Transition and expansion at Boise’s Balihoo

Two years ago, Pete Gombert decided that the Boise marketing firm he founded in 2004, Balihoo, was absorbing too much of his life. He’d logged long hours building his startup into a 75-employee firm with national clients such as Wendy’s and New Balance. Revenues were growing by more than 20 percent per year.

Gombert notified his board that he was phasing himself out as CEO. That gradual process was made public with Gombert’s Sept. 10 post on his LinkedIn account, “Why I left the job it took me 10 years to create.”

Gombert wrote that the company had grown larger than he’d dreamed in 2004. He said he’d intended to sell Balihoo several years after its founding, but plans changed and he rededicated himself to keeping the company afloat during the Great Recession at the expense of his wife and two children, who are now 14 and 12.

“Balihoo got the best of me, and my family got what was left over,” he wrote. “… I will have the chance to build another great company, but I will never again have a chance to raise my kids and be fully present while doing so.”

Gombert started the company in 2004 with $200,000 of his own money. At that time, the company’s product was a search engine allowing businesses to find advertising venues. After receiving $1.5 million in venture capital in 2007 and another $4 million in early 2008, the recession hit, and many of Balihoo’s clients went belly-up.

In response, Gombert cut staff from 75 to 40 and decided to abandon the search engine – the fruit of the company’s first four years – and refocus on writing the kind of ad automation software that has returned the company to growth.

The company raised another $5 million in funding in 2012. Gombert started looking to expand his company’s presence east of Boise.

Too many balls were in the air for Gombert to leave. The company was launching a new platform that expanded the company’s marketing from traditional outlets into the digital realm, allowing national clients to launch campaigns in each of their local markets. The company’s post-search engine software allows clients such as Aflac, which has 60,000 insurance agents spread across the country, to perform marketing specific to each agent in a local market using cloud-based tools that automate local email and direct-mailing campaigns and buying banner ads viewed by Web users nearby.

The company was also preparing to create a home for some Chicago-based employees by opening an office. It opened last month.

The biggest piece of the transition was replacing Gombert. Balihoo found its new CEO in Dave Oliveira. Oliveira had been at Mediaocean, a 750-employee company based in New York City that he says is the largest provider of software solutions for advertising agencies. Oliveira oversaw 50 employees in a division called mbuy.com, which worked with selling media to ad agencies.

Previously, Oliveira worked for five years at Yahoo!, where he sold online ads.

Oliveira said he took the Balihoo CEO job because he was intrigued by the company’s direction.

“A software platform to allow local automation was interesting to me,” he says. “Pete and I were looking at a partnership, and that’s how we got to know each other.”

The Chicago office will place Balihoo closer to many of its clients and to Starcom MediaVest Group, a new partner and the largest media buyer in the country, Oliveira says. Up to a dozen employees will work in the Chicago office. Oliveira, who was living in Chicago, said he’ll split time but spend most of his time in Boise.

“The Chicago office is a natural progression, but we’re focused on Boise,” Oliveira says. “The majority of our employees live in Boise, and that will continue to be the case. We have five or six positions open in Boise. Boise is still really important.”

Gombert remains involved in the business as board chairman. He’s on a year-long trip around the world with his family and was recently in a small English town near Oxford.

You can follow his adventures at takingalap.com/ourjourney.