Shane Yeend: Using his Imagination

Yeend’s business officially became Imagination Entertainment in 1999, taking the name from a previous joint venture he was involved in, Beyond Imagination. “When we left they took their Beyond name back, so I took Imagination.”

But it wasn’t all plain sailing for this entrepreneur. With the number-one Australian website—bigger than ninemsn and the AFL at the time—by 1998 they had a bunch of venture capitalists knocking on their door wanting to take the company public. The co-founders did sell a share of the business in 1999, but the company never did get to listing in what Yeend recalls as a “sad story”.

“We were like everybody else, we had lots of popular websites and were getting ready to list as a big online media company with no revenue, but the market collapsed and the company collapsed. By 2001 we were basically broke and had 21 days of money left. We’d spent all the venture capital money and we had a bunch of people from a consulting firm getting ready to turn this thing into a listing entity, but the market crashed and it was all over.”

Surviving Disaster

With a never-say-die attitude, the team reflected on what they were good at in order to rejuvenate the business. “We’re really good at interactive entertainment and we’re really good at games, so we basically wrote the software to make the DVD box interactive, and started a seven-year mission to launch DVD games around the world.

“I used to go to the toy and game fairs and I’d sit in the corridors and wait for someone wearing a Target or Walmart tag to come past. I’d drag them into an office the size of a toilet we’d rented off the corner of someone else, and everyone thought I was mad. They’d ask why anyone would want to do that, but that one idea changed the whole industry by 30 percent in less than five years.”

Yeend admits that the company grew too quickly, and had to pull back business in areas outside the US until they scored distribution deals with some of the big guys, such as a deal with Hasbro to partner with them 50–50 in DVD games across 43 countries outside the US.

Other deals with Universal Pictures and Disney cemented the company’s position in the global entertainment industry. But Imagination is now able to handle its own distribution with offices in the UK, Germany, France, Toronto, LA, people on the ground in Chicago and New York, and an office about to open in India this year. However, content-owner partnerships with the likes of NASCAR, Disney, and the BBC are key to the business. “We do have lots of license partnerships around the world and they’re quite important to us. Those licensed brands make up about 60 percent of our revenue.”

Not bad considering the company was up against some pretty heavy hitters to score these deals. “I went up against Hasbro for the worldwide Disney licence for our games. To go against a company that is $4 billion in size and you’ve just got three people in a rented room in Santa Monica—to win those things is amazing. It was the right decision. A corporate like Hasbro wasn’t going to do a better job, we were, and we were more passionate and responsive.

“Our biggest weapons are innovation and speed-to-market. Even if these big companies thought they wanted to do something, it’s just so hard for them to do it. And it gets harder as we get bigger as well.”