Spare Backup CEO switch coming

Lost Emails

This resulted in the main business becoming the Conga video-conferencing product. Then Cery Perle found all his emails had been lost due to some computer system error, and there was no backup. He asked his tech staff to develop an automated and very easy to use backup process to stop that ever happening again.

The result was Spare Backup, and it looked so promising that a subsidiary was set up to develop it. That looked so good that the subsidiary was merged back into  Newport, which changed it's name to Spare Backup. The service was launched in Match 2005 and the Conga product was discontinued. All this is a long, long way from real-estate.

Five years later Spare Backup has accumulated debts of a hundred million dollars or so and needs somehow to step on the gas and accelerate its revenues big time. Step forward Stephen Meyer. Cery Perle has recognized that a different skill set is needed for Spare Backup to progress.

Enter Stephen Meyer

The company is traded as a penny stock and is, it appears, greatly under-capitalized. It has an incredible geographic skew in its sales which shows that the service has legs that could run back home in the USA. That's the key, isn't it? Succeeding in the USA is important, which means sales channel development and more cost there.

It can't cut costs to get a profit out of current revenues because that would kill the business. For Spare Backup the choices are expansion in revenues or death. For the expansion to be possible requires funding and that requires investors, or an acquiring company, to believe in the Spare Backup proposition, service, roadmap and distribution channel.

Who is Stephen Meyer and why is Spare Backup trying to get him on board? He is a managing partner at TechFund Capital, managing investments in portfolio companies and helping them in early stage development. He's been engaged as a consultant to Spare Backup to help it deal with the current debt/revenue imbalance and the board liked what it heard so much it decided Meyer was the man to run the company.

While consulting he is focused on capital formation, strategy, product development and go-to-market initiatives. He says he's looking forward to  working with Cery Perle and the others at Spare Backup "to achieve break-even, then profitability and, ultimately success as the leader in the automated online backup sector and cloud services". Good luck Superman, and don't forget the Kryptonite. ®