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By the time the two partners returned to Santa Maria, Water Wonders was well on its way to exponential growth. By the end of 1997 the company employed 12 people and was celebrating its $690,000 in revenues for that year. Last year it posted $2.8 million in sales, and the projection for this year is $8 million to $10 million. Now employing 60 people, Water Wonders sells fountains through mail-order catalogs and at retail chain stores and galleries nationwide.

MORPH INTO A CONSULTANT

Consultants are hardly an invention of the '90s, but they've reached their full flowering in this decade. What better way to bootstrap than to hang out a consultant's shingle?

James H. Fitzgerald recalls sitting across from the man with the dark glasses and the amethyst pinkie ring. "Where didja say ya live?" Fitzgerald quotes the man as asking. It was 1991, and Fitzgerald, then 24, was working as assistant to the vice-president of a large New York City hotel. The man in the dark glasses represented the company that had the hotel's garbage-disposal contract, and Fitzgerald was politely suggesting a reduction in weekly pickups, based on his conclusion that the hotel was paying for twice the number that it needed. In confronting the contractor, Fitzgerald says, he "encountered resistance from fellow executives" at the hotel because of the widespread perception that organized crime controlled the city's garbage-collection business. "They told me I'd end up dead," Fitzgerald recalls. In the end, he says, his tenacity resulted in a 50% reduction in the hotel's garbage bill, from $700,000 to $350,000 a year, and earned him some notice in the local press.

Later that year, when new managers took over the hotel, Fitzgerald left to launch Envirotron USA, a waste-management consulting company. He set himself up with a beeper, voice mail, and a post-office box. His total start-up cost: a few hundred dollars. His first customer was the Omni Berkshire Place, where a manager had heard about his earlier cost-cutting coup and approached him about a consulting job.

One hotel job led to another. Before long Fitzgerald was also rooting through garbage at chain stores as part of his waste-auditing service. "I figure out how much waste a company is producing and make sure they're not being overcharged for garbage and underpaid for recycling," he says. He also finds treasure in trash, selling cardboard and plastic materials that might otherwise be discarded.

Although he initially charged customers one-third of the savings he helped them achieve, Fitzgerald quickly realized that the ticket to success was to offer a complete outsourcing option to his clients. Now he charges a management fee to handle all accounts payable and operations support for trash collection. With five employees and 15 major customers, including Bear Stearns and White Castle, Envirotron racked up $1.6 million in sales last year. According to Fitzgerald, Envirotron has been profitable from day one.

RUSH THE NET

It's a clichÉ of our times: geek sits down at computer, creates an Internet-related business, and a year later emerges from his bedroom as a multimillionaire. Like all clichÉs, there's some truth to it, including variations on the theme.

The origins of Robert Voit's business date back to 1990, when he was a 30-year-old pilot for Northwest Airlines. On his days off he dabbled in his hobby: digital imaging. He liked to tinker with software that allowed him to edit digital photographs and "paint" images with his computer. By and by, he came up with a graphic-utilities-software program and offered it as shareware on electronic bulletin boards. Users were invited to download the shareware, called Paint Shop, and payment was on the honor system.

Voit's start-up costs? The price of paper, envelopes, and stamps, says Voit, who bought the supplies so that he could send an encryption code to customers who had paid him for Paint Shop. With the code, users could disarm an electronic message embedded in the software that badgered them to pay up.

Although Voit incorporated his company, Jasc Software Inc., in 1991, he continued to fly for Northwest for four more years. "I'd go flying, come home, and have a backlog of orders," he recalls. In April 1992 he hired an assistant to answer the phone and fill orders, which freed him to write more code.

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Donna Fenn

Inc. contributing editor Donna Fenn is the author of Upstarts! How GenY Entrepreneurs are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit From Their Success (McGraw-Hill, 2009). Both this blog and the book examine the ways in which GenY is changing the entrepreneurial landscape with new approaches to starting, growing, and managing their companies. Learn more at http://www.upstartsrock.com/.

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