Wednesday, April 28, 2010

The last speaker we visted was a man named Eric Zeanah who is president of American Accessories. Eric recieved an Industrial Engineering degree from the University of Tennessee in 1984 and began working for one of his professors doing part time time studies. He was eventually hired by the company which he later spun off into American Accessories. In this way, Eric is not necessarily and entrepreneur in the since that he created something from nothing, he took a company, which already existed and didn't exactly work, and changed in into a successful business.

American Accessories is a unique company which provides companies such as Unilever, Philip Morris, and Johnson and Johnson custom manufacturing capabilities for different projects they might have. They have a vast network of 100+ facilities overseas, mainly in China, that they subcontract through. One key to their business is that they do not directly own any of the facilities, they only control factories through the orders they have and the way they want the manaufacturing lines to run. American Accessories is truely an international company with roughly half of their employees working out of thier Chinese office.

Many might first think that working in China might would be extremely difficult due to many factors such as the language barrier, comunist government, distance and timzone difference. However, Eric who knows no foreign languages, explained that China in his opinion is the most capitalisitic country in the work an the easiest government to work with. He has never had to sit accross a government official except when he bought is house over there. Additionally, because of the internet, communication is so rapid and cheap that it is much easier to do business there than it was back in the 80's when he started.

Mr. Zeanah was full of advise for young entrepreneurs and those interested in running a business one day. The most important thing I learned from Eric was the importance of the relationship you have with the poeople you work with. Eric is the ultimate networker and is friends with many of the people he works with. He often goes on dinner outings with the people he works with and to have both a fun time and talk business. The importance of knowing how to network with people and how to have a business discussion should not be overlooked. The other important point I took from Eric was the importance of service. He believes that the concept of service has died in this country and it is too easy to say no. He spoke of the importance to listen to your customers and provide them what they want instead of what you think they want, even when it is difficult. It is much easier to get an existing customer to buy something new and different than to find a new customer. One of the lines I picked up was "the easiest thing to sell in business is an answer" therefore you should listen and absorb like a sponge to learn about a market or a problem, then make it better.

Monday, April 12, 2010

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.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Berry Goss and Pro2Serve

Berry Goss founded Pro2Serve about 14 years ago after working for SAIC for in a variety of positions. While there he learned all about business from acquisitions, to proposals, to being a program manager. He eventually decided he wanted to build a business from the ground up and not spend 50% of his time doing administrative duties. After discussing it with his family, he took the plunge as an entrepreneur and moved to Oak Ridge to start his service based business. Pro2Serve is an technical and engineering services firm that sells knowledge and solutions mainly in the nuclear industry. Its four business units are design engineering, physical security systems, environmental management, and nuclear security division.

The most valuable thing I took away from the presentation given by Berry Goss was what he said to us about values. His philosophy was to set baseline values in a company that would attract people who believed in those. He also believed that good long lasting companies have a set of core values that are constant in changing markets. When he started Pro2Serve, he wrote into the bylaws that they are committed to giving back to the communities in which they work. Specifically, every year they would take 10% of their profits from and disperse it over the next year to a variety of charities. He was able to successfully defend these values when pursuing venture capital which he said was one of the more difficult parts of his journey.

Because Mr. Goss’s business is heavily dependent on the quality of his employees and their ability to solve their customers problems, I asked him what is strategy was for hiring and retaining quality employees. He said that the main way was through the network of people he and his current employees know. This affirms they many times I have heard how important networking is.