February 2001

Pro2Net Shifts Focus Back to Accounting

Online professional resources provider Pro2Net has announced a change in tactics as the company finds itself tightening its belt by laying off employees.

While not one of the many reported casualties of the dot-com war, Pro2Net, located at www.pro2net.com, did decide to lay off a major portion of its work force, leaving the company with a skeleton crew in its Seattle-based offices, according to recently published reports.

Company chair and co-founder Derek Doke confirmed an Electronic Accountant story published in January which said that his company whittled its ranks down to a core group of 38 people after eliminating more than 80 positions—including its former president’s—last month.

Now, as the dot.com faces new challenges with a leaner crew, Pro2Net has shifted gears and is refocusing on its original service: accounting content. The company, formerly known as AccountingNet, employed 140 people last year, according to Doke, expanding its service offerings to cater to professionals in the legal, human resources, and financial planning fields. Yet, as 2000 became the year for dot-com failures, the company shifted its focus back to accounting.

“This company was built to help out the accounting profession,” said Doke. “We are continuing to build on our original vision of streamlining the process for the accounting profession by helping to facilitate a better online system for accounting professionals from the time that they are college sophomores until they retire while providing incredible value and support. Our goal is to grow and to get the cash flow neutral by August—and we’re on pace to do just that.”

Citing economics as a major factor in Pro2Net’s decision to make the accounting field its target market, Doke stated that the switch in emphasis will enable Pro2Net to make the most of its “strongest opportunity to build a business” while pleasing the company’s investors, who want to focus on the area that yielded profits in the past.

“We still have a great foothold in accounting,” Doke said. “And this change will probably enhance the CPA in that more of our energy and efforts will be geared toward the public accountant.”

Doke is also bullish about his company’s financial outlook. “We’ve scaled back to focus on sales and marketing as well as editorial content, instead of on product and service offerings,” Doke said. “We ended up losing a lot of people in engineering, technology, and research and development—those whose positions weren’t contributing directly to the growth of the company.”

Doke predicts that Pro2Net will generate revenues of $5.2 million in 2001, some of which will be generated by Pro2Net’s educational training conversion program introduced in December. When a company or firm signs up to receive Pro2Net’s educational center, it is entitled to use Pro2Net’s own technological developments to provide a style of training to staff members that mimics how the firm itself would provide that training.

Other revenue-generating programs that the company is banking on include Pro2Net’s lead-generating campaign (in which the company works with clients to create a marketing strategy geared toward the accounting community) and its career management services center.

Yet some voices are less optimistic about Pro2Net’s future, especially former employees who have taken to voicing their ire at the company that gave them pink slips on various websites. A handful of former employees are predicting that their former employer will go bankrupt in the near future, according to messages posted on a website that monitors dot-com downfalls.