Planning ahead

They said he couldn’t do it.

That was nearly five years ago, and he’s clearly proven them wrong. Today, PlanSoft President Edward Tromczynski owns one of the rare dot-com companies that is actually making money.

Tromczynski attributes PlanSoft’s success record to two aspects of the business that set it apart from the Internet crowd: the tools on the site, such as calculators, search engines and budgeting modules; and the fact that PlanSoft is not waiting for customers.

The company, which employs 150 people, designs, develops and markets Internet-based e-commerce applications for the convention and meeting industry. The business was founded by Tromczynski and Bruce Harris and incorporated in 1996. Both partners came from Conferon Inc., the company Harris founded in 1971, which provides services for managing large meetings and conventions.

To date, the partners have secured more than $46 million in funding for PlanSoft, through both strategic and venture capital investors.

PlanSoft markets two main products — its Web site (www.plansoft.com) and Ajenis event planning software. The products join meeting planners with hospitality service providers, making the process much more efficient for the planner.

Both sides of the market (the planners and providers) are also equity owners in the company. The two largest meeting professionals associations (the American Society of Association Executives and Meeting Professionals International) and three of the largest hotel chains (Hyatt Hotels, Marriott and Starwood Hotels & Resorts) own stock in the company. Hence, PlanSoft doesn’t have to wait for customers, because its customers are its owners.

“Many of the business-to-consumer or business-to-business sites take the stance of, ‘If they build it, they will come,’” explains Tromczynski. “In our case, it’s the guys that are building it who are coming. They’re much more committed.”

Tromczynski adds that having equity owners on both sides of the market is helping the company overcome some of the challenges that dot-coms face today. And as it prepares for a public offering early next year, that position can only be beneficial.

“All these tech stocks are going up and down right now,” he says. “A lot of them are you and I creating shoe.com and hoping consumers come and buy shoes on the Web. All those stocks are having trouble. On the business-to-business front, where people are trying to match buyers to sellers without any equity ownership to those parties — they’re really struggling too.

“We have both the buyers and seller who own pieces of our company.”

While he says the company is targeting the first quarter of 2001 for its IPO, it is in an enviable position of being flexible on the date.

“There’s a lot of companies who can tell you their cash runs out before they can get to the public market, or they barely get there and find themselves trying to change their company into a public company, but they don’t have the money to do it,” he says.

Fortunately, PlanSoft has a strong enough cash flow that it can wait for the right market conditions.

As of last month, plansoft.com attracts about 85,000 user sessions each month, people logging on and actually doing business. When you consider that most of those sessions result in the purchase of a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of products or services, the numbers are impressive, even if the revenue is a small piece of that pie.

“We thought early on one of the ways we can keep these very committed people using our Web site is to bring them tools,” Tromczynski says. “And now we’re starting to reap that.

“A lot of people haven’t done that. They’ve built an advertising model, they have a lot of good information you can read, they have some community activities, but they don’t have tools.” How to reach: PlanSoft, (330) 405-5555 or www.plansoft.com

Connie Swenson ([email protected]) is editor of SBN Akron and SBN Stark.