Jim Howard and the business of getting out of the way

A company can buy software and still spend its days waiting. Waiting for the installation. Waiting for an integration. Waiting for someone with the right permissions to change a page. Jim Howard had worked on enough corporate websites to recognize the peculiar arrangement: the tool purchased to make publishing possible could become another reason publishing took so long.

That was the problem behind Crownpeak, the company he co-founded in 2001. Howard came to it through the business of making websites for other people. Alongside co-founder Carl Sutter, he wanted customers to use a managed service rather than keep undertaking substantial software installations. A website manager ought to have a reasonable chance of managing a website. It was an attractively literal reading of the job title.

The idea would eventually sound ordinary. Getting a company built around it required a more complicated sequence of decisions. Howard’s career is interesting in that gap: between an arrangement that looks obvious in retrospect and the work of persuading people to trust it.

The work before the work

Howard’s early web business began in 1994. He and his partner sold it to USWeb in 1997, and his career subsequently included USWeb/CKS and MarchFIRST. This was an education conducted through client projects, where the price of a cumbersome system arrived in someone’s schedule.

Crownpeak’s early finances gave that education an unwelcome extension. In the difficult period after its launch, it went eight months without winning a new customer. Howard accepted custom software work to keep the business operating. The intended destination remained a service with recurring customers; individual projects supplied the means to reach it.

There is something wonderfully inconvenient about this part of the story. A founder can identify a repeatable product opportunity and still need to take the sort of work he hoped to move beyond. Crownpeak eventually reached profitability and stopped taking those custom projects. The distinction between the work that pays today and the business being built for tomorrow had become a practical management question.

His chemistry degree from the University of Delaware adds a pleasing detail to a career spent with software, sales, and operations. His later work would span startup advising and executive roles as well as founding a business. The job descriptions changed; enterprise software remained a recurring setting.

A service in search of believers

In 2003, the delivery model still needed explaining. Customers could access Crownpeak through a browser, manage their digital material, and publish it into different formats and destinations. The provider handled the application as a continuing service. Alongside Salesforce, Crownpeak offered an example of the emerging alternative to buying packaged business software or commissioning a system of one’s own.

This changed the purchasing conversation. The customer had to consider an ongoing relationship with a provider, alongside the capabilities on a feature list. The arrangement joined software to its deployment, support, and management. Those responsibilities, easily treated as background detail in a sales demonstration, were part of what the customer was buying.

By October 2006, Howard was still confronting resistance. Crownpeak ran a campaign addressing misconceptions about software as a service. The objections covered security, loss of control, integration, and long-term cost. Customers also wondered whether a service provider would compete with their own IT organization.

Those concerns tell us something about his work as a founder. Selling a service meant explaining how an organization would operate after it bought it. Who would have responsibility? Where would the work go? A new delivery model could be technically convincing while leaving those questions unsettled.

The argument reached government purchasing, too. In June 2003, Crownpeak announced GSA certification that made its Advantage CMS available for direct acquisition by federal and state agencies. Features addressed accessibility, workflows, and archiving requirements. A buyer could appreciate the promise of easier publishing and still need a procurement route and a set of standards the product could meet.

It is a useful corrective to the theatrical version of technology history. A new market develops partly through ordinary administrative work. Someone has to make the thing purchasable. Someone has to account for the rules. The brochure may prefer a different subject.

The hours that came back

Crownpeak’s reported 2004 results gave Howard numbers to put beside his argument. Live websites on the system had doubled between the first quarters of 2003 and 2004. Revenue for the first four months of 2004 was more than twice the comparable period a year earlier. Reported earnings before interest and taxes rose from 11 percent to 26 percent over those periods.

Those were company results from a particular moment, rather than a promise about every subscription business. Their relevance to Howard’s story is the connection he drew between predictable delivery costs, recurring revenue, and profitability. He was describing the operating logic underneath the product.

A later customer example showed the argument from the other end. During Virginia.gov’s 2006 redesign, the state portal used Crownpeak to test new designs and organization without disturbing the live site. The project included an RSS-based calendar and work to meet government web standards.

The portal estimated that the redesign saved more than 820 hours of staff effort. Visits were over 50 percent higher three months after implementation than in the comparable period of 2005. The figures belonged to that project, with its own circumstances. Still, the hours matter: they put a quantity beside work that otherwise disappears into the general business of keeping a website running.

For a company selling the ability to manage content, the useful result was partly time returned to the people managing it. Howard’s proposition becomes easier to understand when expressed in a staff calendar rather than a catalogue of capabilities.

A marathon with a product demo

Howard had a concise way of distinguishing consulting from operating a company. Speaking to MBA students, he compared the two kinds of work:

“In consulting, you do sprints. In a job, you are doing a marathon.”

Jim Howard · 2007

The comparison fits the long stretch between Crownpeak’s founding and its later enterprise focus. A consultant can complete a defined assignment. A company must continue supporting the system, explaining the model, and deciding which requests belong in the product. The finish line has an unfortunate habit of acquiring another budget year.

Howard also participated in the industry’s public arguments. The 2006 Gilbane Boston program placed him on a panel with representatives from Microsoft, Interwoven, RedDot, and Alfresco. These were competing approaches to managing content, gathered in the same room. By 2012, he was back on a vendor panel discussing web experience management, mobile, social, and marketing tools.

One can read those programs as a compressed history of changing customer demands. Managing a website had become part of a wider conversation about how organizations handled digital experiences. Howard was selling into that conversation while also taking part in it.

Crownpeak’s next organizational change came in April 2016, when it merged with London-based ActiveStandards. K1 Investment Management provided $50 million in new capital. Jim Yares became CEO of the combined business; Howard and ActiveStandards’ Simon Lande became advisors. The founder’s operating chapter at Crownpeak had given way to a different role.

1. 2001Co-founds Crownpeak
2. 2016Becomes an advisor after the merger
3. 2019Takes the CEO role at Marketron
4. 2024Returns to Marketron’s board chair role

The next queue was in radio

In May 2019, Marketron announced Howard as its CEO. He had most recently been an operating partner at Diversis Capital, the firm that acquired Marketron in 2018. The business supplied revenue management and digital software to broadcasters. Radio companies were incorporating digital advertising into their offerings, and Howard saw an opportunity to support that transition.

Marketron appointed Jimshade Chaudhari senior vice president of product at the same time. Chaudhari came from Sling TV, bringing experience in product and partnerships. The pairing put an experienced software operator alongside a product leader familiar with another media business undergoing change.

The wider team mattered as well. In 2022, Marketron promoted Bo Bandy to senior vice president of marketing. Her work had included the launches of Marketron NXT and Marketron REV. Howard publicly credited her contribution. It is a reminder that the CEO’s title sits above work carried out through many specialties.

In January 2024, Chaudhari succeeded Howard as CEO, and Howard returned to the board chair position. Marketron simultaneously announced the sale of its REV broadcast sales and order management platform to Imagine Communications. Howard credited Chaudhari with helping bring broadcast and digital offerings together.

Howard has also served as CEO of ServicePower for Diversis, and his advisory work has included the committees of Santa Monica incubators Amplify and Mucker Labs. That gives his later career several perspectives on the same company: the person operating it, the board considering its direction, and the advisor working with its leadership. Each has a different relationship to the daily decisions. The founder’s earlier experience supplies a concrete history to bring into those conversations, including the awkward stretch when a product business needed custom projects to keep going.

Today, Diversis lists Howard as a strategic advisor supporting its enterprise software portfolio. Across the career, the customers and products have changed. The recurring problem is recognizable: people have work to do, and the systems around them determine how readily they can do it. Howard has spent a substantial part of his working life trying to shorten that distance.