S9E04: 250X growth, and making the Internet a better place, with Ben Crawford (CEO, CentralNic)

Richard Medcalf
Hi Ben and welcome to the show.

Ben Crawford
Hello Richard.

Richard Medcalf
Hey, it's great to have you today. This is called the Impact Multiplier Podcast and you have multiplied your impact. We were just talking about this right? You grew the revenues of CentralNic that business which your CEO of 250 times in the last 12 or 13 years, he said, When you joined, it was about 2 million, and now it's getting on for 500 million and you've grown from being 12, staff to 700 staff. So this has been an incredible journey. I know that CentralNic has just been acknowledged in the Financial Times 1000 list of fastest growing companies in the world and I know that you've doubled I think in size in six of the last seven years. So this has been a fantastic story and I'm gonna get into kind of underneath both of the journey of that scaling with you but also the mission that you're on, right, what keeps you going, what drives you what gets you out of bed every morning, you know, beyond the obvious financial success that you've already had for anyone who's growing a business and added $480 million onto their onto their revenues. So So let's dive in. First of all, perhaps just give us a bit of context. Tell us a little bit, you know, just a few sentences really around what's CentralNic? And how did you end up in the top job?

Ben Crawford
Very good. Well, essentially, well, as you had, as you said, when I joined CentralNic, it was a domain name registry company, it was very small and employed 12 staff and it was turning over a few million dollars, but it was profitable and, and they brought me on as a consultant and then the top job became available. So so I took it and at the time, I just come off doing to roll up strategies, one in the sports industry, and one in the art in the art business. With the global financial crisis in 2008, the art business kind of collapsed is no one got their bonuses, and no one went and bought paintings for their penthouses and so, but this looked like a very interesting business and as far as the online services industry, where it sat was concerned, it was a fascinating area, I'd worked on the internet since the mid 90s and I thought, Well, hey, there might be an opportunity here.

Richard Medcalf
So what excited you about that opportunity, because you know, it's a domain name. It's sounds okay. It's, you know, it's a technical technical thing that's going on, what was it that may got you going? Yeah, this is where I'm gonna double down?

Ben Crawford
Well, I think probably one thing was that there was big change going to occur at some point, I ended up not occurring for it until about four years after I started, which was the introduction of new top level domain names and so whilst every country had its country code there, was.com.org and.net, and so on, there hadn't been an opportunity for a kind of introduction of lots of domain names for years, and we happen to have a really good distribution platform and so, indeed, what we went, what I did is pulled together a team went out 160 contracts to distribute these new top level domain names and as nobody really knew what the potential was like the cut VeriSign, the company that that matches.com is, is $1,000,000,000.50 plus percent EBITDA margin business with Warren Buffett on the on the Share register. So if you if If you succeed, there's a pretty good outcome and so off the back of that we actually IP owed and so we IPO as a very small company, I think we had revenue up to 4 million by that stage, and about 20 Odd staff but we had these 60 contracts that could potentially take us a long way and I guess, once we IP owed that gave me access to capital, and, and what happened with the new top level domain names, it was great. We became the number one distributor of new top level domain names in the world which we remain today. But that product segment kind of plateaued fairly quickly say, by year two, we kind of knew that it was plateauing. So we decided to use the money we'd raised and the fact that we could continue to raise money to buy other internet services businesses and so I kind of got back into the swing of doing my roll up strategies, which bring existed today.

Richard Medcalf
Right? So yeah. So you over that journey that's been, there's been a whole bunch of companies that you've acquired to expand the breadth of services and the reach of the business.

Ben Crawford
Indeed, indeed. So I think I think about 15 all up that we've acquired over that time. And, but I would also say that last year, we actually delivered 38% organic growth. So it isn't just a matter of buying companies. We have a marketplace model, which means we buy companies with different products, and different customers. And then we kind of merge them all together. So all the products can be sold to all the customers, that does have quite a successful multiplier effect in terms of driving growth. So whilst the companies we acquired might have been growing at 5% a year, we're now as a group growing at 38% a year.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, it's fascinating. Do you have? Do those different business units have a lot of autonomy? Or are they kind of more brought into one corporate structure that point?

Ben Crawford
Well, obviously, they had to start with a lot of autonomy, because if you only have 20 staff, and you're actually running a business with those 20 staff, we didn't have what they call in the world of m&a, a mothership. We didn't have one, processes, systems, head office staff, etc. So a couple of years ago, we decided we had to change from being a essentially a holding company for a portfolio of businesses to actually getting into this integration, because, and we only had 5% growth in that time until we really got into that integration.

Richard Medcalf
Okay. So that was the kickstart for you the integration?

Ben Crawford
It was and it was big decision, because we invested $10 million back into ourselves, rather than buying companies, we hired a lot of staff, we set up a lot of systems, we merged companies together, we changed leadership. So essentially, what we did is we centralize the back office functions, and and then change the roles of the business managers from managing a company like a general manager to just focusing on driving the revenues and the organic growth. And sometimes that involves putting in people with quite a different profile. It was painful, it was expensive, but $10 million of annual investment, it's annual, because it's software licenses and staff and so on, resulted in over $100 million of additional revenues for the first year. So it was clearly money well spent.

Richard Medcalf
Right. That's yeah, that's fascinating, because it's been a theme in the last series of secrets of scaling on the protocol. I think one of the themes was, you know, was this kind of decentralization, like giving people responsibility, but I think a lot of the time again, it was around that responsibility for the revenue line, you know, and then saying, we will take care of the machine to be entrepreneurial on the revenue side where you've got control.

Ben Crawford
And you can see it, if you buy a business that's grown at 5% a year, it's very hard to draw that business up to 20% a year unless you change something quite fundamental. And obviously, if one of the fundamental things is now you don't have to worry about compliance, tax payroll, yeah, project management, product, IT services, just get more customers and upsell them. It's an LLC obviously changes the culture. And it's a difficult change because it means people who were relatively autonomous become less.

Richard Medcalf
So I have a question for you. Jeff Bezos says that whenever he sees meets a founder of a company, he always asks them are they a missionary or mercenary in mercenaries based fundamentally want to flip their stock? And missionaries really care about the customer experience? And that's what gets them out of bed in the morning. So, there might be other ways on how you respond to that, where are you on that scale?

Ben Crawford
I guess, bearing in mind that I've been with the company now for what 12 years, whatever, and haven't sold a share, think that might that might show where I'm falling on that. But look, you know, we we were very mission driven company and, and our mission is to make the internet everybody's domain and that essentially means that it's everybody in the world. And and that very much, I guess, reflects my own global perspective, which I'd say is kind of far from from obvious. The industry. We started in domain name started very much with companies popping up all over the world around the year 2000 when the internet was privatized, to help local businesses get online, and and we had a totally different approach. We're like no, the internet gives us potential to be global, let's be global from day one. And so what does that mean? It's not, it's not like we're about global domination, it's more about worry about inclusiveness and about and just that excitement of engaging with new people and new challenges and new territories, and so on. So what that demand is, we've acquired businesses in a dozen countries, we have customers in almost every country in the world. We have staff from all over the world, when central bank was just a small company in London, I used to do to recruit staff or advertise on Gumtree to get the kind of most recent immigrants, backpackers whatever. And a small world to get the kind of international traveler types. Because I wanted to be the person that discovers this new talented person that's just arrived in London and get them on board. And it didn't matter where they came from in the world. And I think before COVID, we had this, this philosophy, again, I think very much coming from me, let's get on a plane, go go to that country, meet the people form a relationship cut a deal, while our competitors is still doing their research about, you know, market feasibility, or what have you. And, and that was very successful for us. But then obviously, COVID came along. And and that changed entirely. So I went from doing like, over a million kilometers a year of travel and pretty much flying almost every day to to stopping and that and that's actually dovetailed very well with our return to being carbon neutral as well. So we were Yeah, we were carbon neutral before. Before all this started where carbon fuel again now.

Richard Medcalf
So Ben told me so you, just to slow you down on that you you really talked there about what I really heard was a kind of a bit of a relationship. First thing going on there. I don't know if that's right. But it sounds like you Yeah, you really value that human interaction?

Ben Crawford
Absolutely. So it might seem ironic that we're delivering our services over the internet, but we're building our relationships personally. But that's that that's the approach we've taken. And I think, again, we have we have quite a perhaps different approach to business than then maybe a whole lot of tech companies in that we do view as kinds of relationships with all kinds of different organizations has been very important. And but now, I think, a big challenge we're facing today, and I think we're doing fine, that we can do better. And he's using the internet to build those relationships, rather than doing it all in person. And, and, and everybody struggles I struggle with doing it, because it's, it doesn't come natural. But all we've got to do is look at all the tools that are available for us and and know that hey, this is this is happening. Yeah, this the, it is absolutely possible to develop relationships, never having met someone. And indeed, we've now acquired companies without actually me having ever met people, the vendors or the or the or the or the staff. Yeah, it's a new experience. But I personally believe that's the game we need to win now.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, it's fascinating. I should have been at the event I was I ran an event last week, called the hybrid CEO, it was a roundtable of a whole bunch of CEOs who came together and look talking about like, how, you know, what's the leadership requirement on a CEO, you know, how you want to show up and lead and, and structure the business in that hybrid world, most people have got remote working policies and everything in place. So that's not the issue, right? It's more about where the new where's the next level of opportunities. And that's really what you're starting to talk about. And I actually shared. I started off with a bit of a story around. I mentioned it before, but Amazon, right, it's saying that when Amazon came along, they were a bookstore on the line and people thought that's like an inferior shopping experience to the real bookstore where you can go and pick up the book and you can browse it. But then fast forward a couple of years and suddenly Well, you know, this online bookstore you can get all the reviews the recommendations that you know, a personalized option. You can you can check out what's inside the book. All the rest of it right you can you can get it the next day you can return if you don't want to so suddenly what was seen as a inferior option, actually kind of reimagined what the experience looked like and became the superior option in many ways, or at least arguably, right for many people. And so the question was, well, so often we start with this idea that well, online is definitely going to be inferior to in person meetings, and obviously, there's many things you can't replicate. But what would it look like to actually turn the tables a little bit for certain sorts of interactions and kind of start to think about that?

Ben Crawford
Absolutely and so I kind of very strongly believe that that's, that's the direction we're moving in. And part and part of part of that is we've moved data science and AI team into a head office function now looking at everything that we do, including sales, customer relation, management, account management, marketing, and so on. Because Because I'm, I'm thinking that this is, it's entirely possible to build excellent relationships online, is just, it's almost a generational thing. Because I can think about exactly my daughter, before she, before she started, I guess it was before she went to college, she, she already had contacted 2030 people who were in her class, and they were already communicating. And she was in London, they were in New York, before she started, so So it's there, it's just, it's just how to take that technology and make it work for business. And a lot of it's to do exactly with social media.

Richard Medcalf
Yes, on this topic that you've played, uh, you know, some great things, obviously, in this business. When you at some point, in the future, when you kind of step back, what's the legacy that you most want to have left? What will be the most satisfying part of that journey for you?

Ben Crawford
Well, well, I think, Well, I think they were kind of old models of the internet. When it started, people thought, hey, the internet is this world of individuals free from big business, and then inevitably, that the it became big business, and then it was big business free from government interference. And of course, I think we're right in the midst of that, just being destroyed his vision. And, and, and our perspective a lot to speak is definitely look, it's gonna reflect the real world, the internet, right? So there's going to be entrepreneurs, there's going to be enterprises, there's going to be governments. And the key thing is a company like ours, what we're trying to do is bring it together in a way that, on the one hand, make it address his business opportunities. And so obviously, one of the things we do is we work with enterprise entrepreneurs and governments and we work with big tech platforms. So I can see a multi 100 billion dollar opportunity here, but at the same time, we're trying to just make the internet a better place. And, and part of that is our business model is very different from a lot of tech companies. We've never taken people's private data and sold it. We've never tried to impose foreign content and products on people, what we do is we sell them the tools to build, secure and monetize their own patch of the internet, no matter where they are in the world. And we think that's so making the internet more inclusive and more reflective of society. is I think, what what our company is trying to achieve, and certainly in this role, that's what I'd like to say,

Yeah. Just turn for a second to your, your daily life as CEO at this point, what would be your one or two things which really energize and excite you personally, right now in the business? And what will be one or two things which actually drain you and slow you down? And when you're not in, you're not in your sweet spot?

I think I think I'm very driven by a sense of responsibility and by success, and I'm very intellectually curious about the next challenges. But all of those things tend to be internal. I I actually think I mean, I personally am think very kind of Zen and not. And, and my whole thing is, I'm not that affected by the external, like, that's not going to my moods not going to swing based on, on on phone call legs or why. And to me that's actually a kind of key part of being being a leader is I'm I'm going to be a reliable, safe pair of hands. And when things go, when things are going one way or the other, I'm not gonna kind of lose sight of where we're headed. And, and, and so on. So I guess I try not to be influenced one way or another by what's happening.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, it's interesting. I was gonna, another of my clients is it's very something very similar that he didn't really managed to build that kind of car. Exterior, really? I'm just wondering, how have you done that? Right? What's the what's the thought process? I mean, has it been a learning curve? Or has he always had that?

Ben Crawford
No, I think, Well, look, I'm in temperament is obviously something that you kind of develop in childhood or whatever it no doubt, but I would also think there's been episodes in my life, where, in my working life where things have been so bad, I've literally thought they can get through this, then, then essentially, there couldn't be anything worse. And, and I do think that they're probably the key kind of pivotal experiences. And, and also, look, I'm, I'm a big believer in, in, in therapy, and, and in my I have a lot of interest in psychoanalysis in particular, as and. And so I think, that kind of process which you could do, I'm sure, through mindfulness and whatever to actually examining what is anxiety, what causes it? How do we How does my mind work, reacting to bad situations and so on? I think that's a very helpful thing. And I would advise pretty much anybody to take all that stuff pretty seriously, because I think it does. Yeah, it especially if you're looking for positions or responsibility to be less reactive and more, and be able to bring more kinds of self knowledge and calmness to a situation will normally make you better at dealing with it.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. Now thirdly, I often say, you don't get what you want, you get who you are. And it's something that actually we work on ourselves. And that way, we find out other things happen around us in different way. Yeah, fantastic. Well, let's just go perhaps move on, Ben to add your quickfire questions here. I'm always interested in finding out what some of the inputs are, in terms of books and inputs, people and different things that have changed perhaps the way that you you lead. So what's a favorite quote of yours that perhaps is something that you live by or that comes to mind often when you're in leadership?

Ben Crawford
Could tell you some quotes from my first boss, but he is absolutely foul mouthed, man, sir. So if they're appropriate, but one thing I just read recently from, from Dean Rusk, who was the word Secretary of State under the Kennedy was, he said, one of the best ways to persuade others is by listening to them and I think that that that very much is kind of reflective of the management style, or the leadership style that I tried to, to embody.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, I hear that and you you, you've got that said, that kind of poise and you talked a lot about building relationships and so I can, you know, although it's hard for you to know, I don't really know you very well, but that sense of, yeah, perhaps. Yeah. Being tuned in to what people are saying, right, rather than just driving forward with your own own vision.

Ben Crawford
Yeah, I mean, I think it's both on the one hand, I think leadership is taking charge. But on the other hand, I don't think that means imposing your it being authoritarian. It just means setting up the process. You're running it, but then you want to negate your ego, and you really want to listen, you want to find out you want to take responsibility for Everything that goes wrong as well as everything that goes right, you want to buy it and get criticism and so on, because I think you need, the combination of those two things is, is what's going to make you successful?

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, absolutely. What about a favorite app? Is there anything that you have on your phone that is like your go to? Outside the usual camera?

Ben Crawford
Well, I mean, obviously, I'm an open Internet guy, not an app guy as an all about websites, but I did one that I do use is it's a, it's a, it's a concierge service called Velocity black, where you use texts. So rather than having to get on websites and book, plane tickets, or get a phone and sit the queue to try and get a restaurant booking, you just text them and they do it all for you. So it's actually pretty useful service.

Richard Medcalf
I mean, I What about a book that's influenced you?

Ben Crawford
I read a lot of books. But I think about that there's a book by Dave load and called tribal leadership, which, which I'd say I quite enjoy him the it's, it kind of categorizes companies, but by the culture. And having started my working career in a really terrible civil service job, were actually collecting sales tax for people renting out fishing rods. That was obviously a very kind of blow murale business where he would describe it as a business where the culture is defined by the words life sucks. And all the way up to businesses, which are all about empowering individuals and then eventually empowering the company. And so it's yeah, it's it's, it's a fun book, and I think very perceptive as well as I've often used it to help categorize people in companies.

Richard Medcalf
Okay, very nice. I've checked that one out. What advice would you give to your 20 year old self?

Ben Crawford
I think I'd have I'd have to advise them what horse to carry Eric in the Melbourne. If I could look back with what I know today.

Richard Medcalf
Yes. Fair point. Last one is the amount of our best guests on the show do come from referrals. So I'm always curious to know who inspires you as a CEO who somebody perhaps, who you've encountered, you know, who would be a great guest, you know, perhaps for the show? Does anyone come to mind?

Ben Crawford
Taught that very much. I mean, I think having having this relationship model, or this business model based on on close relationships, I can think of two people fascinating business leaders, one is Daniel McGarry, who when he was 27, was the youngest person ever to own his own top level domain name. So he thought X, Y, Z, which amazingly, when Google created alphabet, they decided to use the dot XYZ domain name. So a couple of years later, he had alphabet and if you go to abc dot XYZ that's alphabets main website, okay. Even today, and so a bad bought but I a great CEO, entrepreneur, hugely successful, based in Los Angeles. And, and the other one I can think of is BB and to rakia. So bobbins. Again, a entrepreneur who, I guess by his mid 30s, his his and his brother, dibs, exits had had of companies they created and sold had had already passed the billion dollar mark. And he's still CEO of two companies creating new tech companies all the time. I met like, again, amazing guy. And, and happily, both of them are business partners of ours, in various parts of our business, a pleasure to work with as well.

Richard Medcalf
That's that's really fascinating. What inspires you about them in particular, would you say?

Ben Crawford
Well, I guess the thing is, they're both much younger than me. So it's like, it's like, I guess I've known them both for quite a while, and and at relatively early stages of their careers and obviously, I joined central bankers, a tiny company too. So I think just the fact that we've been able to stay in touch with each other, do business and deals together and kind of grow We grow our businesses in parallel with each other as men's, we've always kind of been been peers, which is a very cool.

Richard Medcalf
Shared journey a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. Hey, my favorite questions is, is thinking you no matter how much we've achieved, there's always a next level to get to. So where does CentralNic Go from here as a business? What's kind of on your radar?

Ben Crawford
Well, I mean, I think what people are looking for is, you know, without growth rate scale, like when are we going to be a billion dollar business and ensure that no doubt inevitably going to happen the next couple of years at some point, but yeah, that's that's a milestone. It's not a it's not a it's not a really a step change in what we're doing that just just incremental change, I think. I think we're just really proving and building out our marketplace model and showing that, that, that by selling all these online services, and focusing on entrepreneurs, and enterprise, and big tech platforms, and government, actually is, is a fantastic model, which were and the all of these organizations actually have a lot in common and again, I guess I'm, I'm, I think I'm a big believer in diplomacy, in in, in sensitive persuasion. So I'm also a big believer in kind of radical transparency but I think often that lends itself to just inviting kind of the Twitter trolls of the office to take the microphone. So I think we try not to not to encourage that, but say, let's face all of our issues very transparently, and then deal with them very diplomatically and so I think, to build a tech company that has that kind of culture that has that kind of approach to like, bring in all those constituents and say, Hey, we're government friendly. Were tech platform friendly, and way entrepreneur friendly. Hopefully, it's a different kind of tech company and it's one, yeah, we would like to see succeed and flourish.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, I love it. I love the way you know, you articulate about that. There's multiple stakeholders and the focus you put on each one, I think it's it's, it's really interesting, because often people rotate on one stakeholder and then everything else is seen through that lens but you've got this balanced approach to mediation and develop. Yeah.

Ben Crawford
Yeah, exactly. I think I think and there's that that's also a big commercial opportunity. Like if you can mediate between tech platforms and governments and entrepreneurs, that that's an opportunity because sales.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, great point. So and then lastly, you know, what do you what will you need to do differently as CEO to multiply your own impact? You know, as the business continues to grow? I mean, what, how will your role change?

Ben Crawford
Well, I guess I gotta go on podcasts. Right? And I suppose that when thinking I guess, I'm thinking more about broadcasting and so on, I mean, the company just recently, so we've kind of joined the World Economic Forum, where where, I mean, I, I have had a parallel career as a journalist all my life and now trying to maybe bring these things together. So instead of writing about art exhibitions, I'm actually writing about what the business and what new and into their policy and so on. So I think there's, we want to be an important company and I think in order to do that, we've got to get we've got to raise our profile and play with the big boys. So that's my role.

Richard Medcalf
Fantastic. Last thing, Ben, if you want to find out more about you or about the company, how do they best get in touch?

Ben Crawford
ben.crawford@centralnic.com. I mean, feel free to email me. I'm pretty accessible. Maybe not physically anymore but certainly, Yeah, always. Yeah. always keen to build new connections. So yeah, I would welcome anyone who's been interested by what I've had to say to get in touch.

Richard Medcalf
That's it. Well, I've been it's been fantastic conversation. You I really enjoy getting this inside. glimpse into you know, this journey that you've been on from 12 people to 750 to 500 billion revenues, right. It's been a really fascinating journey, but I also love Yeah, that heart that comes out that there is this relationship focus So there's this sense of, you know, there's the commercial side, but there's also, you know, how do we, how do we, yeah, mediate between the different stakeholders and make the world a bit of a better place as you do that. I think that definitely comes out in who you are and your focus. So wish all the best on the next on the next stage and thanks for spending a few minutes with us.

Ben Crawford
Very happy to thank you for inviting me.

Richard Medcalf
Thanks, Ben. Take care.