Founded in 1995, GSX Solutions of Geneva faced a challenge common to high-tech startups: how to transform a founder-centric company into a normal business. It had identified a unique business niche—a lack of proactive monitoring and reporting tools for packaged enterprise messaging environments. It also had a dedicated team of 25 employees, and the engineering talent to realize software solutions. What it lacked was the organization required to take the business to the next level.
This was the situation confronting Antoine Leboyer when he bought the company in 2008, together with a private equity partner. To compound Leboyer’s difficulties, GSX’s founder (and exclusive source of technical support) left nine months after the acquisition, in the midst of the worst financial meltdown since 1929.
Though Leboyer had not anticipated all the challenges, he was at least up to the task. After 12 years in sales and marketing at IBM, he had started the European Indirect operations of Candle Corporation, a privately held maker of software that manages mainframes and other computers in business networks. Candle's software manages mainframe computers as well as those that run Windows, UNIX, and Linux so Leboyer was familiar with a service model similar to GSX’s, whose strength was the unification of multiple messaging platforms including Lotus Domino, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Likewise, he was used to rapidly changing customer requirements in an intensely competitive environment.
Leboyer had also worked for startups in software distribution and mobile phone billing software. His most recent position prior to GSX was senior vice president of Baracoda, producer of Bluetooth industrial devices. Leboyer holds an engineering degree from the Ecole Superieure d'Electricité in France and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He is co-author of Building Routes to Customers: Proven Strategies for Profitable Growth, and is a frequent contributor to www.concertonet.com, a website providing reviews of and information about classical music throughout the world.
After his engineering studies, he underwent mandatory Swiss military service. By the time he got out, his “specialty” had become obsolete so he went into sales at IBM. While not a classic place to nurture entrepreneurs, he enjoyed it tremendously during his early years. He learned a great deal, received (and recovered from) a lot of bruises, and discovered that the world was not as rational as he had thought.
After four years, he felt he had stopped learning and the classic IBM career path had lost its allure. He recalls at the age of 28 closing a huge 25 million CHF mainframe contract in 1989 (which would be today € 38 million) after four months of hard work. Despite the success he was thirsty for more autonomy and adventure than a big company like IBM could offer. As a next step, hedecided to apply to the Harvard Business School and took a two year leave of absence.
During a discussion in Harvard’s entrepreneurial finance course, someone said that anyone who wanted to be a software entrepreneur should first spend a couple of years at Microsoft. Instead, Leboyer went back to IBM Europe for several years (part of what he did there is detailed in his book) and left as soon as an opportunity opened up at Candle Corporation, which at the time was one of the three largest privately owned software companies in the world. He stayed a few years at Candle as the dot.com craze reached Europe, where his experiences led him to realize, that while he was not cut out to start a company, he could probably run one better than most founders.
With that in mind, Leboyer set off to buy a company. While doing some part-time consulting and co-authoring the above-mentioned book, he called tons of contacts, visited venture capitalists and private equity companies, and put out the word that he wanted to acquire a company. After visiting around 20 companies, he met the founder of GSX Solutions. GSX was in the same segment as Candle, which enabled him to quickly assess the company’s strengths and risks. For Leboyer, they were risks worth taking so he brought in a private equity partner and concluded the deal.
The biggest risk he saw was that the company founder made all the decisions—as is frequently the case with startups. He also was working 24/7 and was the sole source of technical support. Leboyer knew he had to move quickly to broaden the decision-making and assemble a technical support team critical to acquiring their target enterprise customers. It was a good thing he did, since the founder took all his decision-making and technical knowhow with him when he exited the company nine months later.
Leboyer’s advice to others seeking to replace a founder who is concentrating all the power in him or herself is: “Pick your battles, and go one step at a time in order to rise to the challenge of taking the company to the next level. This is a very delicate moment—you cannot solve everything and you cannot, nor should, do everything yourself. Nor can you share the burden with everybody, so quickly assess whom you can trust and delegate and build fast.”
In his case, Leboyer had to look at how to do marketing, product marketing, sales and support. His background was in sales so he could follow that up easily, and he had an estimated six-month window for product marketing. Pre- and post-sales support was critical, as no one but the founder had done it. His priorities were support, then product marketing, and finally sales and marketing.
Leboyer’s carefully planned transition strategy paid off despite the founder’s early departure and the souring business climate. One year after the founder’s departure he met some customers who were not even aware that there had been a change of management. He took their comments as an indicator that he was doing things right. Three years later, GSX’s legacy business is in good and stable shape. New investments are starting to pay off and GSX has released a suite of products for the new Microsoft collaboration “2010” architecture at the beginning of the year which is in production with many new customers worldwide, a much faster adoption than any previous GSX products and was finalist at the Best of TechEd 2012. Antoine Leboyer has also put the partnership as a key priority for the company. ###
About GSX Solutions
GSX Solutions is the global leader in proactive, consolidated monitoring, analysis, and management of enterprise collaboration and messaging environments, including Lotus Domino, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and BlackBerry Enterprise Server, as well as LDAP and SMTP ports, and any URL. GSX Solutions is Microsoft Systems Center Alliance Partner, Microsoft Silver Partner and a BlackBerry Alliance Elite Partner, providing automated server maintenance for Domino and Windows-based servers. Monitoring millions of mailboxes for over 600 global enterprises, GSX is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, with R&D in Nice, France, and offices in the UK and the US. For more information, please visit www.gsx.com.
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