To me operating cash flow is far and away more important than accounting or paper profits. You can actually use cash flow to make payroll and buy equipment. Imagine that! Somehow financial writers don't seem to understand that. With the exception of a mortgage on one of our data centers, GoDaddy has no debt and has never had any debt. We are entirely self-funded and have held healthy cash reserves. This year we'll have cash receipts of 340 million dollars and positive cash flow from operations of 52 million. That's a million bucks a week.

I think if you do that, you've wasted your advertising dollars. You've got to be different, and often to be different and effective, you've got to be polarizing. One of the problems with marketing is that everybody, bar none - even market analysts and financial writers - they all think that they can do it.

I pushed back and insisted we hire a well-endowed female brunette with the GoDaddy name emblazoned across her chest because I knew that's where every guy that was watching that game would be looking.

Then when we filmed the commercial and submitted it to Fox, it was rejected several times. Eventually, a few days before the game, it got the go ahead. When they finally approved it, Fox came back and said, [laughs] "Hey Bob, your ad is approved. By the way, you want to buy another spot?"

I thought about it for about half an hour and said, "Yes." The rest is history. I was lucky enough to have the first running of the ad offend somebody that had a lot of pull. To this day I don't know who it was, God bless them. But it got the second showing of the ad canceled and this has never happened in the history of television, much less on the Super Bowl and our business shot through the ceiling because of the controversy that happened. We were lucky indeed. That ad is now included in college textbooks and is being used as an example as one of the most effective TV ads ever.

I think it's much better to alienate 10% of your audience and have the other 90% take sharp notice. (CATER TO THE PENGUIN )

Labels: bob parsons, customer service, godaddy, marketing