Tuning in to the dynamics of change in procurement
IN ASSOCIATION WITH:
DIGITAL REPORT 2021
GODADDY
GoDaddy: Tuning in to the dynamics of change in procurement Keith Tice, Chief Procurement Officer, walks us through the comprehensive transformation that has radically upgraded GoDaddy’s procurement processes
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've been with GoDaddy just shy of eight years: I came in May of 2013, just as GoDaddy was beginning a new transformation,” states Keith Tice, Chief Procurement Officer. “When I joined the company, procurement essentially did not exist here.” It’s a bold conversation opener, and one which perfectly anticipates the details of both Tice’s and GoDaddy’s accomplishment, which saw a function primarily managed by business stakeholders and a legal contracts team become a developed, dynamic, and digital process of its own. Founded in 1997, GoDaddy’s stature as one of the US’ foremost internet domain registrars and web hosting companies has only grown over the years. Now with over 20 million customers worldwide spread across almost 60 different markets and 9,000 employees in 14 offices speaking roughly 30 languages to
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service them, this Scottsdale, Arizona business is one of the internet age’s most enduring global success stories. Although Tice arrived with a significant challenge to overcome when he first joined, his expert level of experience gained from over 20 years of work in purchasing gave him the clear vision needed to begin overhauling procurement at GoDaddy. “I brought a mindset that focused on how we structure, separate and categorize the various spend aspects of what we're doing, particularly in terms of understanding suppliers and how they fit in the company,” he explains. Integrating this mindset required good oversight and command of data, something which was made difficult by legacy infrastructure. Tice’s goal was to spearhead a digital transformation that would go above and beyond the solutions he’d worked on previously.
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“ When I joined the company, procurement essentially did not exist here” KEITH TICE
CHIEF PROCUREMENT OFFICER, GODADDY
The first step of Tice’s plan required a broad evaluation of GoDaddy’s supplier network, “prior to my arrival the company had about 10 times the number of suppliers that we have today.” Following a six-month period of rationalizing the available data, he made the decision to shift away from difficult-to-manage Excel spreadsheets to an integrated platform that provided a single pane of glass visibility into the
Keith Tice: Insights to vendors and suppliers @ GoDaddy.com
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KEITH TICE TITLE: CHIEF PROCUREMENT OFFICER LOCATION: ARIZONA, UNITED STATES INDUSTRY: INTERNET SERVICES
• Why are you doing this? • Why this vendor in particular? • Why does it cost this much? • Why are we paying for that? • Why is it necessary? Tice’s next move was to transmit the idea that each and every vendor is “expendable”, acting as a challenge for them to proactively justify GoDaddy’s spend through competitive service and delivery. “Step three was then
EXECUTIVE BIO
company’s spend with each supplier. “I needed to figure out what makes sense for GoDaddy, and I did that through a series of interviews with internal stakeholders about why they have certain vendors performing certain tasks for us.” Tice used the ‘five whys’ as his model:
Keith grew up in a very small town in the northern high plains of Texas. After attending college at Tarleton State University, Keith began his career working in the protein industry for IBP, Inc., which is now a part of Tyson Foods. The goal Keith had set after leaving Tarleton was to establish a career in Procurement. His first role came in 1997 with The Dial Corporation, not a part of Henkel. Keith initially managed Procurement for the Armour Star Brand of food products, a division of The Dial Corporation. As he progressed through the various functional areas within Procurement for Dial/Henkel, Keith was recruited to build a Procurement function and organization at GoDaddy. Starting in May 2013 the transformation and building of the Procurement organization with GoDaddy began as a team of three focused on IT requirements alone. Today, the organization and team Keith has built is managing all third party spending through the efforts of 12 staff located around the world.
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GainShare: Transparency and Accountability in Performance
Bryan Walkey, CEO of GainShare Performance Marketing, discusses the company’s partnership with GoDaddy alongside its mission and culture. With a career spanning over 30 years, Bryan Walkey is the CEO of GainShare Performance Marketing. “I joined the firm full-time four years ago, but I've had an association as an advisor to the firm for over 30 years. Before joining as a partner and CEO, I had worked with Gainshare to coordinate teams and delivery in both Toronto and Chicago. The goal today is to drive seamless delivery and results across teams, tactics, and markets.” Known as Northern Lights Direct for more than 35 years, the company recently rebranded as GainShare Performance Marketing. “We started in DRTV, and so we felt it best to change our brand name to better represent who we are today. We now do so much more than direct response TV. As a performance marketer, we coordinate the customer journey across all channels, and we wanted to ensure we showcased that scope.”
GainShare’s relationship with GoDaddy Discussing GainShare’s partnership with GoDaddy, Walkey explains, “GoDaddy is a performance culture, and they're looking for a high return on their ad spend, and we help them accomplish that and acquire customers in the most efficient way possible. We provide strategy, media planning, buying, optimization, and analytics. We work with a number of their teams, including performance & brand video, creative and business intelligence.”
“With GoDaddy, it is truly a collaborative effort. We feel like we're part of their team. Because they're a performance-driven company, they hold us to account every day, every week, and every month. We're in contact with them multiple times a day, measuring daily and continually optimizing. At the end of the day, it is all about performance,” he adds.
What makes GainShare different from its competitors? “As a performance marketer, we provide transparency, accountability, and we're driving return on investment, return on ad spend,” begins Walkey. “There's been a lot of moaning in the marketing community about procurement driving the price to zero. Well, we believe it’s essential to drive the cost of marketing and investments directly to the bottom line. We are excited to work with CMOs, CFOs, and Procurement equally because we're focused on business outcomes,” he continues. “We talk about return on investment, return on ad spend, we profess transparency and accountability, all things that resonate with both procurement and finance. We deal with the marketing team on the things that are important to them. And we plan and answer procurement on the things that are important to them as well. So, it's a true business relationship.”
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GODADDY
$3.32bn Revenue in FY 2020
1997 Year Founded
9,000+ Number of Employees
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to renegotiate and/or add the right suppliers categorically across the company to service our business needs adequately, not just the way people perceived our needs,” continues Tice. “That shift, while difficult, put us in
“I brought a mindset that focused on how we structure, separate and categorize the various spend aspects of what we're doing, particularly in terms of understanding suppliers and how they fit in the company” KEITH TICE
CHIEF PROCUREMENT OFFICER, GODADDY
a position where the relationships with vendors have become very strong. To take us to the next level of innovation, we needed to bring in vendors that could change the game for us: new technologies and new ways of working.” In addition to consolidation, GoDaddy’s digital roadmap meant that the daily admin of procurement needed to modernize. Dispensing with rote manual tasks that introduced margins for error as information was traded from one system to another through automation was key, as was incorporating spend analytics and e-procurement platforms. Of course, no tech-based transformation story of the last 12 months could avoid the effect of COVID19, and it is in this regard that Tice adds special praise to GoDaddy, “I really have to emphasize how well the company did moving everyone quickly from the office to remote working.” However, the challenge godaddy.com
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Partnership goals: Zones LLC and GoDaddy on DT
Zones LLC is a strategic partner of GoDaddy. We chat to Sean Hobday, SVP of Global Business Development, about digital transformation on a global scale. Sean Hobday, SVP of Global Business Development for Zones LLC, has had an exciting 12 months. The company is a strategic partner to GoDaddy - the internet domain registrar and hosting company based in Arizona. Zones offers a wide variety of solutions. At the company's core, Global Supply Chain as a Service (GSCaaS) has been in overdrive since the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Hobday says, "Making sure that businesses and enterprises can get the IT hardware, software, and solutions that they need domestically within the US, but also all around the world, has been a critical differentiation to ensure clients’ success for Zones during COVID." Hobday describes the relationship Zones LLC has with GoDaddy as evolutionary because it has grown significantly since the companies formed the partnership. From working on projects in one location for the global internet and hosting company, Zones LLC now handles much of the corporation's IT logistics worldwide. "GoDaddy approached us because they had a business problem in one of their locations, and they needed
quick fulfilment of hardware to support a small office. We were able to do that efficiently and effectively." He continues, "GoDaddy is a company that continually acquires smaller companies within their space around the world to enhance their growth. We were a good fit because Zones has offices and fulfillment centers in key locations to align globally.” Flexibility in the current working climate is also essential; Hobday points out. “We make sure that at our core DNA, we have the right flexibility and processes frameworks that allow for adaptability to help clients succeed in their digital transformation” The work-from-home mandates have been challenging; however, it is essential for businesses to navigate the complexity, Hobday states. "The solutions that we offer bring tremendous and immediate value to ensure GoDaddy's business continuance with a distributed workforce.” He adds, "As our partnership grows, we'll be able to address and fortify other solutions within data center, security and networking areas as well.
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Keith Tice: Talks to us about user experience @ GoDaddy.com
was far from being merely a technical one: procurement, he states, is strongly rooted in person-to-person negotiation on both sides of the table. Reflecting on the beginning of the pandemic, Tice claims that he genuinely feared the effects of losing this important aspect, “I was becoming increasingly worried that the effectiveness of my team was going to start to decline because they just don't have that ability to work with the vendor one-on-one.” Despite his concerns, GoDaddy’s saving grace turned out to be the ready availability of conferencing software like Zoom. Tice’s team quickly adapted to the new paradigm and didn’t miss a beat; turning in a 2020 12
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performance that was equal to or better than the previous year, Tice states that he was pleasantly “shocked” by the results. “It’s gotten to the point now where I've recently hired two new permanently remote employees. I didn't hire them with any intention whatsoever to move them into one of our hub offices. Whatever the new normal looks like, I don't see my team going back to how things were unless specific needs arise.” The spirit of embracing change at GoDaddy is easily visualized by its recent rebrand that features a slick image of the word ‘go’ shaped into a heart. “With our logo change, we're thinking about over 20 million customers out there: what’s their
GODADDY
“ To take us to the next level of innovation, we needed to bring in vendors that could change the game for us: new technologies and new ways of working” KEITH TICE
CHIEF PROCUREMENT OFFICER, GODADDY
philosophy and what can we do to support them? ‘Go’ exemplifies all that we want them to do; it captures that entrepreneurial spirit and it's paying homage to the importance of humanity and joy that we wanted in that logo.” Focusing on CX (customer experience) is a big part of fulfilling the renewed promise of that logo. “A few years ago, if you went to GoDaddy with the intention of buying a domain, adding hosting or email, or any of the various products that we're offering, you would have found a front of site architecture that was cumbersome,” says Tice. Subsequently, this was improved by reducing the amount of clicks customers godaddy.com
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EPAM and GoDaddy Join Forces to Help Small Businesses Succeed After a decade of strong growth, internet pioneer GoDaddy recognized the need for a strategic partner to help navigate the ever-increasing pace of digital transformation and constantly evolving customer demands. “We needed a highly-skilled workforce that could hit the ground running,” says Keith Tice, Chief Procurement Officer at GoDaddy. “We trust EPAM’s quality of service, their people, attention to detail and leadership. They are a partner we can grow with.” EPAM offered what GoDaddy was looking for: the ability to accelerate roadmaps, re-prioritize technology plans, transition to a modern AWS Cloud architecture and engage the right mix of professionals to get it all done seamlessly. GoDaddy started as a domain registrar and is now the world’s largest services platform for entrepreneurs around the globe. GoDaddy is the place where entrepreneurs and small business owners come to name their idea, build a website, attract customers and sell their products and services online. Today, GoDaddy has more than 20 million customers. Over the years the need for engineering resources at GoDaddy has grown dramatically. The small business owner that once came to GoDaddy for just a domain name and hosting services, now looks to the company for everything from eCommerce to social media marketing. In 2020, GoDaddy and EPAM kicked off projects to modernize GoDaddy’s eCommerce platform and deliver a more streamlined single sign-on experience for its online customers. Previously, the customer sign-on and signup experience was focused on security more than convenience. GoDaddy wanted both. Already, A/B testing has shown significant success in changes delivered by EPAM. GoDaddy’s customers now have easier access to the company’s products in a highly secure environment. Meanwhile, EPAM engineers on the eCommerce project team are ensuring that the existing architecture is seamlessly supported as they build a more scalable and flexible platform that will further GoDaddy’s ability to offer solutions that meet customers’ unique needs. At the same time, GoDaddy gets the tools they need to be more agile in responding to demands. As GoDaddy continues to grow, company leaders wanted to ensure that whatever project they initiate to help their customers, they would have the right partner to make it happen. EPAM is excited to be a part of this journey helping GoDaddy and its customers build businesses globally that will grow and thrive as we all discover new ways to harness the power of digital.
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“ Go’ exemplifies all that we want [customers] to do; it captures that entrepreneurial spirit and it's paying homage to the importance of humanity and joy that we wanted in that logo” KEITH TICE
CHIEF PROCUREMENT OFFICER, GODADDY
need to perform to find what they need. GoDaddy also introduced automated chatbots to streamline its communication channels and ensure queries are resolved diligently. “We’ve brought in chat automation so that our customers can come in, get what they need, and then move on. Speaking with a GoDaddy care representative is a fantastic experience, but, at the end of the day, running their business is what's important for our customers.” This sense of technological pragmatism combined with a refreshingly adaptable mindset will form the bread and butter of GoDaddy’s approach to procurement in
2021. However, Tice has grander visions for his department beyond cost reduction, value creation and capital management. “We now are very focused on reducing supply risk and members of my team have goals set against that - we call it ‘joining forces’. I've also moved our organization into becoming more of a strategic advisor to the business as a whole. We now understand their roadmaps and where they're headed, and we're able to align suppliers and or technologies to match that.” As digital transformation continues to accelerate there will still be challenges, particularly relating to properly onboarding and training new remote-based team members, but Tice is certain that “every dollar spent” will enhance procurement’s influence, build supplier relationships, and facilitate its growth. Times are changing, he reasons, and those who can’t keep up with the new program are in danger of being left behind.
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