My itinerary?  Starting from home base of Boston, then to New York’s JFK, through London, with the ultimate destination– Singapore.  Total air time one way? 18 hours.  Total air and waiting in airport time one way? 24 hours.

What earned me the opportunity?  First, membership in the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (“EO,” www.eonetwork.org, formerly known as YEO, or Young Entrepreneurs’ Organization ) a global membership organization that is nearing 10,000 members across more than a 100 chapters.  EO is one of a group of leadership organizations, including YPO, WPO, CEO, and several others.  Qualifications for EO membership include annual revenues of $1 million or more, and either founder or majority ownership status in your business.

Hailing from the Boston chapter of 100 or so EO members made up of computer software and hardware entrepreneurs, legal and staffing professional services business owners, and a host of other small business founders  including franchising, travel, consulting, real estate, and medical devices, I was made aware of the strategic partnership between British Airways and the EO organization.  The following paragraph, detailing what a face-to-face opportunity would mean to the growth and expansion of our boutique retained executive search firm, BSG Team Ventures, was what I jotted down–

We have a presence in Boston, New York, Silicon Valley, and London. These are key global innovation centers. However, there is clearly a fifth and/or sixth  location to round out our client value proposition of “on the ground coverage in the key innovation centers in the world”– and those are India and Asia. Although there is a term sometimes used that combines the two (“Chindia”), we feel that there is perhaps a need to be able to service our growth-stage clients in each. One alternative is a meaningful position in a location like Singapore, which is equidistant from both these key innovation markets.

The ability to set up a series of meetings with potential partners, and then bring pre-meeting calls and video conferences to an in-person, face-to-face setting, would be extremely meaningful in taking our business from EU-American only, to truly global, capable of better servicing the needs of our clients who continue to demand the need to themselves expand globally.

I had been to Singapore and Hong Kong in 2008 on business, and knew that another trip there would allow us to cement some developing relationships “face-to-face.”  In 2008, we completed a VP Worldwide Sales search based out of Singapore, and are now working on another General Manager search based out of Tokyo for a leading global technology innovator.  And with the recession of 2008-2009 projected to recover in west-bound fashion this time (Asia first, Europe second, and the U.S. last), China, Japan, and the rest of the Asia-Pacific corridor is important to every business, both large or small like ours.

Having won the right to cash in the BA offer, a plane load of entrepreneurs amassed down at JFK airport in New York.  BA was everything they’ve built their reputation on-service-oriented and courteous, only as the British can be-with a send off in the first-class lounge that was rich in food, spirit(s), networking with other entrepreneurs, and a few humor-filled greetings speeches by both British Airways officials and the British government.   Example of the power-networking in the BA lounge? I met up with Morgen Newman, co-founder of IdeaPaint, another Boston-based start-up that was a BA travel recipient, with a company out of Babson (my alma mater so plugging here) that has formulated a special paint that can be applied on any work surface that then functions as a “whiteboard,” completely erasable when using dry-erase markers.  IdeaPaint is a tool for entrepreneurs that simply brilliant.  Most entrepreneurs are visual thinkers, and this now allows us to scribble on every surface…. (“Beware office cleaners-these walls aren’t “dirty”…. DO NOT ERASE!”)

My itinerary and goals for the trip looked like the following:

-          Tuesday:  Departure from JFK New York on flight into Heathrow, England, arriving at 9:30pm, with champagne reception at the end at the hip Sofitel Hotel in the new BA swanky Terminal 5.  “Bubbly” is the right term for a plane load of entrepreneurs bottled up for 5-hour trans-Atlantic flight….

-          Tuesday eve: Trip into London to stay at one of BSG Team Ventures’ partner’s flats, Simon Haworth, for early meetings the following morning

-          Wednesday morning: Meetings with an affiliated venture fund Dr. Haworth is a partner of, IPSO Ventures, focused on zero-stage technology transfer out of UK universities

-          Wednesday lunch: meeting with Simon and additional BSG Team Ventures staff in UK to review firm-wide global priorities

-          Wednesday dinner: Meeting with Sean Sean-Rogers, venture capitalist originally based in Boston with Commonwealth Ventures, then London with Benchmark Capital, and now out with his first cool media start-up venture fund of his own, called PROfounders Capital .

-          Wednesday late eve: Flight out of Heathrow to Singapore

-          Thurs eve: arrive in Singapore 13 hours later but given time zones crossed, a full calendar day later.  On way to hotel, bump into another fellow EO Boston chapter member, Warren Katz, who’s military software simulation company MAK Technologies based in Cambridge, MA was recently bought by a Singaporean company and where he had meetings completely unrelated to anything to do with EO, British Airways etc.  The probability of bumping into a fellow Bostonian and dear friend 9,500 miles and 15 hours away from home in the same hotel lobby in Singapore is….. rough math? Zero.  If anything proved Thomas Friedman’s claim that “the world is flat,” this certain did.  Serendipity works in strange ways.

-          Thurs late eve: After a run on the treadmill and a shower at the hotel to shake off the jet lag, meet-up with Warren at the hip Equinox Bar at the top of the SwissHotel in downtown Singapore for a nightcap on the 70^th floor overlooking the city (Warren holding porcelein statue of a lion, the symbol of Singapore, as proof of authenticity and handy memory jogger for old age).

-          Friday day: Meetings with the Singapore Economic Development Board regarding the state of the cleantech industry in Singapore, and the Ignite Clean Energy Competition I currently chair.  Potential partnership with Singapore on global cleantech competition expansion.  This was followed by three meetings with boutique retained executive search firms with a similar focus and specialization to our own firm.  Great meetings.  All three firms turned out to be potential partner-caliber opportunities.  And each of them had active retained executive recruiting practices that did search work in India, Singapore, Mainland China, Hong Kong and Korea.

-          Saturday:  Meeting with existing technology client who went public earlier in 2009 for lunch to discuss current and future expansion searches both in the U.S. and Asia

-          Sunday:  Originally, I had booked the trip to try to squeeze in one more business day by staying the weekend and leaving late Monday eve to allow for more business meetings.   However, once there, was greeted with the fact that Monday was a holiday, the end of Ramadan for the Muslim religion, and business was closed.  It’s a great example of Singapore as an Indo-Chinese melting pot not dissimilar to that of the United States.  However, in Singapore, it is a fusion of Chinese, Malay, and Indian cultures that co-exist and create not only incredible cuisine, but a vibrant cultural diversity where all three associated religions are celebrated and many languages spoken.   Moved from hotel in downtown Singapore out to a small island just 15 minutes out of the city called Sentosa, a former military base built by the British half a century ago to protect the island, now converted to a natural wildlife habitat and recreational weekend playground for Singaporeans with several resorts anchoring each end of the island, dotted with golf courses, tennis, beach, dolphin petting, and lots of beach and water sports.  Note to self-keep windows of hotel room closed….

Ran back into Singapore the city to do some late Sunday shopping, and again bumped into the cultural diversity of Singapore, with a street celebration capping off the end of a period in Chinese culture and I believe Tao religion that starts In May, and ends in September, often referred to as the “Moon Cake” festival.  This is a festival  and celebration on the streets of Singapore and many other parts of Chinese Asia I’m told that celebrates the return of all the ghosts to the underworld who each year are let out to roam the earth and make trouble for their living relatives.  At the end of September, these ghosts are all returned behind the gates to the underworld, rendering the earth safe again until the following May.  The Chinese celebrate with parades, demonstrations, the burning of special urns the night before on the streets, and the Chinese pastry called “Moon Cakes” made up of a bean paste with some sort of frosting over the top.

Below is a picture of several groups of Chinese children rehearsing before the start of the parade.  The boys were part of a martial arts school; not sure what the girls were part depicting.

All said and done,  in 4 business days the dash across the globe was a great opportunity, albeit an exhausting one.

Here’s to entrepreneurship and the pioneers in all facets of enterprise who take on the unknown every day, week, and month, in an effort to forge new business value.  Whether those pioneers are in the U.S., UK, Singapore, or India, we’re all very much the same, driven by a like urge to grow and nurture an emerging idea.  Hats off to the rest of that planeload of globe-trotting entrepreneurs.  Can’t wait to hear their stories no doubt more compelling and inspirational than mine….

The Company

Becoming the leading content provider of geospatial imagery for mapping & monitoring applications

Our client has its roots in rocket science… literally.   Since the first image was collected from space over 30 years ago by classified government imaging systems, only a limited number of people have been permitted access to highly detailed photos of the Earth, and the industry was tightly regulated.  Since its deregulation in the 1990’s, our client is changing this historical usage of Earth information through the commercialization of high-resolution satellite imaging and an innovative approach to conducting business with customers, partners and resellers. The company was founded in 1992 to launch satellites into space for the purpose of taking high-resolution photos of the earth for defense and intelligence, government, and commercial use.   In early 2000, the US government awarded its first significant contract for satellite imagery to the firm.  Currently, the company offers the world’s highest resolution commercial satellite imagery, the largest image size, and the greatest on-board storage capacity of any satellite imagery provider.  In addition, the company’s comprehensive ImageLibrary houses the most up-to-date images available.

In 2004, our client struck an exclusive portal agreement to supply much of its satellite imagery to Google’s new product launch, branded Google Earth.  This deal served as both validation for a broader explicit push as well as anchor tenant into the non-federal government, commercial sector.

The company is headquartered near Boulder, Colorado, with other offices and facilities in key geographies throughout the world.  Commercial division headquarters are in Needham, MA.

The company filed for an Initial Public Offering in June of 2008.

Market Opportunity

Popular business and technology soothsaying magazines have trumpeted mapping as the next “killer app.”

Image-enhanced mapping – typically associated with markets based on GIS and GPS – have now begun to penetrate the mainstream lexicon.  Use of satellite imagery is definitely no longer the exclusive province of the intelligence community but is broadly used by business and the consumer as well.  [Even somewhat capricious mapping use has taken off like wildfire, as evidenced by the overnight popularity of photo posting sites like Flickr that tag location coordinates to each image.]

Based on market data from ASPRS and Frost & Sullivan, the estimated global addressable market for sub-1 meter imagery (including aerial) is $680M.  The combination of strong underlying growth in the traditional (GIS-based) market, and new emerging web-based applications will increase the addressable imagery market to more than $1B in 2010.  Very high resolution commercial satellite imagery is expected to be the major growth driver, taking share from aerial imagery providers.

The Position

The Vice President of Sales, Americas will be responsible for managing the overall sales plan, associated P&L and budget for the commercial sales group in the U.S., Canada, and South America.  The VP Sales, Americas (VPSA) reports to the CEO.  The position and associated team is focused on driving new sales into commercial markets, including but not limited to industry sectors including Oil & Gas, Telecom, Utilities, Online Mapping & Portals, Consumer Navigation, and the broadly defined corporate enterprise.

As the Company is headquartered in Longmont, Colorado, just outside of Boulder, Colorado, this position will be based at Headquarters offices.

The successful candidate must possess excellent organizational skills and the ability to lead a multi-continent distributed sales, business development and sales support organization.  Specific sales leadership background is in the broad-based area of web-based content. He or she must have experience establishing and managing one and two tier distribution sales structures internationally.

The Americas sales team is comprised of approximately 16 dedicated staff, including regional sales managers and directors (~6), business development (2), and sales support staff (8).   A Sales operations group of approximately 20 is shared between the various sales organizations, including the Americas, EMEA, and APAC regions.

Highlights of the VPSA responsibilities include:

• Exceed quarterly and annual revenue targets
• Develop and execute sales plans and strategies to position the company for sustained long-term geographic growth in the Americas, especially in key emerging geographic markets such as Brazil.
• Develop and execute sales plans and strategies to expand the industrial customer base, further grow the fast moving online and mobile content and mapping customer segment, and achieve demonstrated success penetrating the enterprise customer marketplace.
• Manage, develop and coach company’s America sales force to ensure success in each region
• Foster teamwork and create a positive work environment for a distributed sales force
• Lead and develop a dynamic and creative sales infrastructure that fits the needs of our business and the products we provide our customers
• Drive internal discussion about strategies, ideas, new opportunities and the best methods for achieving success in a changing marketplace
• Consult with customers on their needs and provide feedback to other departments supporting sales efforts
• Forecast, track and report sales performance using internal tools and application, such as Salesforce.com
• Conduct internal pipeline meetings and reviews with the executive team
• Manage overall sales plan for territory and associated P&L and budget
• Lead team in structuring strategic and integrated partnerships with key customers
• Personally assist in closing large deals and managing strategic accounts
• Travel as needed to ensure that sales and clients needs are met and exceeded
• Participate actively in business planning and budgeting process as a key member of the business unit’s executive team

Staff & Global Office Locations

Commercial Business Unit offices exist with headquarters in Longmont, CO, and other offices in Colorado, Boston area, Singapore, and the United Kingdom.   The sales team is comprised of 4 regional  Director/VPsThere are Regional Sales Managers, for a total of approximately a 5, including all sales VPs, Directors and Managers.

Financial Backing

The largest shareholder in the Company is Morgan Stanley, occupying several seats on the board. During its seed and growth stages, the company has also received venture capital (August Capital, www.augustcap.com), private equity (Frontera www.fronteracapital.com), and strategic investments (Ball Corp’s aerospace division, www.ballaerospace.com [NYSE: BLL]).

Compensation

Compensation will be competitive with the position’s requirements, comprised of three basic components– base salary, incentive compensation driven by a combination of achieving revenue targets and management-by-objective milestones, and appropriate equity stakeholder position.

Having just finished an executive search for a General Manager of Asia Pacific and EMEA region where the candidate was located in Singapore, who was born and had early childhood in India, and educated and now a citizen of the U.S., the question of global talent trends comes to mind. Is this typical of the future executive leadership puzzle, where pieces will come from around the globe? Reflecting at year’s end on the coming year, and the fact that we’re almost at 2010, we got to thinking about leadership succession and the next generation of leaders we’re grooming. With all the news of layoffs at all levels in the media, and despite the forecasts of some of the toughest economic times America has seen since the Great Depression, there are some really interesting global macro trends that are worth noting when it comes to executive recruiting, and executive talent management in the next few years. And now is probably a really good time to start the planning around the impacts these demographic prognostications may have.

The quick headline is this– Baby Boomers as we all have heard (approximate age range of 42 to 60), are aging. And Boomers make up the vast majority of executive leadership roles in corporate America. This includes Wall Street AND Main Street businesses, large and small. In fact, there is some evidence that more entrepreneurs starting businesses are boomers than any other age group. Boomers are fully one-third of the US population now (US Census) and X generation (54 million, ~17% of U.S. population), Y generation (aged between 18 and 30, about 75 million, clocking in at ~25% of U.S. population), and Z, AA, etc (who knows) generations are smaller due to lower birthrates post-Word War II. As the nextgen executive pool is a much smaller one (see http://www.thefutureofwork.net/assets/Review_of_Workforce_Crisis.pdf), we have to ask the obvious question– where is leadership going to come from in the next 5 to 25 years? Who will drive the U.S. knowledge economy, and can the U.S. continue to sell itself as the global melting pot, successfully continuing to woo other countries’ best and brightest with our promise of streets paved with gold? Or, given the two busts in the last 8 years, one Internet and the other financial markets, is the next generation of leaders going to reverse the brain drain from rest of world to the U.S. to its opposite? We’ve certainly seen recently emerging global powers like China actively push to woo and re-patriate Chinese who had migrated to the U.S. for higher education and opportunity.

What is counter-intuitive to perhaps many however is the demographic shifts and a snapshot of what the global talent marketplace looks like in 2020, a mere 11 years away. We were recently at the IACPR Annual Conference (International Association for Corporate and Professional Recruitment, www.Iacpr.org ), and had the opportunity to hear one of Boston Consulting Group’s Talent Practice leaders, Rosalinde Torres, address this issue.

For a summary of the Boston Consulting Group report pdf, go to www.bcg.com/publications/files/Creating_People_Advantage_Summary_May_2008.pdf. For the visual, look at the world map graphic above. Red circles are countries with a net loss of eligible leadership population by 2020. Green circles are those countries with a net gain. One might think that China would be a big player in future leadership, but with their one-child policy, they’re down 10 million. The U.S. is down 17 million. The possible winner for building the biggest pool of future leaders is India, up 47 million people. This is almost more than all the rest of those countries with net positive growth combined.

Food for thought as we go about building executive teams for 2009, 10 and deep into the next decade.