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The advent of the Web caused Voit's business to soar. Based on users' feedback, he created a new version of Paint Shop, which he dubbed Paint Shop Pro and continued to sell as shareware. Without the Internet to turbocharge his marketing and distribution, Voit says, he probably would have needed a "six figure" investment to pursue an alternative strategy.

But by 1997 Voit had reached a plateau and decided to substitute catalogs and retail stores for the Web as his distribution channel. By then Paint Shop Pro had made its mark. His company had 80,000 paid users and 40 employees on the payroll, its revenues had climbed to a staggering $6.5 million, and its product had won kudos in the trade press. Distributors welcomed it with open arms, he says. In 1998 Jasc Software ranked #161 on the Inc. 500 list of America's fastest-growing private companies, and its sales continued to explode, totaling $17 million by year's end.

HOLE UP AT HOME

Working from home once had all the cachet of selling pencils on the sidewalk. But the '90s changed all that. Now bragging rights come with starting a business in a basement, laundry room, or spare bedroom.

Not only did Michael Knowles start his security-guard staffing company in the guest room of his house in Tallahassee, Fla., but he didn't relocate it to larger quarters for two years. Knowles, a former army sergeant, had worked for a friend's security company. In November 1993, at age 42, he decided to start his own. Borrowing $1,000 from a buddy, he founded Seven Hills Security Inc. The money covered the cost of a license, uniforms, and liability insurance.

Knowles shared the house with his wife, Evelyn, who served as de facto receptionist, and his cocker spaniel, whose enthusiastic yelps in the background often interrupted business calls. But unlike some home-based entrepreneurs, Knowles never pretended to be anywhere else, even when he was pitching his company in the most professional light to prospective customers. "I'd be honest and tell them I was working out of my home," he says. "People appreciated me for handling it that way."

To support his family during the lean start-up period, Knowles took a job as a security guard at a local hospital, working until 11 p.m. and making $7 an hour. "I'd get up at 8, sell like crazy on the telephone until 2, go to work at the hospital, come home and go to bed, then get up and do it again," he says. When Seven Hills landed its first contract, from a local car dealership, Knowles performed the work himself, adding a shift to his workday from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. Most nights he slept two to three hours.

In early 1994 demand for Seven Hills security guards had increased enough that he was able to quit his hospital job and hire his first employees. Still, he was adamant about keeping the business at home. "Office space was expensive, and I wanted each part of the business to pay its own way," he says. He compensated for the lack of office space by floating from job site to job site, where his employees would hand in their time sheets and collect their checks. The car lot of one of his customers functioned as an open-air forum for discussing company business. The customer "didn't mind at all that there were more security guards around," says Knowles.

His frugality paid off. Seven Hills Security is now situated in a 20-room suite in a contemporary office complex in Tallahassee, employs 130 people full-time, and last year produced $2.1 million in revenues. That year it ranked sixth on the Florida 100, a list of the state's fastest-growing companies that's compiled by the University of Florida. And last spring Seven Hills Security (now called International Security Solutions) merged with three other companies, including International Research Bureau, a pre-employment-screening agency owned by Darrell Goodwin--who, as it happens, started his business out of a garage with $1,000.

CROSS THE BORDER

With foreign trade on the increase and technology easing access to overseas markets, the mantra for businesspeople is, Think globally. Some bootstrappers are doing more than thinking.

Even back in 1992, when Liz Elting and Phil Shawe started TransPerfect Translations Inc., their goal was as ambitious as it was clear-cut. They wanted to build the largest foreign-language-translation company in the world. It was a remarkably lofty aspiration, considering that they were still graduate students living in a New York University studio apartment and subsisting mostly on Ramen Pride Noodles and Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.

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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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