The Adventures of Pitchman

Howard Getson, president and cofounder of IntellAgent Control Corp., has raised substantial capital with an aggressive and obnoxious approach inspired by junk-mail advertisements.

When it comes to raising capital, Howard Getson is aggressive, manipulative, and obnoxious. And it works

In August 1996, Howard M. Getson, frustrated with a slow-going attempt to raise $2 million from investors who were "right on the edge but couldn't decide," turned his thoughts to a different kind of investor: 14-year-old boys with minimum-wage jobs.

Not that Getson, president and cofounder of IntellAgent Control Corp., a maker of sales-automation software, began exhorting every fryolator-tending adolescent around to put money into his fast-growing company. But after receiving and reading--and then, strangely enough, rereading--a junk-mail solicitation for a martial-arts video, Getson was struck by the similarities between "trying to convince a multimillionaire to make a $100,000 investment and getting a kid to save up for a video."

Inspired, he quickly began dictating a letter to 40 current and prospective investors, modeling his effort on the cheesy missive, which he'd found particularly potent. "I was tempted to dial the toll-free number, and I was really disgusted with myself because I knew I would never have another street fight in my life and that I would feel silly watching the video," says Getson, whose curiosity may partly have been a genetic by-product of the fact that his paternal grandfather was a masked professional wrestler known as the Green Hornet. "I kept picking up the letter because it was so well written."

As was his own letter--or so he insisted. Daniel G. Jobe, IntellAgent's chief financial officer, laughed when Getson showed him the final result. Briefly. "Then I said, 'No, I'm planning to send this out,' " recalls Getson, "and he literally burst into a sweat." Seeking to dampen Getson's enthusiasm, Jobe told him flat-out that the letter was "too aggressive" to mail. "It was such a hard sell, saying, 'Pick up your subscription form and mail in your check today,' " says Jobe, a former audit partner at Arthur Andersen LLP. "I was worried that it would turn off some of our investors."

He was sure it would, in fact, which is why Jobe quickly faxed a copy to Marvin N. Demchick, a board member who was also one of IntellAgent's early investors. "Dan probably did hope I could talk Howard out of it," says the 73-year-old Demchick, a former CEO of two publicly traded companies. "But I laughed when I saw the letter. The people he was going to send it to understand him. They know his attitude." Not that they all cherish his brash style. "Howard can't seem to help himself," says board member George F. Raymond, who founded Automatic Business Centers, a payroll-processing company that had grown to $26 million in revenues when he sold it, in 1989. "But you don't raise money by bullying."

That's true enough for most entrepreneurs. But then relatively few of them have ever raised anywhere near Getson's $6.8-million haul from 70 investors in just over two years. Each step of the way, he's gone out, armed with hat--no, hatchet--in hand, finding cutting-edge methods to remind prospective investors how lucky they are to make the cut. "I am extraordinarily aggressive," admits the 34-year-old, a master of blustery self-analysis. "If that's offensive to somebody, they shouldn't invest in my company, because I'll make them uncomfortable." But his ability to skillfully induce squeamishness may be what's enabled him to raise money, most of it from individuals. At a time when venture capitalists have moved to a higher plateau, leaving so-called angel investors with more options for their investment dollars, Getson's experience suggests that it pays (literally) to stand out. Granted, there are other ways to do so, such as having an irresistible business idea or an irrefutable track record. And would-be investors always seem to respond well to honesty about risks and candor about shortcomings.

But Getson opts to push an investment in IntellAgent Control as if it were something that could be sold via infomercial; he's a close cousin of the slyboots real estate broker, always invoking that nice young couple who just looked at this house and plan to come back in an hour. A former corporate and securities lawyer, he knows how to stay out of the boiler room. "In many ways I am the reason securities laws exist," he says. "But I'm honest and ethical. I just communicate differently. It's refreshing."

And unforgettable. No matter what prospective investors decide to do, chances are, they will long remember something about Getson, whether it's his artfully worded memos (sample heading: "We Stink Less"), his multimedia slide shows ("I added a 'boom' blast 15 or 20 minutes in, when the initial coffee is wearing off and people are thinking about going to the bathroom," he explains) or the "wild-ass claims" he likes to lob ("We closed the biggest sales-force-automation project in history").

Then there's the letter. "It really was the perfect blend," muses Getson, "of direct-mail schlock and true business sense."

It was only three years ago that Getson left his first meeting with a trio of prospective investors "very wet under the armpits," recalls Demchick, who had arranged the three-and-a-half-hour grilling. "My guys gave him an unbelievable workout." Raymond, who also attended, concedes, "I beat him up badly." Rattled, Getson asked if he could have another shot in a couple of months.

Given his reemergence as a fund-raising he-man, it's tempting to see Getson's transformation as analogous to that of one of his boyhood role models, bodybuilder Joe Weider. Weider, the muscle-magazine magnate, originally took up weight lifting because he was tired of taking beatings from neighborhood hooligans. But while it's true that Getson has studied the art of inducement--he cites texts like Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm and Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion--it's clear that his personal style requires that he beam his energies toward one locale: in your face. "When I've tried to be any other way," he says, "I get into trouble."

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