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Bootstrapping E-Commerce to 16 Million: Valerie Holstein, CEO of Cableorganizer.com (Part 4)
Sramana: How much revenue did you generate from CableOrganizer.com during your first year? Valerie Holstein: I did a little bit under $200,000. Sramana: Wow! That is not bad for a garage, grass roots operation. Valerie Holstein: Every penny that we made was reinvested in purchasing more product for inventory. Whatever was not reinvested in additional
Bootstrapping E-Commerce to 16 Million: Valerie Holstein, CEO of Cableorganizer.com (Part 3)
Sramana: In 2002 when you started selling things to hide computer cables, how did people find your website? Was it primarily via your blog? Valerie Holstein: Yes, it was from the blog. I had a couple of pages that explained the issues we had and what products were helpful in hiding the cables. People started
Bootstrapping E-Commerce to 16 Million: Valerie Holstein, CEO of Cableorganizer.com (Part 2)
Sramana: When did you start CableOrganizer.com? Valerie Holstein: We actually started the company 10 years ago when I was nin3 months pregnant with my child. I was still working full-time as a drafting engineer for a screen enclosure company. My husband was working more than full time at Computer Science Corporation. He was a trainer
Bootstrapping E-Commerce to 16 Million: Valerie Holstein, CEO of Cableorganizer.com (Part 1)
Valerie Holstein is co-founder, president and CEO of CableOrganizer.com, now among the world’s leading purveyors of cable and wire management-related products. Prior to co-founding CableOrganizer.com in 2002, Holstein served as assistant drafting engineer at Buchanan Screens, a major fabricator of screen enclosures in South Florida. Prior to this, from 2000 to 2001, Holstein served as
Navigating the Microsoft Ecosystem to Build a 12 Million Dollar Company: Brian Knight, CEO of Pragmatic Works (Part 7)
Sramana: How do you find the people to take these courses? Brian Knight: Last year it was word of mouth. This year a number of news organizations got word of us. Now, for every class of twelve, we have 30 applicants. We do rigorous screening to make sure they have the aptitude and desire to
Navigating the Microsoft Ecosystem to Build a 12 Million Dollar Company: Brian Knight, CEO of Pragmatic Works (Part 6)
Sramana: What were you teaching in your courses? Brian Knight: We had a course that we taught virtually which carried a $795 tuition bill. It taught the new version of SQL Server. Normally, someone would have to spend several thousand dollars to attend a course. Our course still had labs and everything else you would
Navigating the Microsoft Ecosystem to Build a 12 Million Dollar Company: Brian Knight, CEO of Pragmatic Works (Part 5)
Sramana: How did you build your company from an organizational standpoint during that timeframe? Brian Knight: We started with commission-only sales people. We are no longer that way, but it did serve its purpose. We aligned our five commission only sales people into the same five regions that Microsoft had for their sales force. At the
Navigating the Microsoft Ecosystem to Build a 12 Million Dollar Company: Brian Knight, CEO of Pragmatic Works (Part 4)
Sramana: How were you finding your consulting opportunities? Brian Knight: In the early days I found a lot of customers via Microsoft. They had a barrier that their sales people could not get past, which was that they did not provide a way to upgrade from their old SQL Server to their new one. We