Special kind of delivery

By ADAM GIFFORD

Linda Jenkinson has raised more than $368 million in venture capital over the past four years. She built up businesses providing employment for thousands of people. She went through the dotcom crash and survived.

And she learned that capital is not the most important thing an IT entrepreneur needs.

"I thought if you got the money you could build a company. I now believe you need culture and people, and money is something you put on top of that," says Jenkinson, who is back in New Zealand next week to talk at the Baycorp Advantage SmartNet workshop series about leading people and creating organisations.

"By creating culture, you have such a powerful thing for a company, setting out how people behave, what are the accepted norms."

It is not something many New Zealand IT companies would consider, but it is something Jenkinson learned the hard way as she watched her first successful start-up, courier company Dispatch Management Services (DMS), slip away from her.

Jenkinson was from a non-academic Manawatu farming family when she earned a degree in business studies and computer science at Massey University in the early 1980s.

"It was always my plan to do the entrepreneurial thing. I did my degree thinking I was going to work in the corporate world for three years, then build my own company, but I did really well and stayed in that world longer than anticipated," says Jenkinson from the downtown San Francisco office of her present company, Les Concierges.

She became a consultant with PriceWaterhouse, working on several major projects, including a review of the Databank payment-clearing system.

That led to her first major entrepreneurial success, based on a discovery that an efficient same-day courier service was a key part of the banking system and New Zealand had some of the highest-service, lowest-cost couriers in the world.

"We took some of the programmers who had worked on Databank and wrote some systems for these courier companies," says Jenkinson.

What she was looking for was a way to take a services business and give it scale.

After moving to the United States to do an MBA at the prestigious Wharton business school in Philadelphia, Jenkinson worked for consulting firm AT Kearney, becoming a partner in six years.

In 1997 she left to put her ideas for the courier business into action, forming and listing Dispatch Management Services with business partner Greg Kidd.

DMS bought up courier companies across the US, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, using the New Zealand-designed software and methods to improve productivity.

But as it grew, factions developed and Jenkinson witnessed what she says was appalling behaviour from people she had made into millionaires.

"When we grew, the bigger culture subsumed us."

In 1999 she left DMS to create a dotcom company, iSaySo, using the internet to provide a new twist to the growing personal services industry. The company offered members - the employees or customers of large companies, banks or investment firms - services such as shopping assistance, restaurant reservations, gift recommendations and procurement, and information research.

Two years later she escaped the dotcom crash by merging with a well-established concierge firm, Les Concierges.

Jenkinson says iSaySo's smart agent technology means Les Concierges now has much greater reach, and can access 30,000 suppliers of services or products while only having 80 staff in 22 cities.

"If you want front-seat tickets to the Rolling Stones, or to play a round at the Masters golf course in Atlanta, we can arrange it.

"About 20 per cent of the business is travel, 20 per cent is tickets and entertainment, 20 per cent dining, 20 per cent general service and 20 per cent anything you can think of," Jenkinson says.

Member numbers have increased from 500,000 to 3 million, and Jenkinson expects to pass the 7 million member mark by the end of next year.

"We are in the business of making people feel special, based on proprietary technology."

Jenkinson says the dotcom crash and the fallout from the September 11 terrorist attacks, when corporate America stopped making decisions for 18 months, taught some tough lessons.

"In the US, one day you may have one set of business rules, a week later the rules may be different. And you have to go back to employees, to customers, to creditors and convince them it is a new world and they must change, and it is a really good deal.

"I have become really good at doing that."