"At the beginning I believed--naïvely--that I could motivate the manager at the store level to perform certain kinds of marketing, and I would be merely a consultant. In the early years I was more of a training company; I wrote workbooks on how to make things happen. But because I was creating additional work for them, the managers ended up hating me. And it turned out that the number of managers in any chain who actually did the marketing we were teaching them was less than 30%. In '92, Taco Bell asked why I didn't computerize what I was teaching and put in a marketing system that made things easier on the managers. That's what I did.
"Advertising at a restaurant drives traffic through by building relationships--through the use of coupons, special deals, and so on--between nearby employers and that restaurant. I scan a neighborhood for clusters of opportunity to market to. The secret to my staying power as a bootstrapper has been that I work only for the central chains themselves. When chains ask me to go directly to their individual franchisees, I say no. That's how you accumulate bad debt."
Robert A. Mamis is a senior writer at Inc. Resources
The literature on how to build a company from $0 or so is as slender as a bootstrapper's bank account. Recently, however, that body of work has been fattened by the paperback Bootstrapper's Success Secrets: 151 Tactics for Building Your Business on a Shoestring Budget, by Kimberly Stansell (Career Press, 800-227-3371, 1997, $13.99). Her survival pointers include surprisingly sound though hardly exhaustive advice on the basics: finance, setting up an office, marketing, rudimentary management, getting help from others, and coping with growth. Best of all, the handbook provides the names and addresses of hundreds of outside resources--a compilation that alone is worth the price. The author also publishes a quarterly newsletter, Bootstrappin' Entrepreneur. For information, send E-mail to Stansell.
Previous Inc. bootstrapping features appeared in September 1990, September 1991, September 1992, November 1993, September 1994, and August 1995. To find the articles on-line, go to our Web site's search engine and type in the keyword bootstrapper.
So you want to know more about famous companies that have been bootstrapped? For starters, get your hands on Hoover's Handbook of American Business (Hoover's Inc., 800-486-8666, $29.95). Used by our reporter to survey the life stories of hundreds of great American companies, this terrific handbook (his copy is now dog-eared and filled with dozens of bookmarks) is indispensable to the budding corporate historian. Among its best features: an overview of current events within each company and industry; a summary of each business's history from the start-up stage forward; and an index of data, which includes contact information for each business. A pricey $449.95 CD-ROM provides information on major U.S. companies and on big businesses located around the globe, interesting private companies, and emerging corporations. The handbook is also available at bookstores or at your local library.
If you want to contact any of the companies on our hall-of-fame roster, expect a variety of responses. It's interesting to see how diligent some companies are when it comes to keeping track of institutional history. Apple Computer, for example, has a comprehensive corporate biography on-line. And while there are many companies (Coca-Cola, for example) that have great corporate archivists, many others are surprisingly disorganized. Roadway Express, for one, has had to hire an outside firm to keep tabs on its genealogy.
Finally, many big-time entrepreneurs have taken the time to write about their bootstrapping days. While the autobiography of Ernest and Julio Gallo, Our Story, is out of print, Bill Gates's book, The Road Ahead (Penguin USA, 800-253-6476, 1995, $15.95 ), is still available. (Perhaps you've heard of it?) Lillian Vernon's book, An Eye for Winners: How I Built America's Greatest Direct Mail Business (HarperBusiness, 800-242-7737, 1996, $23), is a fun, light read.
CALZONE & CO., Mark and Madeline Peters, 18080 NE 68th St., Bldg. B-140, Redmond, WA 98052; 206-869-5353 40
DEANGELO BROTHERS, Paul and Neal DeAngelo, 100 N. Conahan Dr., Hazleton, PA 18201; 717-459-5800 40
OPEN SYSTEMS GROUP, John Marx, 635 Maryville Centre Dr., St. Louis, MO 63141; 888-755-6736 40
SALES BUILDING SYSTEMS, Timothy F. McCarthy, 9325 Progress Pkwy., Mentor, OH 44060; 216-639-9100 40
TELEGROUP, Fred Gratzon, 2098 Nutmeg Ave., Fairfield, IA 52556; 515-472-5000 40
