I joined what was then called Keyware Internet Technologies in 2002. It was a 15-person web design firm that had just spun off from a larger company and was not doing well. Unhappy clients, high turnover, no clear direction. I was brought in to help fix it.
Over the next five years, we rebuilt it. We rebranded as Embarc, repositioned away from the general web market into Boston's biotech and pharma sector, built a repeatable delivery methodology, and grew the team into something that won MITX awards and did genuinely good work for clients like Lunesta, Acceleron, and Athena Health. In November 2007, we sold to the Garfield Group, a Philadelphia-based agency specializing in healthcare and technology brands.
What the repositioning actually looked like
The dotcom bust left a lot of digital agencies chasing the same shrinking pool of clients. The conventional move was to cut costs and wait for the market to recover. We did something different: we looked at where demand was actually growing and went there. Boston's biotech corridor was expanding. Pharma companies were building web presences and needed agencies that understood both digital and regulated industries. We did not have that expertise when we started. We built it client by client.
The first few pharma engagements were uncomfortable. The compliance requirements, the approval processes, the stakeholder complexity - none of it looked like consumer web work. But we learned fast and built a delivery methodology that could handle it. By the time we sold, pharma and biotech were the majority of our revenue and the reason the Garfield Group wanted us.
What I learned from the sale
The acquisition process taught me things I could not have learned any other way. The buyers are not buying your past - they are buying what they think they can do with you. Garfield Group wanted our client relationships and our team's domain expertise in healthcare digital. They were not buying our brand or our awards. Understanding that clearly made the negotiation cleaner.
The transition period afterward was its own lesson. Clients who trusted me personally needed to be handed off to the Garfield team in a way that transferred that trust, not just the account. That required being deliberately less available over time rather than staying involved. The clients who felt the transition most smoothly were the ones where I had introduced the new team early and stepped back gradually.
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