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You’re the Boss Blog: What It Takes to Start a Company: Sleeping in a Van?

May 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Dashboard

A weekly roundup of small-business developments.

Ever feel the need to get out of the office more? You may want to consider the example of Kevin Hong and Evan Pham.

As noted in Monday’s Dashboard summary of the week’s small-business news, the two 20-something co-founders of Dealflicks — “it’s a Priceline for movie tickets” — are traveling the country and living out of a van in an effort to sign up new customers (we first wrote about the start-up in November). So what’s life really like on the road for the ultimate bootstrappers? We had the following conversation, which has been edited and condensed.

Priceline for movie tickets? Please explain.

Our movie ticket deals are up to 60 percent off on our Web site, our iPhone app, and our Android app, and they’re available 24/7/365. We partner directly with movie theaters — over 88 percent of theater seats are currently empty — and negotiate to bring customers deals on tickets, soda, and popcorn. We’re in 150-plus locations, and we’re looking to expand to 500-plus locations before the end of the year.

Are your other partners jealous of the road warrior life? 

We’ve never asked, but if they are, it’s probably for the weekends. Every weekend we’re in a new city, and it’s fun to explore each city’s nightlife.

Starting a business can be risky, but have your lives ever been at risk sleeping in a van around the country?

Not yet.

Couldn’t you have just picked up the phone?

The theater business is a relationship-driven business. We actually had a meeting analyzing our data once we reached 100 theater locations. Out of the 100 locations we signed up, 94 of them had some type of face-to-face interaction. We were shocked, and that became the genesis of our odyssey.

When you meet prospective customers, do you tell them what you are doing? Is full disclosure a good idea in this situation?

We definitely don’t lead the conversation by explaining our housing situation. But after sharing a few drinks, the whole story usually all comes out. It definitely helps earn their respect and seal the deal. Living in a van not only puts a roof over our heads, but when we need to meet our clients, we can take turns driving and cover a massive amount of ground. The flexibility is imperative for a start-up since game plans can change day-to-day. The van never stops. If we spend time renting cars and checking into airports, we lose out.

So why not just use commission-based outside sales representatives to sell your services?

We’ve done this too — and still are doing it — but it’s simply not as effective as what we’ve have been doing.

It all sounds tiring. At what point will you get off the road?

There aren’t any particular financial goals that we must meet to get off the road. If you’re a founder of a company, you want to do everything possible to give yourself the best shot at success. You are also burdened with the responsibility of developing your company’s culture. We wanted to set the tone, to set the bar high. We believe that one day we’ll be managing a company of over 100 employees, and we wanted to ensure that we developed a can-do spirit for everyone to follow.

When you eventually hire sales reps, what advice will you give them?

Never believe a deal is sealed until you get someone’s signature on the dotted line.

What’s your best road story so far?

It had to be the time we were down in Mississippi. We ended up parking in someone’s backyard behind their barn. We sometimes sleep in our boxers, and we figured we could wake up at 6 a.m. and no one would notice. Sure enough, at 5 a.m. I see a grandma and grandpa peeking through our window. After a moment of frustration, fatigue kicked in and we went back to sleep. An hour later, and they were still there! It’s as if they’d never seen two men sleep in a van! We finally summoned the courage to get up, and we boldly introduced ourselves, still wearing our boxers. Despite the awkwardness, they were surprisingly nice. They actually offered some blankets and invited us over for breakfast.

Would you ever see yourself taking a corporate job again?

We’d rather live in a van and work on another start-up than take on another corporate job.

Gene Marks owns the Marks Group, a Bala Cynwyd, Pa., consulting firm that helps clients with customer relationship management. You can follow him on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/what-it-takes-to-start-a-company-sleeping-in-a-van/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

Media Decoder Blog: The Breakfast Meeting: Hallmark Channels Add Original Content and Sales of Movie Tickets Rise

March 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Crown Media Family Networks’ executives said Thursday that efforts to increase the amount of original programming on their two Hallmark cable channels are already attracting advertisers, Stuart Elliott reports. Hallmark Channel plans to introduce five original prime-time series in July, and Hallmark Movie Channel will present original movies with Christmas themes this fall. Crown Media joins a lengthy list of media companies pursuing original programming rather than rerunning shows from broadcast networks. William J. Abbott, president and chief executive at Crown Media Holdings, said advertising gains will be “strong, strong, strong.”

The Motion Picture Association of America said Thursday that movie ticket sales rose 6 percent around the world, to $34.7 billion in 2012, Michael Cieply reports. China beat Japan to become the second-highest national box office, taking in $2.7 billion to Japan’s $2.4 billion in 2012, and ticket sales rose in the United States and Canada. The number of movies released in 2012 by the association’s members continued to decline, dropping to 128 from 141 a year earlier.

Scottsdale, Ariz., has introduced a borderline surreal campaign to attract the most irascible of commuters, the New York subway rider, Matt Flegenheimer writes. The city of Scottsdale has spent $25,000 on a “full-body wrap” that festoons the 42nd Street Shuttle with images of cowboys cavorting under the sun or in saloons. “We’re embedding that seed of ‘Hey, maybe I’ve never considered Scottsdale before,’ ” Caroline Stoeckel, the vice president of marketing for the Scottsdale Convention and Visitors Bureau, said.

BioShock Infinite, one of the most-anticipated video games of the year, will be released Tuesday, Harold Goldberg reports. The third installment of Irrational Games’s BioShock series took 200 people four years and upward of $100 million to create, not including an advertising budget analysts estimate in the tens of millions. BioShock Infinite, a deep first-person shooter game set in a floating city and packed with cultural references, is in large part the brainchild of Irrational’s creative director, Ken Levine.

It is not a coincidence that inhabitants of the rural town of Dish, Texas, watch Dish Network, Manny Fernandez writes. In 2005 the town, then known as Clark, agreed to change its name in exchange for free basic service, installation and equipment for all residents. A Dish (the network) spokesman said the arrangement has been beneficial to both the company and the town, but many Dish residents said it has done little to put their hamlet on the map and bemoan the costs of premium channels like HBO.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced on Thursday that it would publish a book about Johnny Carson by the late-night host’s former lawyer, Henry Bushkin, Leslie Kaufman reports. Mr. Bushkin and Mr. Carson were close companions for 18 years but had a bitter falling out in 1988.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/the-breakfast-meeting-hallmark-channels-add-original-content-and-sales-of-movie-tickets-rise/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Media Decoder Blog: Fandango Movie Ticket Service Introduces Site Aimed at Hispanics

February 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Hispanics buy a quarter of all movie tickets sold in the United States. But do they need their own place to buy them?

Fandango Cine, a collaboration with Telemundo. Fandango Cine, a collaboration with Telemundo.

On Monday, NBCUniversal will find out. The media company’s movie ticket service, Fandango, in partnership with the Spanish-language broadcaster Telemundo, will introduce Fandango Cine, a digital movie ticket service aimed at Latinos. The Web site and related app will operate separately from Fandango and will highlight movies, actors and original video clips meant to resonate with Hispanics.

The collaboration comes as box-office data points to Hispanics as a major moviegoing force, even as the industry over all has struggled. Hispanic moviegoers bought 286 million movie tickets in 2011, and they go to an average of seven movies a year, compared with five a year for non-Hispanics, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

At the same time, Hispanics are 68 percent more likely than non-Hispanics to watch video on the Internet, according to Nielsen. Fandango had an average of 41 million unique visitors a month in 2012, a record for the service, which charges users a fee to buy movie tickets in advance.

“We recognized from the data that there’s a unique audience in Hispanics in their affinity for moviegoing and mobile technology,” said Paul Yanover, president of Fandango. “That’s a pretty important audience segment we thought we could better service.”

In addition to movie ticket sales, Fandango Cine will include a feature highlighting Hispanic actors and directors under the heading “Overlooked by Oscar.” A segment called “Cine Buzz” will provide celebrity scoops on Latinos in Hollywood.

The Spanish-language Web site will also highlight movies — like “Snitch,” starring Benjamin Bratt as a Mexican drug lord, and “Bless Me, Ultima,” based on the novel by Rudolfo Anaya — that won’t get prominent play on English-language Fandango but are expected to attract heavily Hispanic audiences.

Ever since Comcast took control of NBCUniversal two years ago, the media conglomerate has encouraged partnerships among its previously disparate divisions. Telemundo will provide video clips to Fandango Cine, which will prominently promote Universal Pictures’s “Fast Furious 6.” A Spanish-speaking Fandango Cine movie critic will have a regular segment on Telemundo’s morning show “Un Nuevo Día.”

The partnership grew in part out of Telemundo’s inroads with Hollywood studios. For years, the network received quizzical glances from movie executives who were asked to advertise their English-language films during Telemundo’s lineup of Spanish-language sports, telenovelas and talk shows.

“Today, every single movie is Hispanic focused,” said Peter E. Blacker, executive vice president for digital and emerging media at Telemundo. “That’s a big change from when I used to go around to studios and they didn’t understand the potential.”

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/25/2013, on page B5 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Fandango Adds Service Aimed at Hispanics.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/fandango-adds-service-aimed-at-hispanics/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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