Soon Aulicino found herself creating an informal network of experts -- "my brain trust," she says -- and for a small fee introducing entrepreneurs to experts and vice versa. Some of the introductions may lead to full-time jobs, others to advisory or consulting relationships. In one recent case, a medical-reimbursement lawyer offered to design some critically important marketing software for a medical-products company. Bolstered by the experts, Aulicino's companies are more attractive to investors, which en ables her to do her own job better.
Type Four: The Minimalists
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Who they are. Minimalists typically work with only a few employees -- but unlike the soloists, they're building companies, not just careers. The key distinction: sole practitioners such as Farquharson and Aulicino are the business. Take them out of the loop, and the whole thing collapses. Minimalists, by contrast, create small but durable organizations, which themselves represent value. Examples: Charlie Woglom and Sarah Barnes of Big Hed Designs Inc., in Thetford Center, Vt., design specialty T-shirts, get them screen-printed in nearby towns, and market them through trade shows and a nationwide network of reps. The value isn't just in the shirt designs, it's in the whole manufacturing-and-distribution network. In Alexandria, Va., Bill and Andrea Ritchie and a few others operate $2-million Binary Arts Inc., which develops and sells a line of sophisticated games and puzzles. The products are developed by independent inventors and manufactured in the Washington, D.C., area and the Far East. The Ritchies oversee marketing.
Growth? Sure. Binary Arts, for example, was on the Inc. 500 last year. But most of the minimalists rein in growth when it threatens to compromise what they like about staying small. "I never wanted to have a lot of employees," says Bill Ritchie. "I don't like managing a lot of people. So I had this vision . . . of keeping it small, keeping it lean, and keeping the overhead down."
What you'd better be good at. Managing people? Not really -- the few employees you'll have are likely to be self-starters. Money? Sure, particularly if you're juggling a growing set of receivables and payables. But the minimalist's key skill -- the value he or she brings to the table -- is marketing. Take Nancy Judson, founder of TripBuilder Inc., in New York City, which provides travelers to Europe with custom-designed tour guides based on any of a dozen interests. Judson hires researchers to gather and write the information. A telephone-answering machine takes orders. High school students assemble chapters and mail them out. Nothing too fancy.
What makes TripBuilder hard to compete with, though, is the tiny company's elaborate marketing relationships. Judson establishes partnerships with the tourist boards of every country she enters, ensuring that the board will distribute her brochures with its own packets. She draws financial and marketing support from big travel companies such as British Airways (which collaborates in a direct-mail marketing program) and British Rail (which includes information about TripBuilder in its guide for travel agents).
Prognosis. Probably pretty good, though it's a little early to say. Minimalists -- some have called them networking companies -- are a new phenomenon, an offspring of the '80s. Pushing them onward is the trend toward specialization at every level of the business world. No one tries to do everything anymore; everyone's looking to subcontract as much as possible. Specialty manufacturers are likely to be looking for marketers, marketers for manufacturers, and both for specialized service providers (order-fulfillment houses, telephone sales reps).
On the negative side, the minimalists, unlike traditional small companies, are pursuing lucrative national markets, which means larger competitors may be looking to muscle them aside. Plenty of catalog merchants proliferated in the past few years only to fall to the likes of Lands' End and Sharper Image.
"There's the core business, Binary Arts, the people on our payroll. But there's also a community of professionals that can be central to our business without being on our payroll.
"This is the central thing we contribute, a sort of choreography of people that are good, talented, professional. We become like a lens. And the fun part is, the lens we happen to be is where the lion's share of the money gets made." -- Bill Ritchie,
Binary Arts Inc.
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Most promising variation. Tom Simons thinks of it as the Hollywood model. A small core of key employees. A regular stable of on-call specialists, called in like a film crew for specific projects.
Simons's first advertising agency, which at one point hit 50 employees, was a perfect example of a grower. Simons, however, wasn't happy. "I was out of the manufacturing," he says, meaning he was spending so much time selling and cultivating clients that he didn't get to work on any campaigns. When he founded Partners & Simons, in 1989, he decided to do things differently. Today his permanent staff numbers exactly four, with another 10 to 15 independents called upon for project work in any given month. Simons isn't simply a matchmaker, however; while on a job the independents are working for his company, thereby building Partners & Simons's value as an organization. It's a network that ultimately could survive Simons's departure.
Does it work? Simons reports 1991 as "superb," despite a brutal recession in New England, and claims pretax margins between 50% and 75%. "I was able to learn a great deal in my first experience, to replicate the things that were fun and avoid the things that weren't. My face hurts from smiling."
