Blackbaud CFO exercises option and sells $1 million of company stock
In a Form 4 filed with the SEC last Friday, Timothy V. Williams (chief financial officer and senior vice president of Blackbaud Inc) reported he exercised options for 40,000 shares Wednesday for $4.80 apiece and then sold all of them the same day for $28.02 to $28.31 apiece.
Ironically, while Williams was cashing in, Blackbaud Chief Executive Marc Chardon gave an extensive interview which appeared in Investor's Business Daily and CNN Money this week.
The company started in 1981 as an early accounting program for educators. Today, Blackbaud has 19,000 customers. They include the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Michigan, and the Catholic Diocese of Dallas.When asked who else competes in their market, Chardon said this:
Blackbaud's year-over-year sales growth has risen each of the last three quarters, from 15% to 27%, 32% and 36%. Analysts expect 38% growth this quarter.
Today there are three main kinds of fundraising. In high-touch fundraising, one competitor for us is the BSR part of Sungard Data Systems. Occasionally, the largest organizations might use Siebel (a unit of Oracle ORCL) or Salesforce.com CRM.Previously, this blog has reported on rumors that Oracle might be interested in buying Blackbaud... however, I have no reason to think there is any specific truth to that rumor.
The second kind of fundraising is direct marketing, like for the March of Dimes or Easter Seals. Those groups raise smaller funds, but from a huge database of donors. In January we acquired a company named Target Software, which is a leading provider of that software. Our competitors there include service bureaus (database marketing firms) such as Merkle in the U.S.
The third kind of fundraising involves online fundraising from family and friends for events such as walk-a-thons. In this area, our Blackbaud NetCommunity product competes against Convio and Kintera.
3 comments:
I love this kind of Juicy goodness.
People can have many reasons for liquidating their stock options. Maybe he was locked up until now, maybe he already has something this year to write off against this kind of big capital gain tax, or maybe this is his own asset and wants to diversify.
Either way, you have to think if an Oracle move was about to happen for $35/share, he would hold out until then.
If you examine the SEC fillings further you will see that the CFO, CEO and Comptroller all dumped stock. Now many of these trades are programatic, but if you think there is increased value to be had under your leadership, don't you think you should hold? So, in this case I would say the company has maximized its value under the Chardon regime, because the culture remains cost driven.
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