Adrian Giles: Hitwise Portals

Adrian Giles, co-founder and Executive Director of Internet ranking program Hitwise, and previous Entrepreneur of the Year award nominee, talks with Wealth Creator about growing up in a pub and the business of IT.

Adrian Giles didn’t grow up with a silver USB drive in this mouth, but he did find early on in his career that he had a knack for creating IT systems. Working in his parent’s pub, he spent his youth and young manhood learning management skills and streamlining the business. “My parents owned a couple of pubs. I was actually born in a pub, and spent most of my youth living in and working my way up through the hospitality industry, learning all facets of hospitality, running the kitchen and gaming to the point where I was running the entire hotel, quite young.”

Adrian’s interest in IT began in the early 1990s, when, completely untrained in computers, he wrote software that turned locking up his parent’s pub from a two-hour manual process of writing up cash sheets into a 20 minute computer program that did the same job. Impressed with the power and ease of use that his IT software demonstrated, he completed an Associate Diploma in Business Programming, and then enrolled in a Business Computing degree at Monash University in Melbourne. Quickly realising he was more interested in the marketing and management side of IT than programming, he left the course and, along with 3,000 other applicants, applied for a position with Beam software, building websites, promoting the company, and building the games portal Hotgames, one of the world’s most utilised gaming sites.   

“I learnt a lot marketing websites and promoting them, and about how search engines work. I was able to really influence a search engine result based on the way that we coded a particular website,” Adrian remembers. While with Beam he met web-developer Andrew Barlow, and the pair decided to go into business together. “We hadn’t decided what business that was exactly, we just had this entrepreneurial urge. Obviously it had to have something to do with the Internet.” Because of Andrew’s background knowledge about search engine marketing, the pair decided this would be a good place to start since it could be run with revenues from day one, and was, he describes, “a good cash flow service type business.”

After extensive research and documentation of the processes involved with optimising a website with high search engine listings, Andrew and Adrian started Signwave Interactive, Australia’s first search engine optimisation tool. To sell the business, they walked up and down Melbourne’s St. Kilda Road business district, telling companies they had worked out the codes to search engines and could ensure that the company’s client websites would appear at the top of the search results. Half an hour into their first meeting, they were given Mercedes Benz as a client, and from there quickly built up a core group of brand name clients.

Hitting the mark

The idea for Hitwise came quickly after Adrian saw how successful Signwave Interactive had become. “One of the challenges that we identified in the industry was that no one was really measuring the Internet and giving every website a picture of where they sat in the marketplace.”

Only the largest sites, such as MSN and Yahoo! were being comparatively monitored, and data on smaller sites was not available. “If you think about how the Internet works, you access it through an ISP, whose infrastructure is the backbone of the Internet, so if you can work out a way of measuring ISPs then you can capture a lot more information from many more websites. We were able to produce a rankings product based on the millions of users and in effect we were able to report on the hundreds and thousands of Internet websites.”

The business grew quickly, and by 1999, Hitwise had several business streams. “We were a start-up company back then … we had this top 100 .com.au business, we had the Hitwise  ranking service, and we had the search engine optimisation business. Eventually what happened was the top 100 search engine had a really popular following, but, much to the dismay of many Australians, we decided that the best thing for the business would be to globally scale the Hitwise product, because it was the most unique and had the most legs.” The top 100 site was cutting into the main business, so the pair gave away the search engine business with the intention of returning to it at a later date, and ventured overseas
with Hitwise.

When 1999 clocked into 2000, Adrian and Andrew made the move to put Hitwise into as many countries as possible. New Zealand was first, followed by the UK, Hong Kong and Singapore. The pair decided to wait for Hitwise to strengthen in those markets before venturing into the US, which they did in July 2003. “We became a US company not long ago. We became cash positive as a consolidated entity almost two-and-a-half years ago. It’s been quite profitable and at the moment we’re continuing to scale the business, grow it, and expand into new territories and position the company appropriately for a NASDAQ listing. We feel confident we’ll have a very successful and very strong NASDAQ listing.” Listing Hitwise as a public company was always Adrian’s intention. “We want to give investors an exit, and employees options, and we can only do that by listing. And being a public company will provide the opportunity for the company to grow further, to grow into countries more quickly, and to ensure the success and growth of the company for years to come.”

Executive decision

Adrian credits managing the growth of the business to a decision he and Andrew made early on to bring in a really strong management executive team. “We were pretty young, but we worked out the best way to make the company successful was to bring in very good, experienced executives. We hired a really good sales and marketing person, a really good CFO, and eventually a CEO because we wanted to step out of the business.” This allowed Andrew to leave the business entirely, in 2003. Adrian then moved the company’s headquarters to New York, splitting the executive team and flying the new CEO to the States.

The addition of experienced executives meant Hitwise could become a very well-oiled machine. “Every financial quarter we made a pact to improve the process,” says Adrian. This improvement was due in part to the involvement of Price Waterhouse Coopers, who Adrian requested to come in and audit Hitwise in the company’s early days. “Price Waterhouse Coopers came to audit us from a privacy and data integrity point of view, because obviously with the collection of Internet data, privacy is an important aspect of it. We wanted to get third party endorsement of that so we engaged PWC to come right through and audit the entire operations and data collections to ensure that from a privacy perspective and from the integrity of the data point of view, it was as robust as it could be. Constant reviews opened us up to a continual process improvement cycle.”

Without this pressure from a third party, Hitwise would perhaps not have grown to maturity as quickly as it has. In the beginning though, Adrian thought the company would have grown much more quickly than it did. “We thought it would be even bigger than it is now, earlier. Whether that was part entrepreneurial spirit, part naivety, part having to believe in yourself, whatever it was, we thought in two years time we would be running out of Asia, pulling 50 million companies and that every website in the world would have us. Big sell really, but I believed it. I was 23 and didn’t know any better.” And he’s glad he didn’t know any better, because being young and naïve meant being passionate and driven towards success. “When you’re 23, you have stars in your eyes and you think the most important thing is wealth creation.”

Now, Adrian has worked out that what is really important to him is happiness. “A couple of years ago I set about refocusing my energies, not so much on making dollars but on making happiness. I still work as hard as I did back then, but I work smarter. I’ve learned how to delegate things, to start working on the business rather than in it, and thinking more about the big picture. One of the effects is that you end up making money anyway, but it’s of secondary importance.”

Happiness equals clarity of thought and clarity equals success. “You approach things more calmly, you deal better with people, enjoy it more. When you enjoy something more, it rubs off on people. Your culture becomes better and people have great respect for you. It adds up to a great range of positives which end up making the company successful, which in turn makes you successful.”