John Platallero and EventBooking

John Platallero is the founder and CEO of a company called EventBooking which is an internet based software company which produces a unique organizational calendar program which gives its customers a portal to sync or look up calendars of other users within the network. Mr. Platallero originally received and electrical engineering degree from the University of Tennessee and went to work for Alcoa. He initially had no intentions of starting his own business but changed his mind after he realized the internet would change the way the music industry would schedule concerts. He quit his job at Alcoa and went back to get his MBA at UT where he wrote his business plan for EventBooking.

One of his suggestions to our class was to live below your means, similar to what Dave Ramsey preaches. Mr. Platallero was completely out of debt at the time he wanted to start his own business which put him in a place financially for him to do so.

He began raising money through friends and professors spoke of the importance of how one has to know how to answer the questions like, how much do you want and what do I get out of it? He said that creating the business plan evaluation was difficult because he had never done such a thing before and because the internet was still relatively new at the time, it was hard to estimate a market use.

During the early stages of his business, Mr. Platallero received a lot of enthusiasm from both venue owners and band managers about his EventBooking. But of course, as I have seen from the lectures, no entrepreneur goes without experiencing hard setbacks. Mr. Platallero’s was that the concert venues were not updating the schedules on the calendar, essentially rendering the service useless. His saving grace was that he listened to his customers, changed his approach to the software and essentially started fresh.

Their application is now much more complex and individualized because each large venue uses his program as their main scheduling application. Mr. Platallero attributes his success to making his company very customer centric. They are very conscious about giving the customer exactly what they want, which sometimes means leaving out other parts of their program. After hearing Mr. Platallero speak, I will attribute his success to the energy and enthusiasm in which he talks about his product. He is obviously very passionate about what is business is doing which means he works very hard and it and thus has created a successful business.