Some people have a knack for timing. They land in the sweetest spots at the best possible moments.
Daniel Hamburger’s timing is better than most.
The 37-year-old was in the right place during the e-commerce explosion to make his mark as W.W. Grainger’s go-to Internet guy.
Now he’s moved into the top job at a well-financed start-up that’s being unveiled by the global consulting firm Accenture, formerly Andersen Consulting.
While risky, Hamburger’s new company has the advantages of patented technology used by Accenture in projects with its clients, as well as a ready-made customer list.
The start-up’s name is Indeliq (in-DEL-ic), a made-up mouthful meant to suggest “indelible,” or something that doesn’t fade from memory.
Indeliq is the high-tech equivalent of a purveyor of corporate training materials. It offers Web-based instruction using simulation technology.
Its courses resemble flight simulators for business employees. They place people in job situations to master skills ranging from spotting a budget shortfall to reprimanding an employee.
How did an e-commerce vet land at an e-learning company?
Good timing.
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Hamburger made a name for himself as a pioneer during the brief period when companies couldn’t rush fast enough onto the Internet.
He launched Grainger’s OrderZone.com–an online small-business sales operation–and grew Grainger’s online sales tenfold in the late 1990s.
He’s the guy largely credited with putting a new economy face on an old-line industrial distributor’s stolid visage.
Never mind that it wasn’t a happy face for shareholders: Grainger’s digital businesses, consolidated now into a single unit, generated about $48 million in operating losses last year.
In June, Grainger merged OrderZone with Texas-based Works.com. That left Hamburger as “co-president” of a money-losing dot.com headquartered in Austin.
Not exactly a winning outcome.
Yet Hamburger’s star remained high. Recruiters lined up to lure him away.
“He galvanized an organization,” explains recruiter John Rothschild, TMP Worldwide managing partner in Chicago. “He got recognized for the process rather than the outcome.”
There are other reasons as well.
One mistake he never makes is to confuse hot technology with business. He’s a manager first, a tech guy second.
“The key to Internet e-commerce? It ain’t about technology,” he told a reporter in 1999. “It’s about marketing. It’s about building a business. You have to have technology. But the real differentiator is marketing.”
So Hamburger is talking non-stop now about Indeliq, a company he claims has a future as big and bright as that of players like Siebel Systems in Silicon Valley.
He’s been working in stealth mode on the start-up since January at Accenture’s technology park in Northbrook.
With his management team now in place and 50 employees–he expects to have 100 by the end of the year–he’s beating Indeliq’s drums.
“I think this is the greatest opportunity of anything thrown at me,” he declares.
For sure, e-learning is one of the hottest buzzwords in the $60 billion U.S. corporate training market. That’s because training professionals see Web-based instruction as potentially more effective and less expensive than traditional methods.
The market is young and teeming with competitors. Customers are clamoring for new offerings.
“If they’d done this a year ago it might have been premature,” says W.R. Hambrecht senior analyst Trace Urdon.
E-learning could turn out to be a trend with staying power or another Internet fad. But for now, while the jury’s still out, Hamburger is proving again his knack for timing.
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