About Ric McLaughlin

My first love was building application software. I thought I would never find any work I liked better… until I saw a website. Now, websites are all I want to work on.

I find websites that sell things, generate leads, support sales channels and service customers the most compelling thing to happen to business since.. well, ever.

I find websites that get folks to interact in ways we could have never imagined a couple of years ago simply amazing.

And the stuff that makes websites and Internet systems work is the most fun, challenging and rewarding to figure out, design and development.

I can’t wait to see what super cool thing we will think to do with Internet technology next. Yeah, I guess I am bit geeky.

That said, there isn’t anything I would rather do professionally than lead a group of smart folks making effective websites that solve big business problems. And that is what I have been doing since it was possible to make a website solve a big problem.

How did I get here? Checkout the highlights:

• I worked as a development manager in the ACT! group at Symantec. We released 8 major versions of ACT! on the Mac, palmtop, DOS and Windows platforms and during this time ACT! garnered over 50 industry awards while selling over 2.5 million licenses.
• In 1995, I was one of the first 10 people worldwide to earn both the Microsoft Certified Solution Developer and Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer certifications.
• During the Internet boom, I ran a 60 person web development consulting practice for a portal/infrastructure product company. My team delivered over 142,000 consulting hours for Compaq, Ziff-Davis, Apple, Minolta, StorageTech, Motorola and others with 100% client reference-ability. My team delivered over 20 website projects from start to finish over a 3 year period as sales increased from $600K to 9.5M per year.
• While in consulting management, I developed an agile project management methodology called The SMART Way. The SMART Way was a deliverable-based methodology developed expressly for website consulting projects which used iterative requirements, design, and construction phases.
• I led a small IT shop and web team that developed an e-commerce site selling configure-to-order PCs, a build-to-order manufacturing ERP system and hosting infrastructure within sight of the Dell factory in Austin. (funny how the Internet frenzy made anything seem possible). IDOT.com was acquired specifically for the website and manufacturing capability developed by my team and me.
• I ran the IT group at a SaaS website personalization company with 99.999% uptime requirements and got within one 9 of meeting them. That last 9 is very difficult to achieve.
• At NetIQ, I ran the Webtrends.com & NetIQ.com websites with a total of 50 products and 5000 pages of content. I architected and my web team implemented e-commerce, single sign-on/access control, online training, leads management, content management, partner portal, localization, product support, web services, messaged-based system integration and we monitored the whole thing using WebTrends live. We also put up some good numbers: Registered website users rose from 0 to 375,000 and system availability went from daily crashes to 99.99% uptime.
• At NetIQ, I also ran the internet marketing group. We used email marketing, display advertising, SEO, directory marketing, article submission marketing, a data warehouse, and measured the results with WebTrends analytics. We collected leads and ran campaigns using an in-house developed landing page/campaign management system, which I conceived, and my web dev team developed. Our group scaled marketing campaigns rose from 20 to 170 per quarter resulting in a rise in our sales leads from 900 to 27,000 per quarter. Our marketing database increased from 0 to 600,000 names.
• I have done extensive development and management consulting with clients including Motorola, Symantec, Sony, Mission Critical Software, eCustomers and numerous other startups
• My current professional certifications include Microsoft Certified Profession in .NET, Sun Java Certified Associate (SJCA) and Project Management Professional (PMP) from the Project Management Institute.

For the last 4+ years I have been a stay at home dad supporting my wife and kids. My wife Donna is a US Navy physician and we live in Sasebo Japan. I spend a lot of time hanging out with my two kids (Lana - 2 & Perin – 5), and most early mornings writing articles for this website. We will be returning to the Seattle WA area in September 2008 and I will return to the working world.