The Way I Work: Bob Parsons, Go Daddy
Bob Parsons, founder of Go Daddy, the world’s largest domain name registrar, has the flexibility to do what he fancies.
Brandon Sullivan
EARLY RIDER Here's Bob Parsons of Go Daddy in his work clothes. He says he does his best thinking on a motorcycle at dawn.
MORE EXPOSURE After Go Daddy's first Super Bowl spot, it kept pushing the envelope. Last year's ad was submitted 10 times before being approved by the network
Being outrageous seems to work just fine for Bob Parsons. He's the founder of Go Daddy, the world's largest domain-name registrar, which manages more than 32 million domain names for some six million customers worldwide. He launched the company in 1997, three years after selling his first business, a software company, to Intuit for $64 million. Go Daddy, which has annual revenue of about $350 million, now employs more than 2,000, most of whom work near the company's headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona. As the sole owner, Parsons, a 58-year-old former Marine who won a Purple Heart for his service in Vietnam, has the flexibility to do what he fancies. He typically spends his days traipsing around in motorcycle gear, shopping for rifles online, and brazenly stirring up controversy.
I'm usually up by 4:30 or 5 in the morning. I'm happiest at sunrise, when it's just me and the birds. I have a cup of coffee and then take my Ducati Multistrada for a ride. I got my license two years ago, and now I have 18 bikes and I own two dealerships. I use this time in the morning to clear my head. I try not to think about business, though I do occasionally come up with an idea. I try to be in the moment.
After my ride, I go back home and have a light breakfast -- an omelet stuffed with vegetables, sometimes a side of bacon -- and then try to work out before checking on the business. I used to be a runner -- I ran a couple of marathons before I blew out my knee. Now, I lift weights, and I take four doses of glucosamine a day. As you get older, your cartilage gets tougher, and glucosamine keeps it pliable. If you run and don't take it, you're a knucklehead.
After I work out, I spend time in my home office. I read e-mail and check my blog for comments and post replies. Then, depending on my mood, my day varies. Sometimes, I'll work from home until lunch; other days, I'll just ride my motorcycle to the office, maybe stopping by my dealerships in Scottsdale to check on things. A lot of times, I'll just work in my motorcycle gear, and since I've been hit twice, that means kneepads, a steel-plated leather jacket, and boots.
At my office, I'm almost never behind my desk. I have this cafeteria-style conference table, which I bought for $90 years ago, and a dozen or so chairs. That's where I am most of the day, meeting with my staff. A few folks complained that the chairs were cheap and ugly, and they're right. But they convey the right attitude: functional and cheap. You don't spend your money on office furniture -- you spend it where it's going to impact your customers.
I manage everything from the 57-inch monitor that hangs from the ceiling in my office, which I can access with a wireless keyboard and mouse. I have it set to Go Daddy's home page, and there's a program we created that tracks our current market share and how many domain names we register each day. We register about one every second. The names show up on that screen in real time, like a ticker tape. It's always on, so I can refer to it throughout the day. I can tell at a glance what's going right or wrong.
People are in and out of my office all day. Some have scheduled appointments, and others just pop in. From time to time, I will call an executive staff meeting, but those are rarely scheduled. I expect my staff to be nimble and adaptable.
People often say to me, "You must be a really busy guy!" Actually, I'm not. I can make time anytime I want, and there's a reason for that: I accomplish everything through other people. That gives me a tremendous bandwidth. And then, when I want to get away -- which I do often -- everybody who works with and for me knows how to handle things, so it doesn't matter if I'm here or not. It shows trust. I'm here to counsel, not preempt. But I'm not soft: If somebody's not doing the job, they're gone. Now, that said, the most junior person on my executive staff has been with me six years.
When I am in the office, I never go out for lunch. It just seems like a waste of time. I think it's been more than a year since I've been to lunch with anybody. I eat in my office every day. My assistant usually orders sashimi: Sea urchin is my favorite. I also have an energy drink, Java Monster or sometimes Redline, which I keep stocked in the mini fridge next to my desk.
I spend a good chunk of my day thinking about advertising -- that's where I see the biggest impact on our bottom line. We currently run about 500 ads a week on cable and network TV. I track these ads every day with software we developed, which looks at site traffic and customer conversions. We can determine how effective an ad was within minutes after it runs. We yank the ads that don't work and increase those that do.
We started making commercials in 2005. Back then, we had about 16 percent market share, and I couldn't understand why. We had better rates than our competitors and top-notch customer service. I hired a marketing research firm, which talked with our competitors' customers. Turns out, no one knew we existed. I decided to advertise nationally, and the Super Bowl was coming up. I thought, That would be a hell of a debut, but how do I get a bunch of drunk people's attention? If we explained what we do, we'd be dead in the water. So then I thought, Be outrageous. It doesn't take Harvard Business School to figure that one out.
The Go Daddy girl was my idea. I told the ad agency, "I want a really well-endowed, good-looking gal in a tight T-shirt, with our name right across her breasts." We did a nationwide casting, and then the agency called me and said, "Bob, we just found your next ex-wife." At that point I had been divorced once -- for the record, my second ex-wife was not a Go Daddy girl. We did a parody of the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction. We bought two slots, but there was such an uproar, the network yanked the second one. I was doing interviews for days. The media called the ad inappropriate, which got even more traffic to our site. Our market share shot up to 25 percent, and my mother's very proud that I've established a standard for indecency in broadcasting.
