Finally gave a damn 'bout a bad reputation

(Fortune) Microsoft and Yahoo veteran Blake Irving didn't see much to phone home about when he first considered running GoDaddy, the web domain-name provider. At best he saw a mixed bag of opportunities at a well-known, if poorly understood, company. GoDaddy had quirky marketing and attentive customer service but weak product development. It boasted an impressive footprint in the U.S. yet had made virtually no effort to do business beyond its native shores.

However, the biggest opportunity by far was in changing how the Scottsdale-based company addressed its customers. Irving says women run 58% of small businesses in the U.S. Yet GoDaddy had built its reputation on a series of Super Bowl TV ads beginning in 2005 that were overtly sexist. The attention-grabbing spots were blatant attempts to generate chatter about a product that its founding CEO, Bob Parsons, thought was boring. And while the strategy worked gloriously in making GoDaddy the subject of water-cooler conversation everywhere, "never has a company had as big a gap between what the ads say and what the company is," Irving says.

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