Ian Andrusyk is no stranger to entrepreneurship — he started his first company
in his parents’ basement when he was 15.
While running FabsFreebies.com, a Web site
that listed free goods available on other sites,
the Iowa teenager found a reliable hosting
provider was hard to come by, so he bought
a server and started his own Web-hosting
business.
More than 10 years — and a few businesses — later, the 26-year-old Andrusyk now
serves as co-founder, president and CEO at
FastServers.Net, a 40-employee dedicated hosting provider with fiscal 2007 revenue of $9.1 million, up from $5.9 million in fiscal year 2006.
“When we first started, we were at a
‘grow at whatever means possible’
operations mode,” Andrusyk says.
Today, the wunderkind takes a more
calculated approach to finding outlets
for growth.
Smart Business spoke with
Andrusyk about how to uncover
business opportunities by treating
vendors as partners.
Q: How do you recognize business
opportunities?
We always treated vendors more
as partners. That’s given us opportunities.
Working with them more on the
partner role, we’ve been able to customize a lot of our vendors’ offerings specifically to our needs to
develop new services and offerings
that maybe that vendor’s not offering to anybody else.
Q: How do you create that partner relationship with vendors?
Many of the products that we use right out
of the box are not quite up to our specifications, or we or our customers find a few
things wrong with them.
We always try to sit down and say, ‘Here’s
the product you’re offering so far. Here’s
what we’d like to do to make it even better,
to customize it for us. How can we get
there?’ If that involves jumping on a plan and
sitting down with (them) for a little bit or
anything along those lines, whatever the situation is.
The most important element is getting as
much face time with these people as possible, making sure that you’re going to be at the
same conventions and same industry-specific
things that you’d expect to see them at.
Q: What else can you do to recognize
opportunities?
Make sure to take what’s hot in the industry and try to capitalize on it. Start putting
out offerings that match the buzzwords.
See what people are asking for. If we are
getting consistent requests for a type of service or a type of offering that we don’t have,
that’s obviously a quick way to recognize it.
Q: How do you keep that close eye on the
industry?
There’re certain blog authors that I read on
almost a daily basis. There’re certain industry
forums that you kind of just page through.
Obviously, you can’t read 20,000 posts a day.
Just look for the main topics.
Keep an eye on your industry’s own specific
trade publications and their trade magazines.
Take a look at your competition. See what
they are and aren’t offering.
Anytime you have the opportunity to
attend trade shows, get on a plane and travel somewhere and find out what’s going on.
We’ve got a lot of different people here to
set Google Alerts for different companies
and different products.
It’s just tracking as many different information sources as possible.
Q: What is the benefit of doing those things?
They let us know what direction the
industry’s heading. It’s being able to
know what the news is on your competitors, what the news is on your vendors.
The fast pace in which everything
changes, you’re kind of left out in the dark
if you’re not keeping tabs on it.
Q: You employ a talented team to help
keep up with that pace. How do you show
employees that you’re actually listening
when they present ideas?
It’s the ability to not just listen to what
goes on but to possibly craft changes based
upon what you hear.
A few examples: after-work socialization.
I’ll go out with a group of guys that I don’t do
much overseeing. Someone might just get
comfortable enough to say, ‘I don’t like this,
this, this or that.’
If I just kind of blew it off on the spot, it probably wouldn’t mean much. (It’s) the ability to
at least talk about it the next day: ‘This person
brought this up. What’s really going on?’
There are going to be situations where people blow off steam, or people are going to
have ideas that for whatever reason won’t
work. Obviously, you can’t cater to every little thing.
(It’s) being there and showing that you’re
interacting with the whole process, that
you’re at least understanding what someone
is saying. Maybe you don’t agree with it.
Maybe nothing’s going to change, but you’re
at least feeding it back to them and saying,
‘Well, here’s why this probably won’t work.’
Just that you’re there and willing to sit
down and hear what they have to say; that
does help lead to overall confidence in whatever your vision and mission is.
HOW TO REACH: FastServers.Net, www.fastservers.net or (866)
753-3278
