Coming Out of the Shadows

What Nelson plans to contribute to the business world is no small thing. Visible Customer is poised to change the way commerce is done in the 21st century, he says, just as Carlson Companies did in the previous one.

“My grandfather is really the patriarch of all this.” Nelson waves around the interior of his office. “His genius was that he created a point of opportunity and built a customer-vendor relationship with that. But what we’re doing here is a further variation on the concept of loyalty. And the opportunity is immense.

“We’re highly committed to auto dealers, but there’s no doubt our philosophies will someday apply to every vertical business,” he continues. Traditional marketing will die out. Only data mining and targeted marketing that builds on precisely what customers need and want—sometimes before they know they need or want it—will succeed.

Transforming commerce is a lofty goal, and even Visible Customer’s goals for 2009 could be a stretch given the state of the auto industry. The company has 51 employees now, but intends to have about 92 by year’s end. It also projects revenues of $57 million for the year, up from $8 million in 2008, when it focused less on selling its services and more on rescaling the business.

Stapleton has launched more than a dozen start-ups over the past 30 years, including Coordinated Management Systems, a data mining and data warehousing business that he says was acquired by A. C. Nielsen in the late 1970s. More recently, from 2003 to 2005, he was CEO of Texas-based Who’s Calling, a firm with technology that enables companies to capture customer data from sales and service calls to increase the effectiveness of their marketing—a concept with similarities to Visible Customer’s. Who’s Calling also had large auto dealership groups among its clients.

Now Visible Customer’s chairman, Stapleton met Nelson when they were both investors in a local data-matching software company called IX Match. When they began talking about Visible Customer together, Stapleton acknowledges that he had some worries.

“I had heard all the stories about Curtis and Carlson, and to be honest, I was concerned when we first got together,” he says. “But he has a sense of process and scaling that in all my career I’ve never seen. He took a model that we’d proved with about 150 dealers and rebuilt it so it can service thousands.” Visible Customer currently works with 200 dealer-customers. “Curtis is genuinely smart,” Stapleton adds. “He thinks his way through a situation. And he’s brought in a team of people that are world class.”

Those include the company’s chief information officer, Scott Heintzeman, who came from Carlson Companies, and chief operating officer Siamak Masoudi, who has worked with Carlson, Yum Brands, and Lexco Hospitality. Also vital to the company’s growth will be the 10 software developers on staff, who continue to build on Visible Customer’s internally developed and proprietary technology platform.