With four fast-growth companies up and running and a fifth bubbling on the back burner, David Becker performs an impressive juggling act every single day.
Inc 500 Profile
David B. Becker leans forward in his chair in the first-floor conference room of re:Member Data Services Inc. and slips a new $20 Cross pen between his fingers. The pen is squat and rounded, and when Becker writes, it moves deliberately across the page, leaving a loopy, girlish cursive in its wake. During the entire 90-minute meeting -- a gathering of sales, marketing, and IT honchos discussing a new software interface -- the CEO writes just 10 lines and says almost nothing. If you were searching for the quintessence of entrepreneurial dynamism, you wouldn't give Becker a second look.
And you would be wrong.
Becker is an entrepreneurial powerhouse. He is the CEO of four fast-growing companies: $9-million Virtual Financial Services Inc., or VIFI (#100 on this year's list); $13-million re:Member Data Services(#223 on the 1986 Inc 500 list); $3.9-million First Internet Bank of Indiana Inc.; and $750,000 Inception LLC. "The companies are kind of an extension of the family -- they're my children," says Becker, explaining why he is a simultaneous -- rather than a serial -- entrepreneur. "As they grow up and mature, you don't disassociate with them. You hang on to them." (All four of Becker's "kids" are in Indianapolis, which keeps his life borderline manageable. Still, until July, when two of the companies moved in together, the CEO's navy Mercedes convertible was logging some 500 miles a week along the flat, hazy asphalt of Interstate 465.)
What makes Becker so impressive, though, are the mental peregrinations he goes through to keep four distinct and sizable entrepreneurial balls in the air. His mini-empire is built on a stable foundation of business and management strategies that -- like Russian nesting dolls -- allow him to get bigger and bigger. Meanwhile, Becker's personal-productivity tactics make it possible for him to spend at least some time with his real kids -- five of them, ages 3 months to 18 years, from his four marriages. Running companies has "cost me a lot of marriages," Becker admits. "I kept trying to convince the spouses that having a company as a mistress is better than having a real mistress, but nobody quite appreciated that."
NOW YOU SEE HIM, NOW YOU DON'T: Before two of David Becker's four companies moved in together, the CEO logged some 500 miles a week driving from site to site.
Becker may still be working on the formula for an idyllic family life, but he has perfected his business-building rules: apply existing resources to nascent ideas, deploy key staff members to new ventures, and rely on an arsenal of time-management tricks to stay on top of what he needs to know -- and only what he needs to know. A day spent tracking this CEO around Indianapolis demonstrated how Becker seizes ever larger handfuls of life without losing his grip.
The Companies
When it comes to starting companies, Becker practices a kind of diagonal integration. His new businesses have some relationship with his old ones, but those relationships don't tend to be strictly vertical or horizontal. Re:Member Data -- which Becker founded in 1981 with a $5,000 loan from his father, credit-card debt, and a client-financed $370,000 mainframe -- is the oldest of his holdings, the seed from which the others sprang. The company provides data-processing services, such as loan calculations and check processing, to 108 credit unions across the county.
In 1995, Becker began incubating VIFI on re:Member Data's turf. VIFI, which Becker financed with $25,000 of his own money and a $100,000 line of credit, provides Web-development and -hosting services to banks and credit unions. It plays the front end to re:Member's back end, enabling a credit union's customers to bank, pay bills, and even trade stocks online. Becker has kept the two companies separate so new customers won't perceive the installation of one service as the entrée for the other, though in fact it is. In July the companies' distinctness became even more theoretical when VIFI and re:Member Data were reunited -- this time in VIFI's 60,000-square-foot concrete-and-glass headquarters on Innovation Boulevard, in the far northwest corner of the city.
Becker's third company is across town from his first two, and even further removed in terms of workplace atmosphere. First Internet Bank, an online-only bank with 20 full-time employees, occupies bland gray office space that's not even 5,000 square feet. It has a reception area with a telephone but no receptionist, and a 2.5-foot-high Liberty Safes vault that sits empty in a locked closet. (A vault is a requirement for FDIC insurance.) A massive speakerphone dominates the conference table that nearly fills the boardroom. With its vacant halls and hushed atmosphere, First IB is the definitive virtual company.
Becker launched First IB in 1999 with $1.2 million of his own money and a $14-million capital base raised from investors. (It's the only company he doesn't own 100% of; regulatory requirements cap his stake at just over 5%.) Essentially, First IB is a merging of the products developed at re:Member Data and VIFI. The re:Member Data software constitutes First IB's number-crunching back end, and the VIFI software makes up its graphically spectacular front end.
First IB outsources its technology requirements to its progenitors, paying them through intercompany billing. If the bank wants to develop a new concept -- say, accounts that can be set up instantaneously -- it gets priority over other customers because Becker controls its software vendors, too. The benefits swing both ways. "The bank is almost a working laboratory for the other two companies," he says.
