dollars in revenue. So we’re not really in start-up mode anymore. We are a validated business model that’s a substantial, profitable organization. But the challenge always exists to shed that entrepreneurial outlook and skin and establish credibility as a proven entity in the B-to-B space. That’s the first thing. The second is it provides the recognition, what I like to call air cover, for our sales and business development folks. When they’re out in the marketplace and they say they’re with 3Cinteractive it gives them the air cover for someone to say to them, ‘I heard of you, I saw you in Forbes.’ It tends to shorten the sales cycle from a credibility perspective.”
3Cinteractive came to be because of the vision Duffy, FitzGibbon and Smith had for mobile technology. Michaud, who’s also been there since the founding, said the group recognized early on that mobile was going to cause a fundamental shift in the way businesses communicated with their customers and employees, and it was going to change the way a consumer interacted with a business.
“I think they saw that on a high level which made it easier to take the risk of starting a company focused around mobile technology,” Michaud said. “(CEO) John (Duffy) has always had a fundamental philosophy of acting as a tollbooth as a business. You want to create business where you see a fundamental shift between a business and consumer and you want to position yourself as a tollbooth between a business and consumer and help facilitate communications and transaction between the two. When John recognized those two things happening around mobile, he became very excited about the prospects of being able to build a sustainable company in the space.”
3Cinteractive enlists some of the country’s biggest brands as clients. ESPN, Best Buy, Tracfone and the Cleveland Clinic all use 3Cinteractive services. The company targets the Fortune 1000 companies as potential clients and is also open to other companies that are worth over $100 million.
When it comes to marketing, 3Cinteractive has been very calculated and conscience on how it spends its efforts. Michaud called the company’s approach to marketing “pragmatic,” specifically when it comes to brand awareness. In the beginning, Michaud focused on internal marketing, building the company’s culture and delivering that message to its sales people so they could in turn deliver it to prospects. He feels that allowed 3Cinteractive to build a long term sustainable business.
It’s now clear that since the company is working with the biggest brands and finding itself on the pages of Forbes, 3Cinteractive had grown up a bit. How will that change marketing?
“I would say that is one of our goals every year to try to get some kind of earned recognition on local and national levels. Certainly you get that from Forbes,” Michaud said. “Without naming names, we’ve had some Fortune 1000 companies call our front desk because of that. So it’s been outstanding for us. With that being said, we don’t focus on just pouring millions into marketing just for the sake of doing it. We try to get everything we can out of earned media, social media, earned recognition, speaking opportunities. We think those things can provide just enough, if not more, to raise awareness and credibility as a brand than advertising spend. We’re getting to a maturation point where we’re building off of that and looking to invest more in advertising and other things to take us to the next level.”
Michaud added that we will see more about 3Cinteractive from an advertising perspective in various business and technology outlets in 2012.
3Cinteractive has worked with Boca Raton-based bfw Advertising since its beginning. Michaud called bfw a great partner that has helped that company from the beginning when it didn’t have a full marketing department. He added that at this time he doesn’t foresee the need to add addition agency help with the talent 3Cinteractive has brought on board.
Michaud sees a bright future for 3Cinteractive and the enterprise mobility solutions industry in general, citing that IBM predicts mobility solution will reach $250 globally by 2015.
“We have a phrase around here: Business is like electricity. It takes the path of least resistance,” Michaud said. “We think mobile is following that. To play on that, if you think to the first 10-15 years after electricity was discovered and what all the uses were for it, you couldn’t imagine the things we’re doing with it today. We look at mobile technology and the sheer power of the technology. The fact that it’s the fastest growing industry probably in the history of the world, we think it’s limitless. We ran an ad campaign once that said if you can think it up, we can make it mobile. There’s a lot of truth to that.”
Recently, the 
Vol. 2: There is an old saying “Never Do Business with Friends”. In Volume 2 of Entrepreneurship 101, Duff explains why he ONLY does business with his friends and why he would not be concerned telling people about a new idea for a business.
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