Posted by Tom Blue on November 12, 2009 under Profiles | 
1. What do you do?
Modern Battery Solutions provides battery reconditioning services and sells military proven battery recovery and reconditioning systems to material handling companies, forklift and battery repair companies, distribution centers, golf courses and to individuals with the desire to establish their own battery reconditioning service. Additionally, we offer training programs and assistance in the set up of new service providers within the industry.
2. Who are your competitors?
There are too many to name but, many of them have their gimmicks and battery recon elixir and rejuvenation solutions and sulfation elimination additives and stuff like that.
3. What makes you different than your competitors?
Our customers love us because we work with the originating developer, designer and manufacturer of this technology and they have an established 25 year history of US military tested, proven and accepted battery recovery systems. The versions sold by us and used in our own services are the authorized commercial versions of the original military version that are in battery maintenance facilities all over the world. These battery recovery systems are simply unmatched in price, quality and performance.
4. What are you or your ceo’s biggest challenges?
Our two biggest challenges are industry rehabilitation and the time it takes to accomplish it.1.Rehabilitating the industry’s concept of battery reconditioning from the conventional means and the school of thought that says battery desulfation is possible to a degree, yet even proof that now being our present reality drudges up doubts of their past snake oil experiences. 2. Battery desulfation has been the reality for the US military for several years and has made enormous progress in both cost and waste reduction to say the least, but the commercial industry has been inundated with countless reconditioning and desulfation gimmicks that has skewed its ability to see that the real deal is finally being made available to them at a reasonably low cost.
5. Which marketing tactic/strategy has produced the most leads/revenue for your company?
Our most effective marketing strategies are researching our potential clients and working to build up the trust relationships between the two of us. We send out emails followed up with phone calls and drop-in to meet our clients face to face. We let them know that we are in it for the long haul and keep the focus on the relationship and not the sale because once the relationship is established trust is no longer an issue and the risk of the purchase has been removed.
6. How long have you been in business?
We are a new company established in 2008 working with tested and true ideals from a 25 year history of working with people.
7. How many employees do you have?
We are a modest force of less than 20 employees and are primarily focused the structuring of our North American and European distribution network. A registered small business.
Below is an eInterview we did with Deborah Baker, a founder of Modern Battery Solutions.
1. What do you do?
Modern Battery Solutions provides battery reconditioning services and sells military proven battery recovery and reconditioning systems to material handling companies, forklift and battery repair companies, distribution centers, golf courses and to individuals with the desire to establish their own battery reconditioning service. Additionally, we offer training programs and assistance in the set up of new service providers within the industry.
2. Who are your competitors?
There are too many to name but, many of them have their gimmicks and battery recon elixir and rejuvenation solutions and sulfation elimination additives and stuff like that.
3. What makes you different than your competitors?
Our customers love us because we work with the originating developer, designer and manufacturer of this technology and they have an established 25 year history of US military tested, proven and accepted battery recovery systems. The versions sold by us and used in our own services are the authorized commercial versions of the original military version that are in battery maintenance facilities all over the world. These battery recovery systems are simply unmatched in price, quality and performance.
4. What are you or your ceo’s biggest challenges?
Our two biggest challenges are industry rehabilitation and the time it takes to accomplish it.1.Rehabilitating the industry’s concept of battery reconditioning from the conventional means and the school of thought that says battery desulfation is possible to a degree, yet even proof that now being our present reality drudges up doubts of their past snake oil experiences. 2. Battery desulfation has been the reality for the US military for several years and has made enormous progress in both cost and waste reduction to say the least, but the commercial industry has been inundated with countless reconditioning and desulfation gimmicks that has skewed its ability to see that the real deal is finally being made available to them at a reasonably low cost.
5. Which marketing tactic/strategy has produced the most leads/revenue for your company?
Our most effective marketing strategies are researching our potential clients and working to build up the trust relationships between the two of us. We send out emails followed up with phone calls and drop-in to meet our clients face to face. We let them know that we are in it for the long haul and keep the focus on the relationship and not the sale because once the relationship is established trust is no longer an issue and the risk of the purchase has been removed.
6. How long have you been in business?
We are a new company established in 2008 working with tested and true ideals from a 25 year history of working with people.
7. How many employees do you have?
We are a modest force of less than 20 employees and are primarily focused the structuring of our North American and European distribution network. A registered small business.
Posted by Tom Blue on June 3, 2009 under Uncategorized |
Pari Annamalai is an American that is now living in Singapore. His company, Planvisage, provides supply chain solutions… Here is our interview below.
1. What do you do?
Planvisage is a Supply Chain Solutions Company. We provide both software and services to companies including outsourced planning services for small and medium sized (SMEs) businesses all over the world.
2. Who are your competitors?
Not to sound funny but our biggest competitors are Microsoft Excel or manual processes. We compete with other companies that do Production Planning, Production Scheduling, Demand Planning and Replenishment Planning for SMEs. This market is highly fragmented with no real global player. There are big players like SAP with APO, Oracle with APS, i2 and JDA Manugistics but they focus on larger manufacturing companies so we really do not consider them our competition.
3. What makes you different than your competitors?
Our product is very graphical things like our BOM Diagram and our Gnatt Based Planning board are all very unique to our solution. We also offer functionality that is important to SMEs that are only found in the larger systems but the cost of these systems can be many times higher. Our total cost of ownership is very low because of the following reasons:
a. Our products are based on a proprietary heuristic algorithm rather than optimization algorithms which increases the need for hardware.
b. The products are build on standard proven MS .net framework and standard databases like SQL, DB2 and Oracle. This insures availability of long term support and reduced costs.
c. Implementation times are 25% of the time of larger systems which insures up front investments are low. Typically we can implement our modules in less than one month.
d. No special administrators or support staff required to maintain the system. The users are able to maintain the system and make the needed changes as required.
4. What are your or your ceo’s biggest challenges?
Our biggest challenge is the overall economy has affected most of our customers worldwide but the companies that have used this time to invest in such solutions have seen paybacks of as little as one quarter on their investment. They have seen tremendous cash savings from inventory reductions, utilization of capacity more efficiently, better alignment of supply and demand which has meant lower obsolescence and inventory carrying costs and overall reduction in planning and production cycle times. In one of customers they saw a payback at one of their four factories of less than six weeks. Planvisage has also received in the past year four awards from customers and independent institutions. So getting the word out that this is truly an investment has been one of our biggest challenges.
5. How long have you been in business?
We have been in business since Jan 2004.
6. How many employees do you have?
We have about 21 employees and three partners. Our employees are equally disbursed in development and consulting. We also have a half dozen distribution partners throughout the world. We are also Microsoft, IBM and Intel ISV partners.
7. What are your revenue estimates for 2009?
We expect this year to be similar revenues to last year which is about $1,000,000.
8. Are you profitable?
We expect in 2009 to be breakeven but we have been profitable from 2004 to 2007 and have substantial cash reserves from these years. These cash reserves are in excess of one years working capital requirements.
Posted by Tom Blue on May 27, 2009 under Companies, Executives, Marketing, Technology |
I am always trying to profile bootstrapped startups so I was very happy we got in contact with FunAdvice and Jeremy Goodrich. He is extremely open about FunAdvice and I assume that really helps his PR. Of course, more bloggers, etc are going to be more likely to do a story on you if you can give them some dirt. FunAdvice has been growing 300% year over year and that is without the help of venture capital. Very impressive. Please the profile interview below…
1. What do you do?
FunAdvice is a question & answer service that allows anybody to register, ask questions, give advice and make friends. Our fundamental belief is that advice / answers is far more interesting when it’s truly social so over the years, we’ve added customizable profiles, friend lists, photo sharing & tagging, photo rating, groups, private messaging and more to improve retention and member interaction. Generally speaking, it’s worked very well, as our retention has been going up along with overall traffic.
2. Who are your competitors?
The main competitor’s that we benchmark against are Yahoo Answers, Wiki Answers and Answerbag, as those are the three largest Q&A sites in the US…there are about a half dozen or so that have raised VC money or been acquired, including Yedda, Answerology, Mahalo…however, I don’t worry about what they’re doing as from 3rd party stats services, we’re all pretty close in terms of userbase.
3. What makes you different than your competitors?
The social emphasis in FunAdvice is unique…eg, ‘interest’ lists you can’t find on other Q&A sites, nor customizable profiles, nor photo tagging, etc…our breadth of member features and functionalities is really what makes the service interesting as Q&A by itself is a commodity.
4. What are your or your ceo’s biggest challenges?
To be honest, building out a site and team is pretty new to me. Despite having built eight companies over the last nine years with my wife (and several with our CTO of FunAdvice, Ericson) the last year or so has been tough for me as my leadership and team building experience is very thin. As a result, I’ve been reading a lot of books, blogs and quizing companies I’ve consulted with in the past on how to build a team, how to ensure we attain the productivity I’d like and overall keep marching the numbers higher. It’s a tough juggling act, as I go back and forth on adding features to improving revenue to improving traffic…though our team is very capable and I think we get as much done as most companies with 2x the staff, full time and centrally located staff. The distributed ‘virtual company’ thing has some advantages for us, as I don’t have to deal with atypical office politics stuff…of course that doesn’t mean we’re drama free but I do believe it’s a manageable headache.
6. How long have you been in business?
FunAdvice was started in March, 2003…however, we filed to become an LLC just about two years ago, as the site grew to 700K+ visitors, we wanted to have a more formal business structure around things.
7. How many employees do you have?
Currently we have eight people in total, three are co-founders, three full time, two part time…though I only manage the two part time & one full time employee directly, as our engineering team in China is managed by our lead engineer who has been with us for over two years now and he manages the full time engineers who build out the bulk of the site there for us.
8. What are your revenue estimates for 2009?
Somewhere between six and seven figures…as we use adsense exclusively, their terms of service say we can’t share our revenue numbers publicly. 
9. Are you profitable?
We have been profitable for nearly two years, however, the founders all work part time and don’t receive a salary…we should be profitable even with paying the co-founders (including myself) a regular salary in the next three to six months.
10. When were you founded?
March, 2003 the site went live and we haven’t looked back since. It’s been a wild ride, though we didn’t really work on the site proactively until August, 2006…in October, 2006, we had 70K visitors…now, on a busy day, we have nearly 200K visitors, which is quite a jump.
