Dave Hardy
Founder & CEO
ShowSeeker
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-hardy-3973b4

What are three attributes that got you where you are now?

1. Love what you do! Approach each day with a passion for excellence. When you get up every morning and love what you do, hard work and long hours really don’t present themselves as “just work”; rather, the experience is the peaks and valleys on a long journey to an outstanding, rewarding outcome. I have always had a genuine passion for improving customers’ lives by eliminating the inefficiencies I encountered in the ad sales business model when I started in sales several decades ago. You get much happier customers if you can improve workflows and elevate the user experience. Happier customers are your best referrals, which lead to a robust, growing customer base. Designing workflows that create efficiencies and save time satisfies the decision-making C-suite, who ultimately pays the bills.

2. Don’t Settle. I am unwilling to accept less than “A” player effort and dedication from my team. My staff knows that I understand that people make mistakes, and I don’t ask for perfection. Perfection is a very low standard because it is fleeting and impossible to maintain. I insist on “outstanding effort” and a passion for excellence from everyone on the team, including myself. We have a fully distributed team model that allows us to seek the best and brightest talent anywhere in the world. We have been WFA (work from anywhere) for nearly 20 years, which has served us well.

3. Perseverance. Having gotten out of a wheelchair as a 3-4-year-old child after multiple surgeries that corrected a congenital disability, I always had to work harder at everything growing up. This “disability,” which still involves substantial foot and ankle pain daily, made me much more determined to succeed at whatever task was in front of me. I am grateful for the hardship as it has made me much stronger and more determined to accomplish whatever I set my mind to.

What advice would you give to someone who is looking to enter the market?

If you are going to endeavor to build software solutions for this market, be willing to commit to extremely long hours and plenty of setbacks, and don’t expect your best ideas to bear fruit immediately. Seek out and surround yourself with people who are smarter than you and challenge you to improve on a daily basis. Don’t give up if you truly believe you are solving important business problems. Enjoy the arduous journey or don’t try this. This game is not for the weak-minded or those who simply want to build and cash out.

Pre-workday, what is your morning ritual?

I’m usually up before the sun. I catch up on company Slack activity, as our team is spread across many time zones worldwide, while enjoying my first cup of coffee. I feed and play with my Chocolate Labrador and Labradoodle for at least 15 minutes while enjoying the sunrise and giving gratitude to God for another day of opportunities.

On workout days (3 days a week), I spend about 45-60 minutes in the gym stretching (stretching is so important) and working out. Since the corporate office is now wherever my laptop is, I’m blessed with a full home gym and steam sauna, which is usually part of my post-workout routine. There is nothing like 170 degrees with steam to sweat out the toxins. Top it off with a hot shower followed by a 1–2-minute, ice-cold shower (about 42-45 degrees water) to reduce inflammation, and I am ready for the workday.

What about your job keeps you up at night?

Remarkably, I don’t lose much sleep over my job. What keeps me up at night frequently is the excitement I feel when I know we have made meaningful progress in the industry, and I’m thinking about how we can maintain that momentum. Oh… and if I have coffee after 5 pm. That can keep me up.

In an industry brimming with information, what isn’t talked about enough?

At ShowSeeker, we are focused on how we best tackle tomorrow’s business challenges today, while ensuring our industry protects its current cash flow and margins as we transition to an all-impression-based currency. This industry is moving much more rapidly towards a currency change that has been predicted for over a dozen years now. However, the level of cash flow the industry enjoys today, while admittedly declining, is far more lucrative on an impression basis than the current CPM averages on most digital, addressable, and advanced ads. We need to ask ourselves how to protect our margins and cashflow during this transition and how we can continue monetizing premium video across all delivery platforms. This happens in two main areas: The first area is creating efficiencies in order manager operations. We are platform agnostic and believe that a truly modern Order Manager Platform should be able to deliver instructions on what the buy consists of to multiple platforms — including Linear, CTV, Addressable, FAST, digital, and more — without the necessity for swivel chair order entry. The second area is giving those impression-based buys a lift in value by connecting appropriate content in the ad unit with relevant program content. We have been thinking about this a lot, and we believe it starts with ads that are contextually relevant across any stream or device.