CORPORATE PROFILE Merrill Corporation Unlocking its Full Potential SELLING POWER EDITORS


In an interview recently videotaped at Amelia Is- land’s Ritz Carlton, Rusty Wiley, the CEO of Merrill Corporation – along with Todd Albright, worldwide head of sales and chief revenue officer, and Ryan Blackwell, senior vice president of global sales op- erations – spoke about how the team is adapting to the current needs of their core market by moving the company from a traditional document manage- ment company to a cloud solution provider.


Founded as K.F. Merrill in 1968 by Ken- neth F. Merrill and his wife Lorraine as a typesetting business in their home in St. Paul, MN, Merrill Corporation – still headquartered in St. Paul – now has some 3,800 employees in more than 41 locations worldwide, and serves clients based all over the globe. Cur- rently, Merrill securely connects clients with advisors and enables confidential content sharing and disclosure for all types of financial transactions (Fundrais- ing, M&A, IPO, etc) through its DataSite


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platform and are also a leader in secure communications in regulated industries like healthcare.


Becoming CEO of this near billion- dollar global corporation in 2014 represented a new challenge for Wiley, whose background includes more than 25 years at IBM Corporation, where he most recently served as general manager of the company’s banking and financial services business, and previ- ously held other executive roles, includ- ing many with global responsibilities.


As with many large corporations that start small, the company had grown organically and inorganically, acquiring a diverse set of assets that swelled beyond their now core focus. Those acquisitions had begun to be a drag on Merrill’s forward momentum and bottom line – to say nothing of the technological and management challenges the new CEO faced. As Wiley himself says, executives had to, “…go from a static portfolio- based company with inconsistent growth and margin compression to being a dynamic secure cloud-based content-sharing and communications company.” A big order, to be sure; however, Wiley, having transformed and operated very complex global businesses, was perfectly prepared for this particular challenge. Wiley explains, “We started dis- secting the business to figure out what created the highest client value and what we needed to address first. We knew we had fragmentation and inefficiencies and clearly needed to transition our sales force and our product management and engineer- ing. Having spent 20+ years in sales and financial services I felt relatively comfortable we could sort that out.” Wiley likens the process to empty- ing your grandmother’s attic, opening trunks and boxes and finding hidden gems along with ever-deeper layers of old stuff. “Every time I opened a new box I didn’t know what I’d discover… I’d open one box and say, ‘Oh, we have 12 unique billing systems.’ Opening another I’d find eight gen- eral ledgers for the company. And in another box I’d find we had 5 different standards of salesforce.com,” he says with a smile as he explains the overall flagship platform was 14 years old. In today’s world that would be like making sales calls on rotary phones (remember them?). So Wiley and his team hit the pause button. He went to his Board and


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