Chris Terrill - CEO of the newly-formed public company ANGI Homeservices - stood in front of his employees on a day in the October of 2017 in a town hall meeting, convinced that a third of them hated his guts.

"Look, you have no reason to trust me. I should have come in here in a Darth Vader suit, because I'm sure that's how you feel about me," he said.

It was a bittersweet triumph for Terrill, who until recently had been CEO of home improvement marketplace HomeAdvisor. Terrill himself had joined four years prior, taking his first-ever CEO role at a time when the company was still known as ServiceMagic.

The town hall meeting was the first time Terrill had faced all of his employees after HomeAdvisor had purchased its biggest competitor, Angie's List. The acquisition came about after years of HomeAdvisor TV ads that vilified Angie's List, helping to weaken it to the point where Terrill could swoop in and buy it.

And now he was trying to convince his new employees to trust and believe in him. "It was weird," he said of that first meeting. "I assume they had pictures of me to throw darts at me."

The acquisition itself was unusual, too. It was an all-equity deal valued at $500 million in which the smaller company, HomeAdvisor, bought the bigger, publicly-traded Angie's List — a deal that placed Terrill as CEO of the combined entity, now dubbed ANGI Homeservices, with his one-time rival, Angie's List founder and namesake Angie Hicks, now working under him as chief customer officer.

The outcome of that deal: Terrill instantly became the CEO of a publicly-traded company. And suddenly, Terrill was managing a team that was about a third larger than it was before the acquisition.

All of this was a far cry from where Terill found himself in 2012, shortly after he joined the company, when he made a strategy decision that immediately crashed the company's revenues...and had him on the hot seat, in fear of being fired, for almost a year.

Terrill's career story shows that if you truly do your homework, make decisions based on data rather than on ego or fear, and stand by your data-driven decision, you can overcome almost anything.

From marketing guy to first-time CEO

Terrill had made a name for himself in the marketing world, stemming from his days at IAC's Match.com followed by a short stint at Blockbuster and Nutrisystem. He was only at Blockbuster a year, but it taught him a valuable lesson: if you wait too long to change, you can never recover.

At Nutrisystem, he met product and technical whiz Brandon Ridenour, and they became close friends.

The two were searching for their next gig together when his old employer, IAC, called him. IAC was looking for a new CEO for its wholly-owned contractor marketplace, called ServiceMagic.

Terrill has decorated his Denver, CO office with photos home repairs. Business Insider/Julie Bort

Terrill is a rabid DIY-er who has remodeled eight houses, and the son of a contractor, as he told Business Insider. He and Ridenour researched the company, liked its prospects, and decided to join up.

He was now a CEO, for the first time ever.

IAC's billionaire founder Barry Diller actually prefers first time executives who grew up within the IAC organization, as Terrill did at Match.

"If you hire people at senior positions, you are a failure," Diller once said. "I have always believed to hire people, bring people into your organization who are young, and who are inexperienced for the job that you give them."

Diller believes that floundering forces people to grow, and if they swim instead of sink, they will succeed.

Floundering has commenced

IAC had bought ServiceMagic from its founders in 2004. When IAC leadership talked to Terrill for the job in 2011, they "didn't sugar coat things" for him, he recalls.

The company wasn't growing, and Terrill would be on the hook to fix it.

The execs from whom Terrill would inherit the job, including the then-CEO and founders, were "very honest" about the problems. "They said, we're not very good at product marketing," he said.

With Terrill on board, the previous CEO stayed on to run sales and international expansion.

HomeAdvisor employees play basketball at their Denver headquarters on a court with a logo so big, you can see if from an airplane. Business Insider/Julie Bort

Terrill spent months researching the problem. The data clearly showed that they needed to change both the company's name and its business model.

The company was relying on Google search and ads to find customers. So customers that had used the service didn't recognize the name, or even understand that they had used it to find their contractor.

Just as bad, the company wasn't creating repeat customers.

The research also showed the company needed to focus on expanding its most lucrative market, home repairs.

He market tested new names, and the winner was HomeAdvisor. And so, in October 2012, the product teams relaunched the company's website with the new name.

That change immediately crashed the company.

Nine months on the hot seat

The new HomeAdvisor site was invisible to Google for four days, denying the company its chief source of customers.

"There were 10 million [internet] pages that needed to be indexed. You disappear from Google when you do that," he said.

Barry Diller Michael Seto/Business Insider When Google's webcrawlers finally did see the site again, it had lost all of its ranking in the search results. To find HomeAdvisor, you'd have to click into the third page of results, which very few users ever do.

Terrill expected to lose maybe $5 million from the pain of rebranding. Ultimately, "we lost about $20 million," he said.

He'd been CEO for about a year, and believed he "was probably really close to getting fired," he admits.

For nine months, the company suffered while revenues slowly but surely clawed their way back to what it was.

Terrill was on the hot seat the whole time, and recalls constantly being questioned by execs at IAC: "Did I take this thing that was pretty good and just completely destroy it? Or was it going to be okay?"

He spent his time pleading his case, encouraging IAC, his managers, employees, and even Diller himself to stick with it. If they wanted growth, that meant a new name and a more focused business model.

Diller asked Terrill, "Chris, do you believe in this?" and when the Terrill showed him the data and stood firm, Diller backed Terrill. That support clearly helped save his hide.

So Terrill proceeded with phase two of his plan: running TV ads.

"I've been doing TV for a long time. I thought this was a great TV brand," he said. Terrill blasted low-cost ads on cable shows with audiences most likely to need home repair.

The ads not only told homeowners about HomeAdvisor, they took shots at HomeAdvisor's better-known rival Angie's List. The commercials pointed out that HomeAdvisor was free for homeowners to peruse and find a contractor, while at the time, Angie's List made you pay for a membership.

And the ads worked. Customer growth picked up pace.

After nine painful months, HomeAdvisor was back to its pre-name-change days and it kept growing, faster than ever. "All the research we did on the name and business model started to pay off," Terrill recalled.

From villain to boss

By 2015, three years after he changed the company's name and was almost fired, HomeAdvisor had annual revenues of $297 million, the company says, and had signed up 102,000 service professionals to its network. It was expanding internationally, too.

Angie HicksAngiehicks.comAngie's List was still better known, but with its stock down to $3.73 per share by July 2015, Terrill and IAC saw their chance and offered to buy it. They were turned down.

Angie's List, only slightly bigger at the time at $344 million in revenue, didn't want to be swallowed by the enemy.

But by 2017, after four quarters of shrinking revenue, and a share price still languishing well below $10, Angie's List was ready to take the offer.

Both HomeAdvisor and Angie's List also had a bigger enemy to worry about: Amazon, which had entered their market in 2015.

In September, 2017, the two companies merged, and Terrill found himself instantly running a public company, one-third bigger, filled with employees who spent years despising him and his ads.

So in a series of town hall meetings, he stood in front of those Angie's List employees and said: "I don't blame you. You guys had a great brand and we were tiny," he recalls. He told them about his plans for future growth, and asked them to stay and help him execute on that vision.

A year later, the move looks like a good one.

The combined company has hit $255 million in revenue in its first quarter of 2018, which puts it on track to book $1 billion in revenue for the year. This compared to HomeAdvisor's $151 million in revenue in the same period, before the merger. However, the joint company also swung to a $10.8 million loss for the quarter — compared to operating income of $1.4 million for HomeAdvisor alone in the year-ago quarter. The loss was due mostly to stock compensation costs due to the merger, the company said.

Still, investors are hopeful again, too. The stock is up 174% since the merger, priced at over $16 per share, giving it a $1 billion valuation. That compares to the $5.88 that Angie's List was trading on April 21, before the merger was announced.

It all happened because when a big change was needed, Terrill stuck to his guns and his research and convinced everyone not to panic, but to stay the course.

Upsetting the apple cart like that "was a really, really risky move," Terrill admits. "Thankfully, I was given the latitude and time to come back."

By the time Mark Lawrence started raising big money for his startup SpotHero — which lets drivers find, reserve, and pay for parking spots on their phones — plenty of investors told him he had "already lost."

Those were the days of the on-demand valet empire.

In 2015, anyone with a car in San Francisco could summon a valet with just a few swipes of an app. People wearing pink blazers or blue running jackets— the signature looks for startups Carbon and Luxe, respectively — zipped around the city on Razor scooters to take your keys, park your car, and return it on demand for a small fee.

Hundreds of millions of venture capital dollars flowed into these valet businesses that hoped to mimic the success of Uber and provide a service at your fingertips.

Even then, Lawrence held onto the belief that letting drivers book a parking spot on an app was the right path to building a billion-dollar on-demand parking company.

That decision ended up saving his company. The four most high-profile valet services have since shut down or pivoted, leaving SpotHero with the opportunity to take their business. The tale offers a helpful — and somewhat obvious — reminder for any entrepreneur.

"I know why they failed," Lawrence said. "Whenever you sell a product for less than it costs you, that's a problem."

On-demand valet was an incredibly costly business model. Companies like Luxe, Carbon, Zirx, and Valet Anywhere would dispatch a valet at a moment's notice to park a car in the middle of a city. The margins were thin. They made about $2 to $5 per parking job after paying the valet's wages and a monthly fee for the parking spot.

As demand for these services grew, the companies had to buy more parking spots. The parking lot and garage owners often denied giving the companies any meaningful discounts at scale. And so, as demand went up, so did their operating costs.

Lawrence said "every bone in my body" told him the business model was doomed.

Founder and CEO of SpotHero Mark Lawrence. SpotHero

Still, their early success made it difficult for Lawrence to raise money for SpotHero. He had already left his job as a financial analyst at Bank of America shortly after the worst of the financial crisis to pursue the SpotHero idea. Yet, some of top firms in the Valley, including Bessemer, Lightspeed, and GV, Google's venture arm, already made their bets in the on-demand parking space, which meant they couldn't put money into competitors like SpotHero.

By 2015, "half of the growth-stage funds in Silicon Valley invested in on-demand valet. And so, imagine, I've only raised $4 million, I'm supposed to go to market, and the pool of people I'm supposed to raise from has shrunk by 50%," Lawrence said.

Investors told him to consider expanding into valet services, which was climbing in popularity in 2015. On visits from Chicago to San Francisco, he saw the rival startups' ads and their valets, who served as walking billboards in their colorful outerwear.

"I had major doubt," Lawrence said of his company's early chances of survival.

SpotHero briefly considering a pivot to on-demand valet. The company launched a pilot program in Chicago, its home base, and New York City. At the end of the trial, SpotHero had blown through tons of cash to pay valets, and validated Lawrence's suspicion.

He presented their results of the experiment at a board meeting.

"After five slides, they were like, 'We're not doing this,'" Lawrence said.

His perseverance paid off. SpotHero spent three years building the Chicago market and fine-tuning the operation, before expanding to 49 other cities. It links drivers with over 5,000 parking lots, garages, and valets across the US and Canada. SpotHero takes a commission on every reservation made, without having to pay for labor.

According to the company, SpotHero will generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue this year, up 52% over 2017. It's raised $57 million in funding to date.

Ultimately, Lawrence said SpotHero thrived while his competitors failed, because his business model made sense. Plus, he believes it provides a better customer experience.

He said in most cases, it's faster to walk to your car, sitting in a SpotHero lot or garage, than it is to wait for a valet to get your car, drive through city traffic, and meet you.

"You know what's more on-demand than on-demand valet?" Lawrence said. "SpotHero."

Prime Day is coming — and this year, Amazon is making it about much more than deals and free shipping.

Prime Day is Amazon's made-up July holiday, where it heavily discounts items in a way similar to Black Friday. Its sales typically rival the highest sales days of the year.

It is, however, restricted to Prime members — just another perk the $120 a year club enjoys over regular Amazon shoppers. This year, however, Amazon is looking to get a little more out of its Prime members, and is hoping that they'll spend a little more time exploring all the benefits that Prime has to offer.

Sure everybody knows and loves the two-day free shipping that Prime provides. But now, Amazon is encouraging members to try Amazon Fresh, its grocery delivery service, with $30 off of any $100 order for new subscribers with the code "30FRESH".

Want to try Whole Foods 2-hour delivery via Prime Now? Amazon will give you $10 off your first two orders with the code "20PRIMEDAY".

Regular shipping speed more your style? Prime Pantry is also offering a discount— the code "PANTRY" unlocks $10 off an order $40 or over if customers start a 30-day free trial during Prime Day festivities.

That's not even including discounts on digital services like Freetime for Kids, Kindle Unlimited, Audible, and Amazon Music Unlimited, all of which are offering special promotions

Amazon is also discounting its own private label brands for Prime Day, many of which are already available only to Prime members, further highlighting another perk.

Taking all this together, Amazon is turning Prime Day into Prime Highlight Day. Yes, we still expect there to be deals, but the deals will highlight what is special about being a Prime member, and it's designed to drag customers deeper into the ecosystem so they can't even dream of quitting as it has become such a vital part of their everyday life.

These are services that Prime members might not even know exist, but the spotlight of Prime Day could get them noticed as the fanfare a deal bonanza draws eyeballs to Amazon.

Amazon has an interest attracting new members as well as keeping them happy, as Prime members still spend about double what non-members do on Amazon, and buy much more frequently.

Sonos has amassed a fervent fan base over the years. But that doesn't mean investors should get overly enthusiastic about the company's stock when it hits the public markets.

The consumer electronics company, which filed on Friday to go public, has carved out a nice niche for itself with its line of wifi connected speakers. But the company's sales growth has moderated from its heyday, and in recent years it's struggled to post a profit. Meanwhile, it's dependent on some of the biggest and most powerful companies in tech for a core new technology that's transforming the home audio market even as it faces growing competition from those same companies.

In other words, I wouldn't bet the house on Sonos — no matter how much you may love its connected speakers.

By some measures, Sonos has built up a respectable business. Since 2013, its sales have nearly doubled to almost $1 billion. Its gross margin — the portion of its sales it has left after accounting for the direct costs of producing its profits — has generally been in the 45% range or higher. That's a healthy figure for a hardware company, indicating that it's able to charge a premium price for its products. It also gives the company plenty of room to spend money on marketing and research-and-development.

Sonos has some fanatical fans

Consumers have been catching on. In the last 12 months, the company sold 4.6 million speakers, more than triple the number it sold in its 2013 fiscal year.

And Sonos' fans really seem to love its products. Of the 6.9 million households that have a registered Sonos speaker, 61% have at least two of the company's products. Some 27% have four or more.

The average customer who starts off with just one Sonos speaker will buy more than two more over time, according to the company. On average, customers who start off with more than one Sonos product initially buy about three at the start and then purchase another two over time.

All that sounds great. But there are signs that Sonos has struggled to build a profitable business outside its niche of geeky audiophiles.

Warning: The best days may be behind it

Most of its sales growth over the last five years happened between Sonos' 2013 and 2014 fiscal years, when its revenue soared 75%. Since then, the company's revenue hasn't grown faster than about 10% on an annual basis.

The bulk of the growth in Sonos' device sales happened in that same period, when they nearly doubled. Ever since, the growth in its product sales have been much more modest, rising just 11% in its last year.

As Sonos' growth slowed, its bottom line deteriorated. The company went from posting a modest profit in fiscal 2014 to a big loss the following year. On an annual basis, it's been operating in the red ever since, although it's gradually improved its bottom line.

Things improved for the company in the first half of its current fiscal year. Sales were up 18% over the same period a year earlier and the company posted a profit for the period. But that improvement could prove to be a chimera.

Sonos' fiscal year ends around the end of September, meaning that its first half includes the all-important holiday season, where it almost certainly gets the bulk of its sales. The company posted a profit for the first half of its fiscal year last year too only to end up posting a full-year loss.

The speaker market is being transformed by "smarts"

Beyond just the numbers, there are bigger reasons to be concerned about Sonos' prospects. Even as the company is hitting the public market, the industry it competes in is changing dramatically.

From when it debuted its first speaker in 2005 until the last year or so, Sonos had the connected speaker market pretty much to itself. If you wanted a whole-home audio system that allowed you to stream music from the internet that you could set up yourself without a custom installer, Sonos was generally the way to go.

Amazon upped the sound quality of its Echo line when it rolled out its second-generation devices last fall. Elaine Thompson/AP But that's no longer the case. Amazon's line of Echo smart speakers offers the same capability. So do Google's Home devices and now Apple's HomePod.

The Echo and the Home weren't initially on par with Sonos' devices in terms of audio quality. But both Amazon and Google last year released new versions of their smart speakers with improved sound. And audio quality is the main selling point of Apple's HomePod.

But all three companies offer something with their speakers that Sonos traditionally hasn't — a built-in intelligent agent. You can control Amazon, Google, and Apple's smart speakers with just your voice. And you can do a lot more with them that than. You can use them to turn on and off your lights, tell you the news and weather, answer trivia questions, and give you the latest sports scores.

The smart speaker market has started to catch fire. In the first quarter of this year, unit sales grew a whopping 210% from the same period last year, according to market research firm Canalys, hitting 9 million worldwide. That's nearly twice as many speakers sold in one quarter as Sonos sold in the last year. Canalys expects worldwide sales of smart speakers to reach 56.3 million this year, up from about 35 million last year and fewer than 10 million in 2016.

That kind of growth obviously far outpaces what Sonos has been doing lately. It also illustrates how smart speakers are starting to dominate the speaker market, just as smartphones pushed aside dumb phones and nearly all televisions are now smart TVs.

Sonos' smart speaker strategy is really risky

Sonos has recognized that market shift toward smart speakers. Last fall, it introduced its first one and it has more in the works.

But there's a big flaw in Sonos' strategy — it doesn't have its own voice-assistant technology. Instead, for now, it's relying on Amazon's Alexa assistant, although it plans to add in Google's Assistant and Apple's Siri in the future.

At best, that will relegate Sonos to being a second fiddle to the big players. When people think of an Amazon-powered smart speaker, they think of the company's Echo line. Sonos faces a huge marketing challenge to make consumers aware that one of its smart speakers can offer the same Alexa assistant that they'd get on an Echo.

Sonos' Beam soundbar is one of several smart speakers it offers. Kaylee Fagan / Business Insider Even it's able to do so, it may find it tough convincing customers to pay up for one of its speakers, when they can get an entry-level Echo Dot for $50. That challenge could prove even more difficult when you consider that Amazon has full control over which smart speakers it promotes in its web store — and has taken full advantage of that control to promote its Echo line.

Sonos' reliance on the big tech companies could become more problematic over time. Right now, as Sonos acknowledged in the document it filed to go public, it doesn't pay Amazon anything to use Alexa. But that could change if Amazon ever perceives Sonos' devices to be a competitive threat — or as a potential money-maker

Worse yet for Sonos, Amazon and the other tech companies could just cut Sonos off, leaving it without any voice assistant for its smart speakers — both the ones it's already sold to its customers and any future devices. In fact, according to Sonos' regulatory filing, Amazon can sever ties with the company with only "limited notice."

"If these partners disable the integration of their technology into our products, demand for our products may decrease and our sales may be harmed," Sonos warned investors. "We cannot assure you that the resources we invest in research and development, existing or alternative technology partnerships, marketing and sales will be adequate for us to be successful in establishing and maintaining a large share of the voice-enabled speaker market.

"If we are not able to capture and sustain market share, our future revenue growth will be negatively impacted."

For me, that's good reason to be cautious about Sonos. It may make great speakers. But in the smart-speaker era, it's much more important to have the technology to make them intelligent.