Centro

Shawn Riecksecker founded Centro in 2001 because he saw a critical pain point: digital advertising was fragmented, complex, and manual. Ad agencies were struggling to manage buying across multiple platforms—newspapers, TV stations, radio websites—with no unified system. "The entire idea was that when you look at the process of purchasing planning buying and operating Digital advertising is highly complex. There's a lot of moving parts a lot of different platforms that the industry needed a holistic comprehensive automation and intelligence platform," Riecksecker explained.

With no money and no expertise, Riecksecker started by solving the immediate pain: helping ad agencies outsource their local digital buying. By the mid-2000s, he had identified his first wedge—mid-market ad agencies in cities like Oklahoma City, Denver, and Tallahassee that were underfunded compared to major holding companies. He raised $2 million in angel capital in 2006 and began building a real platform (before then it was "just access databases and spreadsheets"). By 2012, Centro had built what Riecksecker called "by far the best operations planning system."

But the industry shifted beneath his feet. Programmatic advertising and real-time bidding exploded. Social media became a major advertising channel. Suddenly, the platform he'd spent six years building wasn't the right fit for the future. Rather than patch it, Riecksecker made a bold decision: rebuild the entire platform from the ground up. Starting in 2013, they set an ambitious goal—rebuild in three years what had taken six to build, but make it more comprehensive. They acquired Sitecore, a Toronto-based DSP, to gain real-time bidding capabilities.

Centro's early customers were ad agencies forced to solve a real operational problem. "Back in 2002, 2005 ad agencies were struggling just to do digital nationally," Riecksecker recalled. He sold by working directly with agencies, often starting with outsourced local digital buying at specific locations. Over 15 years, this evolved into a diversified customer base: mid-market agencies, mid-market brands, and eventually self-service software customers.

By 2016, Centro had built a hybrid revenue model. They processed approximately $500 million in digital ad spend in 2017, with about $150-175 million flowing through their self-service platform and the rest through managed services. They charged between 8-25% on the self-service side and 10-25% on managed services, depending on contract size and complexity. An average managed services client spent $175,000 per year.

The rebuild proved harder than expected. "The last four quarters have been tough for us," Riecksecker admitted. As ad agencies brought programmatic buying in-house, demand for Centro's managed services declined. Without the new platform in place, they lost market share they could have captured. Growth in 2016 dropped to single digits—a stark contrast to earlier years and the worst performance since the 2008-2009 recession.

However, they remained profitable almost every year, a discipline Riecksecker attributed to building an internal muscle: "I'm actually really good at figuring out how to sell my way into innovation." Rather than chase massive capital raises (they raised only $52 million across three rounds while competitors raised far more), Centro invested heavily in infrastructure. In 2016-2017 alone, they spent $8-9 million on infrastructure and bidding costs to handle 3 million auction queries per second and store 7 billion audience profiles.

In July 2016, Centro launched Basis, a new platform that combined three elements no competitor had merged: an ERP system (like MediaOcean), a DSP (real-time bidding engine), and BI tools (Tableau-like analytics). "If you seamlessly merge them all together into a single platform that's basis and it's something that no one else has," Riecksecker said. By 2017, Centro had 700 employees—200 in R&D and 500 in services—and projected $110-130 million in annual revenue. Riecksecker remained single at 45, single-minded about building the business, though he reflected that his 20-year-old self should have "created more balance." The company was profitable and facing a new growth curve with Basis.