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How One Entrepreneur Rode Out the Dot-Com Bust and Lived to Tell the Tale By Michael Krauss
michael.krauss@mkt-strat.com
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s founder and CEO of Closerlook Inc., David Ormesher leads an entrepreneurial technology, marketing and communications agency that serves some of the world’s top pharmaceutical companies. He’s a role model for marketers who want to be more entrepreneurial—either within organizations, or in marketers’ own firms—because he has managed to migrate and morph his company from 1987 to today with deftness and finesse while maintaining a commitment to sound operating principles. His 120-person firm has served companies including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novartis and Astra-Zeneca. And Ormesher now splits his time between serving such clients and coaching entrepreneurs in Rwanda, as chairman of the board of Bigger Future, a nonprofit humanitarian consulting agency that builds the capacity of high-potential entrepreneurs in emerging economies. Ormesher is an effective coach and mentor because he balances left- and right-brain skills, he demonstrates a commitment to storytelling and technology, and he’s willing to share his own story of launching, maintaining and growing a profitable business. Young marketers
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could learn a lot from his dedication, and from his journey. Ormesher was born in California and grew up in New Jersey. His father was an airline pilot who bought an old dairy farm where Ormesher was raised. “I grew up with horses, goats and sheep,” he says. “Those were nascent
technology days. I was a ham radio operator stringing long wire antennas around the farm.” He studied physics for three years at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill., before deciding that lab work was not for him. “I was enjoying my time playing in rock bands much more than physics and switched to liberal arts, earning a humanities B.A.,” he says. “After graduation, I got a job at a small Indiana radio station as an announcer and engineer.” About three months into the job, the 22-year-old Ormesher started telling his boss how to improve the station’s format and revenue. He told the owner that if the owner didn’t make the recommended changes, Ormesher probably wouldn’t stick around. “I returned from a few days of Christmas vacation and there was the employee schedule. My name was on the schedule, but it had been crossed out. It was my first indication that I was cut out to be an entrepreneur,” he says. Ormesher found his way onto the staff of a small UHF television station in Chicago, and began working in video and broadcast production. He started pitching documentaries on labor strikes and urban gang violence. “From those documentary years, I learned the power of storytelling,” he says. “You have to touch the heart to move the mind.” In 1987, he struck out on his own to launch Closerlook Video Group, a production company serving corporations. “When I started the company, I had no idea about business,” he says. “I was just a writer, producer and director. I scraped together enough cash for a couple of months’ rent and moved into a little 1,000-square-foot walk-up office across from the Brehon, a great old Irish pub in Chicago. For three weeks, we had no phones. We walked over to the pub to make calls. We tipped Annie, the bartender, to take messages for us. That’s how we got our start.” It turns out that that’s all they needed: an obliging bartender plus a savvy focus on storytelling to help companies connect with their customers. “Clients kept giving us more work,” he says. “Then, suddenly,
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in the mid-1990s, we were doing websites. We started adding some technology people to do the programming. By 1998 and 1999, we were in the thick of the dot-com bubble. In 1999, I ran into a VC and cut a deal over a one-hour breakfast. We sketched out a plan on a napkin. And so we were off to the races. We had 25 people the morning of that breakfast. By 2000, we had 120 people. It was like riding a bucking bronco. The VC wanted us to grow, grow and grow.” Then the bronco bucked unexpectedly. “Suddenly, there was the dot-com crash,” Ormesher says. “Four of our biggest clients were dot-com companies and went bankrupt in a single week. They left us $2 million in the hole. My financial advisors recommended bankruptcy and shutting down the company.” Ever the resourceful farm boy, Ormesher refused. He reduced staff, circled the wagons and committed to getting through the downturn by restructuring the company. “We owed several million dollars to our vendors and I said: ‘It’s my commitment. We will not stiff anybody, even though we got stiffed by the people who went bankrupt. We’re going to pay everybody back.’ ” And that’s just what he and his firm did. Over the next three years, they made good to all of their vendors. “We went back to our roots serving large Fortune 500 companies,” he says. “Within a few years, we were back in the black and growing,” serving an array of scaled companies including Kraft, TAP Pharmaceuticals, Abbott and Andersen Consulting. While staying in the saddle during the dot-com bust had been challenging, it convinced Ormesher of the value of technology. “One of the things we did do during the dot-com boom was buy a technology firm,” he says. “Now we had great creative chops in writing, art direction, graphic design, video, the storytelling piece and technology.” It would be the key to Closerlook’s future success. As his business recovered, Ormesher began considering the need for what he calls “domain and industry expertise.” He was working for clients in financial services, manufacturing, technology services and
marketingmanagement PHOTO COURTESY OF CLOSERLOOK.
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David Ormesher, CEO of Closerlook Inc.
healthcare. He decided that he needed to pick one industry, learn the marketplace domain and become an expert. “After several months of reflection, I picked healthcare,” he says, but soon it turned out that even healthcare was too broad. According to Ormesher, Obamacare was creating uncertainty in the market. “We saw that the business model in pharmaceuticals was changing, so we narrowed even further. … Just like the rest of us, physicians go online when they have questions. The digital channel was changing pharma. We focused Closerlook on finding out what doctors really care about. What do they define as value? And then we deliver it through the channel that doctors prefer.” That laser focus has allowed Ormesher and Closerlook to hone their industry expertise, and to position themselves accordingly. “We call it pattern recognition,” he says. “After you spend time in a particular industry and serve many clients, patterns begin to emerge and you begin to know the major issues that a particular industry is facing. You can speak with total confidence because you’ve seen the issue before. The solution may not be exactly the same, but the solution is likely to be pulled from a limited set of possible solutions, and that gives you an advantage.” Closerlook was invited to conduct multimillion-dollar strategic engagements instead of $200,000 discretionary projects. Today, Closerlook’s industry
focus also has enabled the company to invest in proprietary technology tools to serve its clients. “We created a software platform called Backstage,” Ormesher says. “Backstage begins to automate the process of capturing data from physician’s activities. We’re able to analyze that data and make recommendations on how best to reach physicians with content that’s going to be of value to them, so ultimately, we’re doing relationship marketing using our storytelling capabilities and our technology capabilities.” Storytelling is still key to marketing success even though data and analytics are on everyone’s mind, Ormesher says. “You still have to catch the imagination of your audience. … That hasn’t changed at all. We’re still human beings. And yet, by the same token, it’s not just about storytelling. It is also about technology and data.” Ormesher has plenty of his own stories to share with budding entrepreneurs and data-driven insights to offer the Rwandan business community through his nonprofit, Bigger Future. “There’s nothing more thrilling than working with entrepreneurs and nothing more challenging than working with them in an emerging economy,” he says. “It’s the best time of my life helping and watching these entrepreneurs experiment and grow.” m MICHAEL KRAUSS is president of Market Strategy Group based in Chicago.
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