Andy Vota, vice president of Union Street Media

In case any of you missed it, our very own Andy Vota was interviewed on WPTZ channel 5 here at Union Street Media. Burlington Vermont has recently begun the application process to Google’s fiber network pilot program. This network would be ultra high speed, providing bandwidth of up to 1GB/second to homes and businesses.

Andy is quoted as saying “We want to be on the cutting edge of technology in Burlington, and this would be a great opportunity to do that. We want to be associated with a great brand like Google that’s known worldwide as a leader in technology.”

Watch the segment and Andy’s interview here

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.

From whence I came to where I will stay

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.

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.

Scooby Doo

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.

New Hampshire real estate agency Prudential Spencer Hughes is a long time client of Union Street Media. They went for a redesign to update the look of their website. They’re also continuing with our Report Recommend Revise Internet Marketing services to ensure the site’s high level of performance.

Overland Summers is a teen adventure program that offers a variety of lifetime experiences to youth. Their offerings include hiking & biking excursions, writing programs, language immersion programs, and more. Overland came to us wanting a redesign that would better express the incredible programs they offer. They are also marketing their website through Union Street Media’s RRR Program.

Eve Thompson is a Reston, VA, realtor who has been utilizing our Internet Marketing services for some time. Eve made the decision to have Union Street Media build a brand new website that reflects the “new urban” appeal of Reston. Our Internet Marketing team continues to work with Eve on her online marketing efforts through the RRR program.

The Burlington Tennis Club is a member-owned, non-profit recreational club located in Chittenden County, VT. They came to Union Street Media wanting to keep up with the times, and attract younger members with a cleaner, better designed website. Their goal was to shift their advertising focus from traditional methods to include more digital marketing.

Located in Greenwich, CT, Brunswick School is a college preparatory day school for boys in grades Pre-Kindergarten through 12. Brunswick needed a fresh, new design for their site that provided easier navigation for potential students, their parents, and alumni. Union Street Media gave them the functionality they desired in a professional and aesthetically pleasing package.

Bullrock Corporation has been in construction management and real estate development since the early 1980s, and in 2000 they became involved in the senior living business. Bullrock Corporation came to us needing a website that provided clear information about their services, targeted potential customers, and provided a professional representation of their business.

Union Street Media is proud to add each of these sites to our evolving portfolio of clients!

Click here to view the embedded video.

The founder is John McCardell, former president of Middlebury College. John believes the drinking age should be lowered to 18 so young adults in the 18-20 age range don’t resort to dangerous measures to acquire alcohol. The idea is that by teaching people at an earlier age how to drink responsibly, it will lead to better habits in the future.

John came to us needing a better website, and that’s exactly what we gave him. Watch him talk about his positive partnership with Union Street Media.

Check out the Union Street Media YouTube Channel to watch other happy clients speak about their work with us!

Camp Pemigewassett

Camp Pemigewassett (or “Camp Pemi” for short) is a family owned boys camp in the beautiful Lakes Region of New Hampshire.  They needed a better laid out site to reach potential campers to experience this character building camping experience. Their new site helps extend their reach and foster relationships with alumni.

Dream Maker Properties LLC is a boutique real estate firm in North Carolina that needed a stronger web presence to highlight their expertise. With offices in Chapel Hill and Elkin, they needed their website to extend their viability in North Carolina real estate. The new website and blog is designed to achieve just that that.

OMARA is a non-profit booster club that works with the Okemo Mountain Competition Programs and Okemo Mountain School to provide support to those who are serious about their future in their respective discipline. Their site offers more insight into what they do, who they serve, and the awesome snow sports programs at Okemo Mountain Resort.

This Massachusetts real estate agency needed to display their experience in Cape Cod commercial real estate, vacation rentals, and collection of other properties they offer.  Their new site gives visitors a fresh new interface, easier navigation, and a blog for the folks at Bayside Realty Consultants to display their knowledge.

This hydro-powered commercial property in Stowe needed a website that illustrated its authentic beauty. Redstone Commercial Group can be proud of this historic property, which was formerly a saw and grist mill. Check out the captivating Tubbs Mill and matching website here.

RE/MAX Presidential is a real estate agency serving the Mount Washington Valley in New Hampshire and Maine. They needed a better designed website to feature their extensive property listings and wealth of local knowledge. Check out their new site to see how easy to navigate it has become.

The Merritt & Merritt & Moulton boutique law firm, located here in Burlington, VT, provides support and guidance to a variety of start up companies. Their new Wordpress template better displays the depth of professional services they provide.

This forum for Vermont entrepreneurs was also switched to the Wordpress platform. It now has better functionality to provide a better link to the network of associated organizations and individuals. You can see the site and find out when their next meeting is here.

The Union Street Media team is proud to have these new additions to our constantly growing portfolio of awesome websites!

From the Upper Connecticut River Valley region of Vermont and New Hampshire, James Becker provides custom furniture, reproduction furniture, and his own original designs.  Jim provided USM with excellent photography and site copy.  We were able to put it all together to create an awesome looking site for Jas. Becker Cabinetmaker Inc.

All of the agents at Ski Home Realty are avid skiers and snowboarders, making them experts in Mount Snow region real estate. They needed a fresh new design and content to reflect their expertise. From their office at the base of Mt. Snow, Ski Home Realty provides quality townhouses, condos, vacation rentals, and more to those looking for an exciting Vermont snow adventure.

Chip Craig and the team at GreyBeard Realty are based in the mountains of Western North Carolina.  As longtime Union Street Media clients, the came back to us to refresh their site to make it more functional and user-friendly.  We were happy to help out in the process and are proud of the results!

The Aloha Foundation on Lake Fairlee in Vermont is another longtime Union Street Media client that relaunched their site with us this past month.  After visiting the site, you’ll see why we’d love to go back to camp for a summer!

The Green Castle Estate House is an intimate vacation villa on a remarkably beautiful and historic plantation in the Jamaican countryside. Green Castle brings together diverse stakeholders that are committed to a positive future. They specialize in eco-friendly vacations and they needed a clean new design to illustrate the gorgeous environment Green Castle inhabits.

The Burlington Climate Action Plan is helping the City reduce emissions to 80% below what they were in 2007 by 2050. The BCAP needed a more functional website to make their plan more widespread and easier to find on the internet.

The Church Street Marketplace is an award winning open air mall that is a hub of activity. Union Street Media gave this Burlington cultural center a new design so web surfers can easily find out more about the various stores, restaurants, and events that make Church Street such a downtown hot spot. Visitors of Burlington can also find information about history, directions, parking, and store hours.

At the Putnam Indian Field School in Greenwich CT, children build positive relationships, grow in independence, develop skills, and gain knowledge in areas that interest them in a warm and nurturing environment. The redesigned website allows new families and returning ones to have easy access to PIFS information and enriching programs.

All of these sites are proudly welcomed to our expanding portfolio. If you want your website to better represent your business, contact Union Street Media today!

Recently we’ve compiled a video that highlights a few good words that some of our clients had to say about their experience with Union Street Media.

After you’ve signed up, check out all of Union Street Media’s videos and rate your favorites!