Investment Banking Case Study For Service Businesses December/2005 Update   by Nadir Burnashev Dear Mr. Evoy, Since discovering SiteSell.com and SBI! and firing expensive outside designers to build our Web site, you can hardly believe how well matters have gone. If you remember, from when I first wrote to you, our site soon surpassed the ratings of our local competitors. And by three months after the launch, it had higher ratings than the National Bank, and Ministry of Finance of Kazakhstan, or even the state television agency, Khabar. And we saved both time and money, too! We are the proof that SBI! has no boundaries, as the Internet itself, and it has the potential to win the new markets, as the good and successful product. Big companies who are not happy with their results from the World Wide Web, should buy SBI! and give it to the smartest young person (not a tech or designer) and watch for the results to come. If we have done it here in Kazakhstan, everyone else can do it. And now let me update you since then. December/2005 Update First, let me apologize. It's been quite a while since I last time wrote to you. I do read your ezines -- they are the only material I need to stay up-to-date. And I follow the forums, too (when I have any free time). That's to say that I stay engaged and committed. :) Let me briefly update you on the developments with myself, our company and our site. 1) Personal update I became General Director of Kazkommerts Securities. I've been extremely busy running business, getting new clients, increasing revenues, traveling etc for the rest of 2004. The company has finished 2004 with good results. To make the life merrier for the financial sector, by the end of 2004 Kazakh Agency on Supervision passed amendments to the financial legislation aiming to split the investment banking from the brokerage activities. After drinking champaign on the New Year Eve and getting short vacation afterwards I reorganized the company. By end-April 2005 the reorganization was over. The part of the company with brokerage activities went to the headquarters of Kazkommertsbank, which is 100% shareholder now. And the part of the company with investment banking and corporate finance remained in the original office and became Meridian Securities Kazakhstan-an asset management company of Kazkommerts group in Kazakhstan. I remain with the latter one. Now I am General Director of Meridian Securities Kazakhstan. I guess this also updates on the company. 2) Website update The site needed very little extra work. It keeps working well (that is, we were first in the search engines on the target words, SBI works like a charm). Also, I didn't have much time for more site development after I became the boss. So the best part is that the site stays visible to the investor community in Kazakhstan and abroad, even if we don't have much time to add to it now. Fantastic. Much of our income is derived from serving large domestic corporate clients and direct investments. Those activities don't require informational websites for foreign investors. Despite this we used the site for client development and company external publicity. In the absence of man-power and free time what I did was the following. A former student clipped and gathered the news and information on Kazakhstan from a variety of sources and then sent it by email once a day. We used SBI!'s e-zine mailout to send this Kazkommerts Securities business digest weekly at no cost to the company subscribers. We archive the back issues to our Web site. This was it! The internet surfer who landed at the site's main page was asked to subscribe for Kazakhstan Business Digest, and leave his name and email. Then he started receiving the regular newsletter once a week. Results? It became the largest electronic business digest on Kazakhstan in the world! Now we have over 5,000 active subscribers in the database. I met with many people who told me that Kazakhstan business digest was their favorite and authoritative reading on Kazakhstan. Particularly it went well with subscribers who were senior management and decision makers. It was short (4 pages max), sent weekly, had a clear mission (""KZ-NEWS delivers essential news and information on the economy of Kazakhstan once a week directly to your mailbox. It takes only 30 minutes of your time a week to brief you on the developments in Kazakhstan.""), and well-structured format and content. Unbelievable, given our limited investments into the enterprise! But it has won over many paid-in specialized sources and government official publications. It was helpful in closing a major deal, bringing large institutional investors and insurers together. To my great surprise, they informed me that they followed Kazakhstan for the last two years and one of the main information sources was our business digest! If fact, this was their essential reading once a week, because they covered so many countries and regions that they had no spare time except for this weekly reading. I don't think you ever intended SBI! to cause deals worth this much to happen, but it did. Of course I don't think that our digest was the major driver in the deal, but it definitely helped., Even at our "big business" level, PREselling is important. The digest helped by providing the information on the country and reducing political risks threshold for the foreign businesses. Our $300 investment in SBI! site has paid for itself many, many times over, but this case would certainly go for the winner. In a throat-cutting fiercely competitive business, which investment banking is, what counts at the end of the day is the completed deals. As they say, "earthquakes don't count, deals do." The clients pay us only because we bring them money. And that's precisely what you do for your clients! With passion for your product and with respect for your customers. Mr. Evoy, SiteSell has accomplished a lot during this year and your product now stands clearly out of the crowd. In fact, reading your newsletters sometimes I think that SBI has become the Maserati of online marketing. Like a Maserati, the more you accept the car and learn to drive it on its terms, the faster you go. As a result, you (and I, therefore) are miles ahead of the competition. Thank you and with best regards, Nadir Burnashev General Director Meridian Securities Kazakhstan http://www.kazakhstaninvestment.com email: nburnashev@msk.kz Back to original case study     Close Window