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Elders’ MeetingElders’ MeetingJun 22-23, 2009Jun 22-23, 2009

06-22-2009Elders Meeting June 22-23, 2009 Pg 2

Introduction

As I step back from the day-to-day and look at the near term horizon, I become extrememly concerned that we will not be able to adequately address all the additional things we are trying to accomplish in the second half of the year. These are the initiatives and efforts (directly or indirectly) addressing the Elders’ Plan.

Let’s start with a quick review of the major areas of focus from the Elders’ Plan:

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Focus of 2009 as Outlined in the Elders’ Report

1) Hiring a Vice President of Institutional Sales and having him develop a product and market strategy and implement it. It is vital that we locate this person and have him on board on or before Apr 1.

2) Determining a corporate pricing strategy, including prices and migration strategy, that maximizes institutional and individual revenue.

3) Emphasizing protecting current revenue while focusing on walkups, both conversion rates and traffic. Secondary focus will be on innovative exploitation of the Free List. Paid List will remain the same, while partnerships will be treated opportunistically.

4) Expanding the analyst team with a more robust internship program and implementing a more robust monitoring program that can support 24/7 operations when needed (Gaza, Mumbai, etc).

5) Developing basic capabilities in multi-platform delivery in anticipation of the next phase.

6) Creating compensation packages designed to ensure the retention of Class 1 analysts, spreading this out through the company as quickly as possible, built around salary and stock packages that bind the key people to Stratfor.

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Overview of New Efforts

1) Our strongest growth engine, individual publishing, has grown 17% Yr/Yr (through mid-June) in an industry climate plagued with bankruptcies and layoffs…and yet has missed plan/budget . You will all see later this morning that there is a laundry list of new sales activity and a staff of people hired to re-invigorate this effort.

2) Planned institutional Sales growth got off to a slow start, but is now staffed and following up on some promising leads. Product differentiation is likely in the 2H.

3) Stratfor is moving to a dossier system of site navigation. While available to all site visitors, we believe this will be particularly attractive to our institutional customers.

4) We are on the eve of launching our multimedia initiative which will enhance the user experience via more (and better) audio and video on our website.

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Analysis

All these major new initiatives intersect at I/T. This is not to mention ongoing projects, fixing things that “break” and responding to emergencies. We currently have two full time I/T programmers…one of them is still learning. This is entirely inadequate for an organization that depends on I/T and has expansion plans. Mike Mooney has been tasked to find at a minimum one more, and possibly two.

But additional h/c is not enough. We have a really small company culture and we need to grow up a bit. We have come to a point where our next steps forward will come only if we can change the way we’ve been going about our internal business—and pursue a new way….a culture change of sorts. Our I/T tasking “process” needs to change.

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Conclusion

1) I will need to help Mike manage the I/T workload. Mike and I have discussed and Mike will judge the “small” stuff.

2) I will prioritize the larger projects.

3) Mike’s staff will no longer take on projects without Mike’s say so. This means all I/T requests need to go through Mike. No more informal “Steve can you take care of this for me” type shit.

4) Mike will increase the I/T physical office presence so that organizations needing to contact I/T will not be left wanting for a lack of physical I/T presence.

5) This means we cannot demand an immediate fix for an issue unless it is a true emergency (as judged by me and Mike).