A Few Things I’ve Learned After Ten Years in Business

As mentioned in my previous post, this past week was CollegeXTRA.com, Inc.’s 10th birthday.  CollegeXTRA.com, Inc. is the corporate name of Union Street Media.  As a celebration of this milestone, I’d like to share with you a few of the things I’ve learned over the past ten years.

Easy money doesn’t exist but free lunches do

Running a business of twenty people requires a lot of cash and none of it comes easily.  Each month our sales team is responsible for generating well over a hundred thousand dollars.  To earn that money, our web development team needs to produce the work, which requires our product development team to create a scalable architecture for the sites.  Our internet marketing team needs get the sites up in the search engines so that our clients get the traffic to generate a return on their invest.  Our support team needs to keep the sites live, handle incoming phone calls and help clients with updates.  Our office manager extrodinaire needs to invoice for all of this work and then made sure we actually get paid for it.  This is fun, challenging and inspiring, but not easy.

However, there are free lunches.  I know because I used to buy them for people and now, on occasion, people buy them for me.  Maslow’s hierarchy of needs requires that we eat.  Every day.  Often three times.  I have used lunch as a way to get an hour with really smart people.  Our awesome attorney, Peter Kunin, helped set us on the right course over many-a-$10-sandwich, which is less then his normal billable rate.  I have had the opportunity to learn from successful entrepreneurs about the lessons from their businesses over a lunch, and applied those lessons to USM.  After a trip to the Google Campus in 2008, I discovered that 110% of Google employees eat free lunch at Google every day (I really appreciated the free lunch even if the shareholders might not).  So now we have office lunch too at Union Street Media every Tuesday.  We get together as a group, share stories, ideas and hang out.  It’s awesome.

A good networker is a netweaver

Jim Shattuck, the Director of Career Services at my senior year at Middlebury College, had a simple manta: “Network, network, network.”  Although I didn’t know it at the time, I actually honed this skill at Middlebury.  Freshman year I found out pretty quickly that if I knew the person behind the bar at a campus party, I got my luke warm Natty Light faster.  Today, I’m the most public facing employee at Union Street Media.  I spend about 10% of my time attending business events in the community and volunteering on boards of other organizations.  However, you can’t just take from your network.  You have to give back to it.  One of the things I like to do the most is connect people in the community with each other, whether it’s for business purposes or friendship.  When people move to Burlington, I invite them to the office and share my knowledge of the area.  They leave with a sticky pad full of names, emails and phone numbers from contacts at a company where they might find a job to the best guys fix-it-guy (Chris Labelle, 802-343-0269) and mechanic in town (Daren Smith, 802-660-3111).

Vermont actually is a good place to do business

After 30 years of listening to rants about the “richest one purcent“, Vermont may be one of the last places in the US that thinks you can tax the rich to balance your budget.  (It’s also the last place in the US where you’re better of speaking French then Spanish, which lined up nicely with my study-abroad year in France).  There are a lot of “rich” people in Vermont, they just stay for less the 180 days each year and take their tax dollars with them.  I wish Vermont could address it’s challenged relationship with money, but that is another topic.

Despite the best efforts of some elected representatives to make it not the case, Vermont is actually a good place to do business.  Vermonters, by-birth-and-by-choice, are honest, hard working people.  They do right by others and in turn do right by themselves.  The corruption that is rampant in many parts of the world doesn’t exist here.  There is a strong sense of community, place and identity.  The quality of life is second to none (unless you’re a surfer, like my sophomore year roommate).  Since good jobs are hard to come by here, people will stick with one for a long time.  It makes for a steady, albeit small, labor pool which is the number one ingredient for a successful business.

A company’s most important assets go home every night

Union Street Media doesn’t have heavy machinery or physical capital that you can touch.  We have brains and some really smart ones at that.  Inside the heads of the people that work at USM you’ll find the future of our business.  My job, as I see it, is to harness the power of all these brains, align their interests with that of the company and then get out of the way.

Make serendipity happen

While I don’t know if Bo Peabody actually coined this phrase, it sure sounds like something he would have written in his book Lucky or Smart.  My brother and business partner, Jon, who has been along for much of this ride likes to say that 80% of life is just showing up (thanks to Woody Allen on that one).  Some of the best opportunities in our business have come from being at the right place at the right time.  Coincidence?  Sort of.  Lucky?  A bit.  Over and over again, we found our way to an opportunity and then capitalized upon it.  That’s what great teams do.

Happy 10th Birthday to CollegeXTRA.com, Inc.

Ten years ago today, after a long lunch at a cafe in SOHO with my then business partners, I called The Company Corporation in Delaware and officially incorporated a start-up that had launched out of my Middlebury College dorm room the previous fall.

The spring of 2000 were heady times.  Everyone was full of optimism.  The NASDAQ was less then a month away from it’s all time high. Twenty-somethings like me were becoming multi-millionaires overnight on The-Emperor-Has-No-Clothes business models and we were going to be the next ones.  A Doonsbury Cartoon from that spring summed up the times, as one character said to the other “Just finished the business plan.  I’m off to get a Mercedes.  Want one?”

Ten years later, the story didn’t play out that way for CollegeXTRA.com, Inc., but that’s just fine with me.  As a celebration of our tenth birthday, I’d like share a few things I’ve learned along the way, but first, a little history on how I got here.  If you want to fast forward through the “how we got here” part, my next post covers some of the things I’ve learned over the past ten years.

The business you start is not the one you end up in. So how did we go from creating “for students, by students” web sites at college campuses to developing web sites for REALTORS?

Our original model was to develop sites like Middkid.com at campuses across the country.  Middkid, which is still very active today, is a hyper-local portal focused on the Middlebury College community and supported by advertising from the merchants in the town of Middlebury.  We have a local business directory with coupons from our sponsors, an offline printed discount card that can be found in the wallets many students on campus and a monthly special events email newsletter.  The site has a database with thousands of course evaluations written by students over the years, sharing their experiences about the classes they took and the professors that teach them.  There is a Middlebury student who is our Campus Manager each year that resubscribes the businesses during the summer and the updates & markets the site through out the school year.  It’s an awesome, paid internship that is one of the best hands-on run-your-own business jobs I’ve seen for college students.

With all the success we had (and continue to have) at Middlebury, why didn’t this go national? The answer there is a blog treatise in itself, but the quick points are as follows

• Ideas are great.  Implementation is really, really hard.  At 33, I don’t know much.  At 23, I knew nothing.  We experienced a lot of the challenges that faced most start ups.  Partners that didn’t always see eye to eye.  Lack of infrastructure.  A frenetic pace that wasn’t sustainable.  Insufficient skill sets in key areas of the business.  Some bad timing (we launched our expanded campus platform in September 2001).  The list goes on.
• As we chant at the hockey games “there’s only one Middlebury.”  The town:gown ratio in Middlebury turned out to be the perfect balance.  Businesses counted on students, but students had options so the businesses need to advertise.  When we went to smaller communities, like Hamilton, NY, home of Colgate University, there was only one pizza place.  When we went to larger ones, like Syracuse, the students were drowned out by the population of the community.
• We were only as good on each campus as the student that was representing us (and the student turnover was every year).  The priorities of college life require that you drink with your friends, hang out with your significant other, go to class / complete your assignments and sleep.  Managing a business came fifth, at best.  Only a select few of the students were as passionate about their campus site as I had been about Middkid.  It was a job for them, not their baby, and it took me a while to come to grips with it.
• We were ahead of our time.  Sounds like a cop-out, but in 2000, we were selling online advertising to College-town merchants who had no web site.  In order to get the sale, we ended up building a web page on the college site for the merchants and those pages were becoming their de facto web sites.  Since you follow the money in business, we went to where it was (web development) and left behind what wasn’t working.

When we decided to put the college student business model to bed, we looked around and saw another opportunity, which is the story of Union Street Media.  We had developed a great content management system that let the campus managers update their site.  We were able to leverage that tool for business clients who needed a web presence.  However, when you’re literally going door-to-door selling web sites, you’re competing with the most precious assett in business, and life: people’s time.  We were having marginal success at it, when our then advisor, now board member and long time mentor, David Bradbury, set us up with meetings at three different trade associations in Vermont.

We established partnerships with the Vermont Bar Association, the Vermont Lodging and Restaurant Association and the Vermont Association of REALTORS.  With each partnership, the association paid us to develop their web site.  We then discounted our services and they marketed us to their members as a benefit of joining.  As it turned out, lawyers were too smart for the internet in 2002, lodging & restaurant establishments in Vermont couldn’t afford it, and the real estate industry was about to be fundamentally changed by the “Internet Data Exchange” (IDX), which is the sharing of brokers’ listings online.  Previous to the internet, if you wanted to buy a house you needed to walk into a broker’s office and look at the “black book” of listings.  The book was printed monthly and out of date the moment it left the press.  It made for an extremely inefficient process, but let REALTORS control the information.  The tug-of-war that ensued with in the real estate community was vicious.  One Vermont REALTOR virtually accosted my brother at their annual convention in 2003 “Scooby-Doo” style for ruining his businesses (“if it wasn’t for your rascally kids…”)

From the early days of developing web sites for local Burlington VT real estate clients like Century 21 Advantage and Brian Boardman, we expanded to NH, MA, NC and Chicago (we’re White Sox fans).  We are now developing web sites and providing internet & social media marketing for hundreds of agents, brokers, teams and real estate offices all over the country.

Now that you know the history, check back tomorrow for the lessons I have learned over the past ten years running a business.

USM’s Spencer Taylor to speak at Thursday’s “Ask the Expert” Session at the Northwest Vermont Board of REALTORS

The headline pretty much sums it up… at 8:30 AM on Thursday January 21st, Spencer Taylor will speak to the members of the Northwest Vermont Board of REALTORS at their conference space in Williston, VT.  Curious what’s real estate web site tidbits will be covered in his presentation?  Listen to Spencer and NVBR’s Mary Ward talk about it!

Changing Media Landscape

I had an interesting phone call from a longtime client yesterday who decided to stop advertising in his local print real estate monthly for the next four months and will instead be engaging our report, recommend, revise process.  “RRR” helps our clients improve the search engine placement of their web site and generate more leads from the web.  This client understands the shifting media landscape and I was pleased to see him make his marketing investments accordingly.

The upcoming Media Convergence Conference in New York City, put on by The Economist, launched a video called Shift Happens, that helps put these changes in context.  They posted a fascinating video about the event here:

My favorite statistic: The average American teen sends 2272 text messages a month.

With numbers like that, and the often quoted 2008 NAR study that shows 87% of home buyers use the internet when making a purchase, I wonder how much longer people will continue to disproportionately spend money offline?

Brian Boardman on why he uses Union Street Media

One of our favorite lines from Good to Great is “be interested, not interesting”… so please excuse this somewhat self-promotional blog post.  It’s not our style.  However, we’ve been cooking up some new videos here at Union Street Media and have one we feel compelled to share.  Brian Boardman, the Owner / Broker of Coldwell Banker Hickok & Boardman and a longtime Union Street Media client, talked a little bit about why he’s working with us and we got it on tape!

Inspired by a few videos we saw on our semi-annual trip to the Inman News Real Estate Connect conference, we also produced a video biography of Brian to help introduce him to site visitors.  We launched a new site, www.agentsdrivinghydrids.com, to coincide with Brian’s effort to encourage REALTORS to drive hybrid vehicles this summer as well.  If you’re one of them, please let Brian know and he’ll link to your web site.

Adam Hergenrother, USM client, named to REALTOR Magazine’s 2009 “30 Under-30″

Congrats to Adam Hergenrother!

Adam was recently selected to REALTOR Magazine’s “30 Under 30″ for 2009.  A longtime Union Street Media client, Adam and his wife Sarah recognized early on that that a strong online presence is key to building a business in real estate.  They have been able to convert the leads they have collected online into sales and are now one the top REALTOR teams in the Burlington area.  Union Street Media has worked with Adam since 2006 and are honored to be a part of his success!

Being an Entrepreneur in the Great Recession

There is an excellent blog post by Bill Taylor I recently read on the Harvard Business School blog that discussed the difference between entrepreneurs & MBA’s and who has the upper hand the economy we now face.  In this topsy-turvey economy, with desperation being the mother of invention, we’re seeing both an increase in graduate school applications and start up companies.

Let me start by saying that I see myself as an entrepreneur. I’ve been one since I opened my lemonade stand to finance my baseball card collection in fourth grade. A number of our clients are entrepreneurs too: REALTORS, hospitality businesses, social entrepreneurs such as Choose Responsibility & Given Limb.  The list is extensive.  There are a lot of people out there starting things and when you start something, you inevitably need a web site.  One of my favorite parts of my job is working with entrepreneurs to help them further their initiatives.

On occasion I have been asked to speak to student groups about my experience as an entrepreneur.  I’ve often said that when one is considering starting a business, they should envision the worst case scenario, which is normally something along the lines of “My business idea fails. I lose money. My lifestyle is negatively effected” etc.  I then ask them if they’re willing to accept that scenario as fact?  If the answer is yes, then I encourage them to move forward with it.

When I started Union Street Media in 1999, my worse case scenario was “the company dot-bombs, I’m 24/25/26 years old, I have a great story and I apply to business school.”  Well, the dot-bomb didn’t happen.  I’m now 32 and still haven’t managed to get to business school.  A few years ago when I was asked to speak to a panel of Tuck MBA’s their first week of class that line got the best response of all. Read more

Real Estate Apps on the iPhone

Apple is running TV commercials focusing on the applications available on the new iPhone.  They recently released one that highlights a real estate application geared towards students looking for apartment rentals close to campus.  You can see the advertisement here.

Although college students perceived as market leaders when it comes to technology adaptation (just behind middle schoolers), they’re not the only ones using their mobile devices to look up real estate.  As iPhone sales skyrocket even in this down economy, users are expecting that your site will load on their mobile device.  The trend is catching on amongst real estate data sites too.  Some newspapers like the Gainsville Sun and sites like Trulia & Zillow are making their sites easier to search using a mobile phone.

You should check with your web developer to make sure your site is mobile friendly.  Some real estate web site developers (like Union Street Media), can create a new mobile template for your site that strips away non-core images & content, which increases the speed that the site loads on the mobile phone.  Check out the two variations of Brian Boardman’s web site to see what it looks like on a web browser and on a mobile phone.

We generally see three types of REALTORS requesting mobile-friendly sites:

• REALTORS who are technology savvy and browse the web on their mobile phones
• REALTORS who’s clients are technology savvy and use mobile phones for real estate searches
• REALTORS in a second home markets

Check out www.adamdow.com if you’d like to see one person that fits all three categories (and was one of the first clients to get a mobile-friendly site from USM).

There are a lot of other cool examples of mobile-friendly real estate web sites out there.  Please share any that you have come across in the comments section below.  Thanks!

Video Testimonials: Simple, Inexpensive, Convincing

In Vermont, we have a great tradition called Town Meeting Day, where members of the community come together and vote on local issues.  Depicted in a famous Norman Rockwell image, Town Meeting Day is one of the unique things about Vermont that makes this a wonderful place to call home.  Here in Burlington, our 39,800 residents makes us the largest city in the state (calling it both a city and within Vermont are considered debatable points).  Since we’ve outgrown the high school gym for our Town Meeting day, Burlingtonians go to the polls.  Accordingly, this past March we held an election for Mayor.

Amongst the candidates that ran for office, I publicly supported a moderate independent candidate named Dan Smith.  Unfortunately, he didn’t win.  However, Dan did do some pretty cool stuff on the web much of which involved the use of video.  Using the new $229 HD Flip Mino Video camera, Dan’s staff videoed a number of local supporters, myself included, and uploaded the videos onto youtube.  They then embedded the videos in his site (which is still online, but may not be much longer).  This was pretty simple to do, easy to publish and unique with in the campaign.

So what does this have to do with selling real estate, promoting your company, product or service?  A lot.

I’m a believer that device consolidation will eventually lead to your computer (or iPhone) being the one tool you use to access all media, including television.   At this time, however, video still has a little bit of the “wow” factor still left in it online.  Imagine a new visitor coming to your site and hearing from your clients, on video, talking about how they benefited from working with you?  It would be unique, compelling and not that hard to do.  I’ve mentioned the idea to a number of our real estate clients of videoing a young couple just after they have purchased their first time home.  Hearing them describe how you helped them find, negotiate and close on their home would be compelling.  Unlike a video tour of a home, which I also recommend, a video testimonial has a long shelf life on your site.

We have a couple of clients who have been progressive with their use of video, such as Dan Cypress and Jessica Bridge at RE/MAX North Professionals.  Jessica, who also endorsed Dan Smith, is photogenic and Dan knows how to do a thing or two with iMovie.  However, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to put together a great video about the Vermont Required Consumer Information Disclosure and post it on your site.  All it takes is a little initiative and a investment in a Flip Video Camera.

Please share links with us in the comment section below if you have posted cool videos on your site.

Swimming in January

In the 1930’s, my grandfather was a member of his local polar bear club.  When asked what it has been like to be in business during the last couple of weeks, I’ve thought of him jumping in the freezing cold water in January.   This economic climate isn’t comfortable, but it has a way of invigorating the senses and washing away complacency.  There will be a feeling of accomplishment when we’re all dried off.  However, we still may be a long way from the warming hut.

It’s not trite to say that those of us under 80 have never seen anything like this in our lifetime and it’s anyone’s best guess as to where it will go from here.  The peanut gallery will entertain an ongoing discussion of how much worse it will get.  This exercise is guestimation, at best.  After hearing NYU’s Nouriel Roubini discuss his prognosis on the future at last year’s Real Estate Connect, one person commented “Well, that’s why they call economics the dismal science.”  The economic tsunami will take out both good and bad companies but there are ways to improve your chances.  While it may sound self-serving, leveraging the power of the internet to grow your business is at the top of the list.

This will be the first recession of the Web 2.0 era.  The Internet today is a very different beast then it was in the days of the dot-com hangover.  More people are online then ever and they use the web for a broader number of services than in the past.  The acquisition cost per client on the web is still lower then offline media.  Campaigns can be made much more precise.  All the results of internet marketing are trackable thanks to tools like Google Analytics.  As a result, when deciding where to trim advertising budgets, business owners are more likely to do it offline.  I believe this trend attributed to Google’s revenues increasing in the third quarter.

Part of my cautious optimism is anecdotal.  Several of our clients have told us that they’re reducing their overall spending but are increasing their internet marketing investment.  We will be releasing a new internet marketing package in November at a discounted rate to help those clients who are committed to internet marketing.  Please contact me if you’re interested in learning more.

Finally, over the last couple of weeks I have been asked by a number of business owners, clients and friends how Union Street Media is weathering the financial storm.  During our staff meeting last week we outlined how we’re preparing to address some of the challenges that we’ll likely face over the next couple of months.  Thanks to our strong growth over the past five years and a prudent, old yankee financial management strategy, we feel we’re well positioned for what may come our way.  We look forward to seeing you in the warming hut!