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A press release went out yesterday announcing that Mr Gregory Platz (current CFO) has been offered the position as CEO of Dark Blue Sea (DBS). Richard Moore has elected to not renew his contract and will be stepping down on June 30th,2009. According to the release Richard will continue to consult back to DBS and will be remaining on the board.
 In my opinion this is a really interesting move on the part of DBS. I don’t know Gregory Platz and therefore I don’t intend to comment on whether he will be good or bad for the company. In fact, this is really part of the problem. I don’t know who he is and I don’t think many people in the industry know who he is. To date Mr Platz has obviously maintained a behind the scenes position diligently managing the various corporate obligations of DBS.
The challenge for me as both a shareholder and also a domain owner is that Mr Platz doesn’t have any sort of profile in the domain industry. If you asked any domain owner who Mr Platz is then I would be pretty confident that they wouldn’t have a clue. The numerous long-haul trips across the Pacific made by DBS staff to domain conferences over the last few years has definitely paid dividends in the formation of relationships with customers and potential partners and this is what Mr Platz is going to have to make up for. I know that I certainly don’t envy his future frequent miler points!
This last point is critical. If Mr Platz is going to spearhead the company forward then he will definitely need to be out and about at every domain conference and start “pressing the flesh”. It sounds like a trivial thing to do but the domain industry more than any other industry I know runs on relationships and without those relationships he’s starting way behind the eight ball. Not wanting to promote what I do but I would think that it would be very advantageous of him to reach out to the domain blogging community, get on skype, instant messaging, emails, phone, pigeons or whatever and start get those relationships going.
With a change of this magnitude I wouldn’t be surprised if DBS goes through quite a few changes over the next few months and familiar faces will be replaced. I don’t envy Mr Platz having to manage the company through this transitional period and I honestly wish him all the best. What I do know is that it’s going to take a while to get things under control after DBS having such a tight successful dynamic team over the last few years. In the meantime....I hope that he does something about the share price :-)
Just as an aside.....I tried to find a picture of Gregory Platz on the DBS website and there wasn’t one. I called DBS up and they didn’t have one either......guys you may need to remedy this pretty quickly. A face, is a brand is a company.....
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