The History and Foundations of ForgeBusiness
From a business that started as a one-man outsourced affiliate management practice, Forge has evolved into a fully fledged Online Strategic Marketing Consultancy.
Jonathan’s a bundle of creative energy constantly reshaping and refining the business methodologies and pulling Forge forward in leaps and bounds
A classically trained marketer, Jon terms himself a “serial marketer”. Jonathan Miller has been in the Information Technology industry since 1991 and developed & marketed a niche industry product database, search engine & image cataloguing toolset in 1992 (when by his own admission he was still dumb and didn’t know what they’d become)
He was young and naïve and sold out! The company was acquired as part of a listing on the SA stock exchange.
Over the next 4 years Jonathan built a reputation in South Africa & internationally consulting to clients in the information technology industry developing internet marketing applications for leading South African & International clients in such diverse industries as Financial Services, Gaming, Architecture and Construction.
Eventually he ran away from Corporate South Africa for the promise of travel to exotic destinations & joined an online casino where he developed an affiliate program and learnt the beauty of Affiliate Marketing! The business model, its simplicity and its power appealed to Jonathan and blended with his passion for Marketing Strategy and Metrics Analysis formed the basis for Forge’s philosophy.
We may have become more corporate - but it’s a hell of an exciting place to work!
While spending almost 2 years entertaining affiliates everywhere from the Bahamas to Miami and Las Vegas and along the way built the second largest casino affiliate empire in the industry. Jonathan became somewhat of an expert on the subject of Affiliate Marketing and kept being invited to speak and hold workshops at global conferences including Affiliate Force, Affiliate Summit and Casino Affiliate Force.
The food has improved - but the working hours have gotten longer, lol
The pull of entrepreneurship was too strong and Jon started his “one-man” show from a home-office as Team-Affiliate, under license to USA based Kowabunga Technologies, providing outsourced Affiliate Management Services to their clients. Kowabunga provided the software and Jonathan provided the managed services.
The value proposition was simple and to this day remains true. South Africans work hard, value relationships, are ‘relentless’ and can offer more as an outsourcing destination due to our lower labor & overhead cost & exchange rate efficiencies.
Soon the work became too much and associate #1 had to be employed, Ric dos Santos. (Ric sadly left us in 2005 to take over the family SAP implementation business - a testament to the entrepreneurial spirit we foster at Forge!)
Within days, Associate #2 Ryno Saayman joined as an affiliate recruiter.
Ryno is still with the company and heads up our Customer Contact Center. Without Ryno we’d be lost in a flood of email & calls from 130,000 active publishers 
There’s nothing like getting a call from an affiliate who’s on a first name basis with you! This is a guy or gal that lives halfway around the world and depends on me to help them make money each day. It’s awesome when they call me to say ‘Hi Ryno, so, what new offers have you got for me?
Within 3 months Jon’s wife kicked them out of the house (to make way for the new baby, she said) and they had to find an alternative office, so like any good startup they took refuge in the converted garage armed with 1800 numbers from the USA, Canada and the UK as the business was expanding fast.
When associates #3 (Werner), #4 (Mary), #5 through #7 joined we thought we’d got enough capacity - but all of us in one converted garage, together with 3 part time interns just got too much. Jonathan’s approach has always been to spend more time with clients so while the consultants were racking up the air miles the home-team was fighting over desk space - office hunting we went.
I’ve lear’nt from the master how to pack 13 meetings in 8 cities into 7 days, travel across 2 continents, only using carry-on (to avoid delays) dress well to ensure you don’t get stopped by immigration, ensure land/sea/air/underground arrangements are pre-booked and sleep well on trans-continental flights so you arrive on-time refreshed and ready to do business! It’s a blast
We moved into a modest yet WOW! (To us) 1600sq.ft office space and over the next 2 years the business exploded and another 15 permanent associates joined in various roles including finance, consulting, software engineering, analytics, SEM, marketing and green stuff (ask Jon about that some day )
This place is wild - shouting, arguments, phones going crazy, designers, techs, developers, marketers and affiliate managers all arguing the finer points of creative vs optimization - I’ve learnt and achieved more here in a year than my entire marketing career before Forge!
Our business evolved and as our vision for performance marketing changed to anticipate the needs of the market, we recognized that in order to grow our clients and help them succeed we needed to always offer best advice and independence.
We still count on the many publishers that Jonathan built relationships with for much of the success our clients enjoy today - that’s the power of relationships!
We added our own Ad Network Business, Customer Interaction Unit, Registered Patents on our Methodologies along the way and generally had a load of fun evolving from that one-man affiliate management practice into the business we are today.
To clearly illustrate this vision to our clients we had to show them a new brand - one that forged a new way - one that stood for going into the uncharted waters and did things differently.
And so Forge was born!
Today we have 26 associates in 3 continents, we travel relentlessly, we love visiting our clients, defining strategy, pursuing sales targets, understanding our clients’ clients first and executing with passion, determination and attention to detail.
I love it when the travelers return from their trips - there are always new toys for the ‘back-office’ teams!
We’re a small business, have a lot of fun, work under a lot of pressure, take what we do very seriously, know that we can change the destiny of our clients, associates and publishers through our actions. Even though we know all this we don’t take ourselves seriously
We’re a public company, closely owned by our original investors, associates (yes, every one of our associates is an owner in the business) and outside shareholders. The business is very family oriented and value centered, has been profitable from the very beginning and had absolutely no startup capital!
As we’ve expanded the business we’ve done so by redeploying our profits back into our people and business. Ultimately our vision it to become a Globally Competitive Internet Marketing Company, focused on delivering significant value & revenues to our clients & marketing partners through the use of integrated performance marketing solutions.
Sound overly corporate? We thought so too - but we just couldn’t find another way to say it any better. If you actually read this far down and you think you can find ANY better way to say it mail me: jonathan@forgebusiness.com