Monster.com Founder and True Internet Marketer Dies
By Anna Johnson on December 4th, 2008Andrew J. McKelvey, the founder of leading online job ads site, Monster.com, died of pancreatic cancer last Thursday. He was 74. Until recently, I didn’t know much about Mr McKelvey, but his story reads like an entrepreneurial fairytale. Only it’s true. Feel like a little inspiration?
Let’s pay a little homage to a man who was a legendary Internet marketer, and a man who, having started Monster.com in his 60s, certainly didn’t let ‘age’ or lack of technological knowledge stop him from dominating one of the most lucrative online niches…
Born in 1935, Andrew J. McKelvey grew up with a passion for business. His first venture was, as a 14 year old, buying eggs from a farmer in Southern New Jersey and selling them to neighbors for a profit of 10 cents per dozen.
Mr McKelvey graduated from Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, then ran a movie theater and served in the Army, before moving to Australia to start a business.
According to his son, Stuart, Andrew McKelvey considered Australia a decade or so behind the United States in adopting social and consumer trends and therefore the ideal place to gain a first-mover advantage. (Hmmm… I don’t know whether to be insulted or proud about that, but given it was the 1950s… he was probably right!)
Mr. McKelvey subsequently started a music jukebox business that became one of the largest in Australia. By the early 1960s, however, he saw advertising as a more promising industry and decided to move back to the U.S. to be a part of it.
By 1963, Andrew McKelvey was living in New York, working as an advertising agency account manager handling consumer products. In what became another turning point in his career, he then moved to another ad agency where he took over the account of a client that advertised in the hot new media of the time – television and the Yellow Pages.
The entrepreneurial bug hit again and in 1967, aged 33, Mr McKelvey started his own Yellow Pages advertising agency called Telephone Marketing Programs. He started the business in borrowed office space, with just one part-time assistant. He then built the company, which was later named TMP Worldwide, into the largest U.S. Yellow Pages ad agency – handling a third of its business – and employing thousands of people.
But Mr McKelvey, who sincerely believed that ‘the secret of success is being in the right place at the right time’ didn’t stop there. In the 1990s he moved TMP Worldwide into help-wanted / job advertising, and it was then that he met Jeffrey Taylor, who ran Boston-based recruitment ad agency Adion.
As it happened, Mr Taylor also had a little side business – an online jobs board called the Monster Board.
While initially skeptical, it wasn’t too long before McKelvey realized that the future of job advertising lay online. So, after buying Adion – and the Monster Board along with it – in 1995, TMP Worldwide embarked on a mission to become the leading online jobs site. Indeed, not too long after TMP Worldwide acquired Adion, the company bought its then-larger competitor, Online Career Center.
George R. Eisele, a former board member of Monster Worldwide, the parent company, and a longtime business associate of Mr. McKelvey, said McKelvey was so successful because he was RELENTLESS. Nothing – not age, not lack of tech knowledge, not competitors, not anything – got in his way.
Unfortunately, Andrew McKelvey left TMP Worlwide in less than ideal circumstances. He was accused of being involved in backdating employee stock options, a scandal which saw him leave the company in 2006. The case was settled earlier this year – Mr. McKelvey agreed to pay the company $8 million and give up most of his voting shares. In another settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, he paid about $276,000 in fines.
Outside of business, Mr McKelvey was also very active. He was married six times (he’s survived by two sons, two daughters and six grandchildren) and was an active philanthropist. In 2000 he established the McKelvey Foundation to provide college scholarships for high school students with entrepreneurial aspirations.
In addition to that, Mr. McKelvey, who suffered from a lung-scarring ailment, also supported the research of the physician who successfully treated him and donated $25 million to set up the Andrew J. McKelvey Lung Transplant Center at Emory University.
Mr Kelvey also helped set up the Families of Freedom fund which provides college scholarships for the children of the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. That program raised more than $100 million.
Rest in peace, Andrew J. McKelvey. I didn’t know you, but what you achieved in business (particularly online business) and philanthropy serves as an inspiration to us all.
