On Building A Website For RFID News And Information
I was a senior writer at the Industry Standard in 2001 when I first heard of radio frequency identification (RFID), a new technology for tracking shipments, managing inventory, and much more. A group of researchers at MIT, backed by Procter & Gamble, Walmart, and the Department of Defense, saw it as the next evolution of the barcode. It sounded big, so when the Standard crashed and burned, along with the dotcoms it covered, I bought a book on how to write HTML code, got a domain (rfidjournal.com), and a $9.99 hosting plan, and started a website in 2002.
Thanks to Google, folks began finding the website, and suppliers of the technology approached me about advertising on it. Seems I had a business. A year later, I contacted a friend who organized events and launched our first conference and exhibition, which is where the real revenue and big margins are. Around the same time, Walmart announced plans to require its top suppliers to put RFID tags on pallets and cases. Website traffic sourced 3000% and our conference grew by 433% in two years. We outgrew hotels in Chicago and had to move the event to Las Vegas.
What's your backstory and how did you get into entrepreneurship?
I was a journalist before I launched my own company. I graduated college in 1984 and moved that year to Hong Kong, where I landed a job covering the surging Asian Tigers (the rapidly growing Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korean economies). I moved back to the States in 1995, and the next year, learned about the Internet, then a nascent technology only a few geeks understood. Somehow, I understood its importance and switched from covering business to covering technology.
I got a job at InformationWeek, covering business technology. I left to join the Industry Standard, then considered the dotcom bible. I was making about $90,000 a year, and life was good. But journalism is a tough business, especially for someone aged 40 and making a good salary. You tend to get canned for a college grad making $27K who doesn’t know technology and can barely write. I knew I needed to strike out on my own.
Take us through your entrepreneurial journey. How did you go from day 1 to today?
In my first year or two in business, I wrote all the articles, coded them, and posted them. I started a weekly newsletter, which I composed and sent via a desktop email program. Pretty soon, things were getting too big for me to manage, too many articles to link to, too many emails to send out by blind copying. Once I launched a successful event and ad revenue picked up, I hired a friend from my journalism days to design a professional-looking website (he had set up his shop). He did a great job and introduced me to another entrepreneur who started a company with a great email marketing system.
I hired my first employee, a writer to help with the articles. Around the same time, I was introduced to a venture capitalist with a track record in events and media (he backed VNUs entry into the United States and other successful ventures). He brought in a group of six investors who took a 20% stake, valuing the company at $4 million (I’d been offered $1 million for it a year earlier, an offer I considered a test of how stupid the company thought I was).
With the funding, I hired my own events team, accountant, editors, designers. Things were going great. We were expanding our audience. The event was growing. RFID adoption was accelerating. Then, in the fall of 2008 Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, setting off a global financial crisis.
At the time, we were planning to host an event in early 2009 in Orlando. We’d contracted with the Swan & Dolphin Hotel, guaranteeing the hotel something like 2,000 room nights at $249 per night. Or exhibitors and hotels, we soon realized, were booking rooms at the Hilton Orlando and other hotels for $99 per night. If I didn’t fill those rooms, I would owe the Swan & Dolphin half a million dollars, which I didn’t have lying around. Fortunately, the manager was reasonable and agreed to work with us on rates to move people from other hotels to the Swan & Dolphin. Hundreds of phone calls later, we filled all 2,000 rooms.
After the collapse, we needed to find ways to bolster revenue, as a lot of RFID projects were killed as companies froze commitments until the global economy stabilized. I wound up working 14 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week, creating virtual events (something very common now, but not so much then), DVDs to sell, special reports to sell, and other products. It was a hellish time, but we pulled through.
Business steadily picked up in intervening years, but somehow my workload never seemed to diminish. Getting close to burnout, I wound up selling my company to Emerald Expositions in 2016.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
The decision to sell was a difficult one. I didn’t know what it would be like no longer being a CEO. But the decision turned out to be a good one and I have no regrets. The company I sold to is well-run and has a tremendous group of individuals who are good at what they do. I’ve enjoyed being part of a larger team and working with new people who have new ideas and new ways of doing things. I run the RFID Journal brand for Emerald, and I enjoy it.
You can figure things out on the fly, make adjustments, change your marketing strategy, but knowing who your potential customers are and how you plan to reach them before launching a company will go a long way towards achieving success.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
I think the biggest thing I learned is to trust my judgement. There were times when I deferred to investors or others, thinking they knew more about business than I did. That was probably true, but I made a mistake in following their suggestion to hire a professional manager to help run the business. I didn’t need one and hiring one only set us back for a while.
I also learned to trust my staff. A lot of entrepreneurs assume they know more about everything than the people they hire (because at some point they probably did that staffer’s job). And that might be true at times, but if you hire good people and tell them what to do all the time, they leave. You need to trust others to make decisions and focus on the big decisions you need to make as CEO.
The other thing I learned is that you need to be resilient. There are a lot of things that happen in business -- a key customer leaving for a competitor, a key supplier going out of business, and so on -- that hit you like a gut punch. You need to keep getting back up, no matter how much you want to crawl inside a bottle of vodka or cash in your chips. And you can’t expect any appreciation for anything you do. If you are looking for appreciation, you should not start your own company.
I don’t think I had too many lucky breaks, but I did make a good decision in selling part of my company to a group of angel investors. For one thing, they were good people, not sharks, and always gave me their best advice. And when it came time to sell, they helped me get the best price possible, which I knew they would.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
We use OpenMoves for email marketing. The dynamic content feature and ease of use are what attracted us to this platform. It has served us well. As a matter of coincidence, David Loewy, who designed the early RFID Journal websites, is now a partner at OM. He sold his business the same year I sold mine.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
My focus has been on helping companies adopt RFID technology to improve the way they do business. The most influential book on technology adoption is Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. Everything Moore writes about in that book is what I have seen in the real world. Unfortunately, most technology startups don’t read it, or if they do, they ignore Moore’s advice. I don’t get it because we changed our approach to the market after reading the book. Instead of trying to bring new people into the RFID market, we focused on our readers, who already understood the value of new technology.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
My advice would be to focus on customer acquisition and marketing. In the tech space, a lot of innovators come up with new technology. They are so excited by their innovation that they think everyone else will. They often spend every last cent to enhance their product and leave nothing to marketing. The result is that they have no way to promote their product and their businesses fail.
Having a great idea or a great product or a new technology is only the start. You need to figure out how you are going to acquire customers. Rarely does a product resonate so much with consumers or business customers that the first person who comes across it, buys it and then tells friends who tell friends who tell friends? And rarely do Google ads or social media posts create the kind of awareness that leads to success.
You need to create a great product or service and then market it consistently and effectively. We had one small company come to us 15 years ago. They marketed through our website almost exclusively and participated in our events every year. The total marketing spend was under $2 million over that period, but the result is that they are now a $500 million publicly-traded company. Other companies with good products didn’t do that kind of marketing and remain in the $2 million to $10 million range.
You can figure things out on the fly, make adjustments, change your marketing strategy, but knowing who your potential customers are and how you plan to reach them before launching a company will go a long way towards achieving success.
Where can we go to learn more?
Visit the website to learn more.
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
