Kisamura - yes I would keep him for now, and heres why. Steven had, and still has the vision and the gift of gab. So he has always been the perfect startup CEO IMO. What has always been lacking is the execution, the expense management and a board that can actually help the company get business.
That said, you do not begin making changes at the CEO level here IMO. You leave Stevven as the Marketing face of the company and you bring in a COO who can run Wave day-to-day. The COO is the internal CEO in most companies anyway, while the CEO (in startups) remains as the visionary face of the company until they cross-the-chasm so to speak. They have not done that yet IMO. They have chased the evolution of the technology,instead of focusing on growing and managing the business.
You can't have a CEO who is in perpetual seminar, dinner and relationship management mode run the business day-to-day. But again, IMO he is the perfect face for this franchise at present. Now, you take the board on an individual basis and you ask yourself and the company the follwoing, What has each individual done to help this company grow?" They have left Steven in place, so they haven't done anything there. The business has made a great deal of OEM relationships, but the margins get immediately eroded, and the bread and butter for Wave -- the enterprise seats never get turned on. So how well (really) has the board performed in bringing tangible guidance and business to Wave? Not a whole lot I would argue.
Now, if the board has brought real, tangible opportunities to Wave, and Wave as a technology company has failed to impress ... and all we have is the word of Steven here that the pipeline has grown steadily over the past few years, but the revenues haven't ... so why is that? To continue the thought ... if the board has brought potential business to the table, and Wave has failed to impress, then I don't think you see everyone on the board hanging around wasting their time with Wave. You don't want to be on the board of a failing company any more than you want to be the CEO of a failing company. So if Wave has under-impressed, then I as a shareholder have been fed a bunch of misguided forward-looking statements that avoid a simple truth --- that no one wants the technology.
that said, I don't believe no one wants it. I believe that all are interested, and something is missing here that a board should be able to help decipher. If it's got every OEM signed this means something. Maybe not much, because everything is optional and as soon as volumes increase, the price per unit shipped decreases. So I don't believe (still) that this is a must-have solution for many. The only problem here is that I don't why it is not, because Steven himself can't even tell me. So that leaves me with the board.
Oh - don't get me wrong, Steven is a close second out the door if things don't improve IMO, but we shouldn't start with him. We should start by sending Wave a strong message. And that message is:
1. We don't know why you're not growing revenues and the bullshit conference calls that always look to the future as a bright, coming-soon days never happen. Either tell us why or we're going to start demanding changes. Education is no longer an excuse!
2. Board - if you're not going to take the necessary actions to grow shreholder value, then we are going to. And that starts by getting rid of any/all dead weight on the board. Either help us, and show us how you're helping us, or get out!
3. Steven - time to stop the forward looking statements and the fluff of tomorrow and focus on today. If you need to continue what you're doing to grow relationships and get opportunities (pipeline) in the door, then get someone (COO) to run the day-to-day, and help you provide better information to your shareholders. If you don't want to state gloom and doom on a quarterly call with shareholders - that's understandable. But when does shareholder value become important? Why isn't it already? What if you could lose your job if it wasn't? And finally, to disarm you before you levy your typical BS response that this is a journey, and the shareholders can''t be the priority right now ... I simply believe the shareholders and the delivery of value to your clients, prospects and partners are not mutually exclusive! If you are delivering value (not just an optional add-on nice to have) to them, then you shuld be delivering value to us as shareholders by now in the form of growing revenues, customer base and shareholder value.
So my long-winded response is that I don't believe we start with Steven ... since we've done nothing else to date to send any strong message. A strong messge to Steven and the board would be to start with the board, and then move to Steven. If Steven truely believes that growing shareholder value had to take a back seat to education, development and reverse stock splits since 2005 when he first began saying that we are now a sales driven company, then the time has arrived to let him know that this can no longer continue to be true. Show us progress or we start voting for change. It can't get any worse really. We're at less than 75 cent share price. We made or reported less rcently than we did the year before. This isn't my idea of great technology being tried by a growing pipeline. This screams bad product, bad execution, or bad support.
Which is it? I want to see what Steven can do when his seat heats up. right now, the sense of urgency doesn't seem to be there. Let's see how he performs once he knows it is there. If he can't cope, then he's next
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