Samsel's change of direction sounds like a stretch -- from fish processing to home pages, seafood to E-mail. But the truth is that Samsel has pursued the same strategy in both ventures: identify an emerging, fast-growing market and flourish by supplying the businesses in it. With his seafood company, that market was warehouse club stores. Samsel says that the company's initial customer was the first Costco store, and the company grew by serving the expanding new warehouse-club market. Similarly, Free Range Media aims to capitalize on businesses' increasing interest in the WWW. Under the direction of Fry, a Microsoft veteran, Free Range Media has assembled a team of artistic and technical talent that specializes in electronic design and the Internet. Since its founding, in late 1993, the company has worked on some 20 WWW projects, including home pages for such clients as MCI and Macmillan Publishing. Already, the market is changing, Samsel says: the sales cycle has shortened as companies become more familiar with the WWW, and Free Range is confronting more competitors. Samsel says first-year revenues for the company, which now employs 21, were slightly less than $1 million. He expects sales of a few million this year.
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Career Counselor
James Gonyea
Gonyea & Associates, New Port Richey, Fla.
As a career counselor, James Gonyea helps people bring about dramatic change in their work lives. That's a subject he knows firsthand. Six years ago, Gonyea's employment-counseling company was much like any other: he met face-to-face with clients. Now he conducts 100% of his business on-line.
Gonyea launched his company 15 years ago in the Manchester, N.H., area. At first, the business remained small, because Gonyea found himself facing stiff competition from other businesses in the area. In 1989 he started to learn about on-line services. Gonyea persuaded then-fledgling America Online to allow him to offer career services on-line. "Within weeks, I completely closed my local doors, because the electronic traffic was far greater," he recalls.
Today Gonyea's company is transformed. With a staff of five and headquarters in sunny New Port Richey, Fla., Gonyea maintains electronic "locations" on America Online, Apple eWorld, the Internet, Prodigy, and a number of electronic bulletin boards. In addition to providing on-line job counseling and rÉsumÉ assistance, Gonyea works with a growing national network of 65 independent employment consultants to compile on-line employment listings and rÉsumÉ banks. His main distribution channel is still America Online, which pays Gonyea & Associates according to the amount of time subscribers spend in the counseling firm's Career Center. Gonyea won't disclose the actual numbers, but he says his business is 15 to 20 times larger -- in both sales and profits -- than it was in its original, sole-proprietor incarnation. "Every business should consider an electronic storefront," he says.
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Lawyer
Frederic Wilf
Elman Wilf & Fried, Media, Pa.
If pioneers open up a promising new economic frontier, the lawyers won't be far behind. Frederic Wilf of Elman Wilf & Fried practices technology law for the telecommunications and computer industries. "We advise clients on intellectual-property issues, like who owns what on the Internet and how to protect what you sell on the Internet."
The $1-million law firm, based in Media, Pa., was founded by Gerry Elman in 1982 as a boutique to advise biotechnology and computer companies. Now one-third of its revenues come from clients such as Internet consultants and software writers who distribute their wares on-line.
The partners had been using CompuServe and private legal on-line services like Lexis since 1982. Gradually, their professional use has become a source of business leads. Wilf now serves as a section leader in CompuServe's computer consulting forum. He spends an estimated five hours a week answering subscribers' general questions about the law there and in the on-line service's legal forum. Now some 50% of his personal client base is drawn from contacts made electronically, and many of those he never meets in person. He regularly handles client projects entirely on-line -- sending messages and contracts back and forth through CompuServe E-mail.
"We hope to use the Internet more to talk to our clients," Wilf says. His firm uses Pretty Good Privacy, a type of encryption software for Internet E-mail, but he worries that "security is still an issue. Even though most don't bother to, people can read your E-mail."
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Technical Writer
Tim O'Reilly
O'Reilly & Associates, Sebastopol, Calif.
These days O'Reilly & Associates is a certifiably hot company. The Sebastopol, Calif., publishing company's Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog is a best-seller in its field, and its Global Network Navigator is one of the WWW's highest-profile sites. In the last year alone, the company grew by 45 employees, to 140, and sales increased by 30%, to $17 million.
Life wasn't always so exciting at the company. In fact, it doesn't get much duller than O'Reilly & Associates' original business: computer documentation. These folks wrote computer manuals for their clients. The company, which Tim O'Reilly founded in 1978, specialized in documentation for products related to the UNIX operating system. It wasn't exactly a glamorous market.
In the mid-1980s, O'Reilly & Associates decided to retain the rights to some of its documentation. Then, at a 1988 trade show, the company for the first time offered its work as stand-alone books. "We were mobbed," Tim O'Reilly recalls. "It quickly became clear that there was a huge market for them."
