It's been a while since I've posted on this blog. I've been busy restarting various business units. I'm using that term loosely because it's been my rallying call here in Manila during my stay on this trip.

You see, we recently moved into a new office in the Philippines and significantly ramped up our staff. We have put a much stronger back office in place to support the various business units and in doing so, have modified much of the way we do business in the broker, auction, development and loan departments of our various companies.

I keep telling the new employees that we aren't a startup because we've been here for years but we also aren't business as usual. Welcome to a restartup.

Here are just a few of the changes we are making. Naturally, I can't tell you about all of them because of competitive spying eyes.

RickLatona.com -This is our broker department. It runs our incredibly popular Daily Domains newsletter. It started a couple of years ago with me simply emailing well-known buyers asking them if they wanted to buy any of my names. It now rarely has any of my own names and has become a force in the industry for domainers looking for a quick turn of cash and buyers looking for bargains on nice names.

I think we've all noticed the trend in industry focused domain auctions. Our competitors are all doing it and we've even started doing it as I'll talk about below. So why not do it in the newsletter as well?

Last week we ran a test selling "i" and "e" domains like ichick.com, istockbroker.com, etc, etc. It went well. So we announced a sports theme for this week and got off to a good start yesterday. Next week will be GEO domains and so forth. If you think about it, it isn't hard to come up with 52 themes that can be run in a year.

I like this approach because it is easier to focus on targeting the buyers. Here in Manila we are putting a large sales force in place to hammer end-users and scout for buyers.

We are also testing our new broker landing pages. See www.vino.com or www.database.com for an example. Soon we'll have individual mini-affiliate programs for each and every name under agreement. More on that at a later date.

Other technological improvements are in the mail like a click to buy feature and some super secret stuff I can't go into.

Rick Latona Auctions - This, obviously, is our auction department. Let's separate the conversation into two departments

Live Auctions - Much has been written about our deal with Rick Shwartz and Howard Neu. It was a landmark one for sure. The end result being that RLA is the exclusive auction company at TRAFFIC shows. We'll have 6 shows in 2010, at strategic locations around the world.

This will require nothing less than a super human effort to pull off well. Fortunately, we are up to the task. Our initial concentration is on New York however and Rick, Howard and I will be announcing an exciting line-up of speakers very soon. We'll be bringing in top talent from different but related industries for the first time ever.

On the auction front, similar to the brokerage department we are ramping up our sales force in both the Philippines and home in Atlanta. Believe me when I tell you that you don't want to see our Fed Ex bill from all the packages that have been sent to CEOs of major corporations that might be interested in bidding on these premium names.

Online Auctions - The work has begun on our own internal platform. It's obviously needed both for competitive reasons and simply to save money. Using third party software in the auction business is simply too expensive and we need something designed from the ground up for the domain business.

Our goal is to have something in place by the New York TRAFFIC event. Clearly it would be too risky to use something untested in a live environment such as this so our live auction will be on the same third party platform as we've always used. The extended auction which begins right after the live auction will be the first on our new platform.

By the time our January TRAFFIC show gets here, we'll have what is sure to be a stable, fast and reliable system ready to run in the live event.

For those of you concerned, I'd just like to point out that this isn't my first rodeo in complex software development. We have a reasonable sized team of excellent Java developers and we are building this system like a proper enterprise.

We've also started our own monthly themed auctions. They won't be exactly monthly as we move into 2010 because we don't want them to compete with our live auctions. They'll most likely be every other month or 6 live and 6 online auctions per year.

Our themes are going to be a little different. We are going to try and follow the money. If an industry is making money online they are likely to buy names. That's our simple theory in a nutshell. That's why we are focusing on the CPA/Lead Generation business at the moment because those companies are bringing home the cash.

AEIOU.com and Web Development - Perhaps the business unit with the most immediate change is AEIOU.com. The changes we are making everywhere else require time, capital investment and technology. One the web design front we are seeing immediate improvements, much of which is hard to explain.

I suppose the easy way to get the point across is that we have more of a team to work on projects, more management to oversee the quality of the work done and more efficient management of the projects to help keep both our costs down as well as the prices we need to charge our customers. It's all under-the-hood type of stuff that you won't see, you'll just know it is there.

DigiPawn and DigiLoan - Loaning money on domains and advancing cash on domains is tricky business. Fortunately, over the years, we've been very shrewd on these investments. There have been times where my customers haven't been happy with the amount I was willing to loan or advance but I sure am glad I did things the way I did. Our default ratio is very low and our customer retention is very high.

At the risk of sounding a little egotistic it is important to point out that I invented the business. Since 2003 we have been putting money on the streets using domains as collateral, a full 3 years before our closest competitor.

Changes in this business must come slow and carefully or it can put everything at risk. Earlier this year we launched DigiLoan.com and it has been a hit, primarilly for people financing purchased names from our newsletters and auctions. These services will be more tightly integrated in due time but the core of the model won't change much.
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That's about all I have (or can) report at the moment. Exciting things are sure to come. If only I could tell you guys about Project X.