Prior to starting Active, I spent many years in the corporate world. While I realized the successes that went hand-in-hand with working my way up the corporate ladder, I also realized that I didn’t enjoy the bureaucracy that went along with it.

I didn’t want politics and I didn’t want bureaucracy. I wanted to innovate and drive growth through innovation, which we did. But then I found something else: the very thing I wanted to escape from, politics and bureaucracy, I created on my own!

I never wanted Active to be more than a one-floor company. Today, we have five floors, and each floor is like a different world. And so, you do create the politics and the bureaucracy.

But it’s a kinder, gentler politics. What makes it a little more gentle is that we decided, about 10 years ago, to sell a percentage of the company to the employees, so we’re an ESOP company. We try to do the right thing with people and we also give back to the community.

In my corporate life, I ended up feeling limited in my ability to be creative and decided I wanted to focus my career on driving growth through innovation. My vision was to develop an organization that was entrepreneurial, nimble; a cutting-edge organization built on innovation and creativity. In looking at the marketplace, I saw an opportunity in corporate trade.

Because I came out of the media side of the business, I had great confidence in being able to create trade deals with media providers here in the United States and around the world. When we came on the scene 26 years ago, we were number 34 out of 34 corporate trading companies. We were the last guy on the block.

Today, there are just a handful of our original competitors still in business. I believe our longevity is based on the one core concept that remains fundamental to our business: delivering measurable value to our clients and making sure they’re able to retire trade credits.

There are manufacturers and service companies everywhere that, for one reason or another, have excess assets. It could be due to a packaging change, seasonality, the economy or a host of other reasons that impact businesses every day. But the bottom line is that these assets are only worth about 20 cents on the dollar.

The assets we acquire fall into four asset categories: consumer product, real estate, capital equipment, receivables and bad debt. Each one of those asset classifications has excess assets.

That’s important, but it’s the solution that really matters. We sit down with the client, work our way through the issues and come up with a solution.

At its simplest, Active buys the asset for its full wholesale value and issues the client a trade credit, which our client uses to purchase products and services through us.

These are products and services they would be planning on purchasing anyway — such as media, travel, freight, event planning and retail marketing. Instead of paying 100 percent cash, they buy through Active, using their trade credit to offset some of their cash costs.

Our clients realize the full wholesale value of their excess assets as they use their trade credits, which is why having the infrastructure — a way to use the trade credits — is so important. If there’s no infrastructure, ultimately the client doesn’t receive the value they were promised. This is why so many of those original companies are no longer in business. They didn’t have a scalable way for their clients to use trade credits.

Active’s products and services are available globally and we service clients from our 11 international offices. We offer all forms of media: electronic, print, out-of-home, newspaper and digital, and place more than $1 billion in media on behalf of our clients annually.

We also have a robust retail-marketing offering, which we consider another form of media. It includes everything from shopper marketing and strategy to the execution of displays and fixtures.

We also provide individual business travel and event planning services as well as truck, ocean and air freight. Of course, we’re always looking ahead to develop innovative new products that will enable our clients to accelerate their use of trade credits so that they recognize value as soon as possible.

We use our ingenuity, from a financial or marketing solutions standpoint, to find a way to dispose of the underperforming asset. We’re a consultant to the client, but one who not only gives a report but also executes on what we identify. Consultants don’t execute. We do.

One of our goals is to retire trade credits for our clients while delivering measurable results. This is where our creativity comes in to play. What’s particularly rewarding is sitting down with a potential client, getting a full understanding of their business challenges and the goals they are trying to achieve. We strategize together on how our model can best help them achieve these goals, and then we execute what we’ve agreed to.

For example, we have a client who had real estate, a former supermarket location that had closed. They needed to sell this property but had no buyers. Active purchased the property at their target value in exchange for a commitment to place an agreed-upon amount of media for the client as well as their selected vendors.

Through this media placement and the purchase process, Active was able to provide real-estate services at no incremental cost to the client.

This example also illustrates the way we work with our clients’ partners. Our goal isn’t to replace a longstanding relationship, but to work together to help our clients’ businesses. In some cases, our clients use their assets as a way to fund new programs. So, if they have a limited media budget, they can use their inventory as a way to increase their budget without using cash. This is a value-add that’s impactful and measurable to our clients and their brands.

Not every idea is going to work, but our employees are given the freedom to explore new ideas and opportunities. It’s a culture where there is flexibility and the ability to participate in creating value.

In our earlier days, we were transactional, and that was good for us then. Today it’s all about relationships. We’re focused on creating relationships and trusted partnerships, not only with our clients, but also with our clients’ partners. We analyze our clients’ issues within their industry and come up with solutions, using technology and smarts, that aren’t just about the execution.

By the way, Active has worked on developing relationships with advertising agencies and helping them understand the value of corporate trade. Some of them have now decided to enter into our space, which further validates the industry as a whole.

The economy and the recession have caused CEOs to look at their businesses from a much different perspective. Active is no exception; as a company we are working harder and smarter. We remain committed to understanding our clients’ needs and developing solutions that work for them. We are focused on long-term relationships, not a one-time transaction.

Through gathering and collecting information and analyzing it, everyone ends up looking smarter. We’re
a thinking company and it’s all about how we expand our clients’ businesses. We are constantly thinking about how to benefit our clients — and how to have fun doing that.

Even after all this time, I’m still passionate about this business. Our vision, which began as a dream, has come to life, and I couldn’t be more excited about the possibilities for our industry and for Active.