President
Rhino Records
Los Angeles, California
My philosophy is simple: Love what you do. Don't do something because you hear that it's a great way to make money. When we started our record label, disco music was selling. We could easily have said, "Let's produce disco records." But we had no passion for disco music. By the time we got into business, disco was dead. If we had chosen disco, we would have failed miserably and gone bankrupt. Instead, we went for a niche that nobody else was filling. But it was a niche that we were passionate about.
Start as small as possible: To achieve 100% success, you need to grow organically. Pass up outside financing until you know that you can run the company. Starting with limited financing forces you to learn every single aspect of a business: how to balance a ledger, how to collect receivables, how to draw up contracts. If you don't understand all aspects of your business, you've set yourself up to fail.
Rhino Records (www.rhino.com), which offers more than 2,500 reissues of rare recordings, was acquired by Warner Music Group in 1998. Richard Foos and his partner, Harold Bronson, started the label in 1978. At first, Rhino issued novelty recordings, but over time it began licensing and remastering recordings from other labels. Foos got his start by selling used records from the trunk of his car.
Founder, chairman, and CEO
Jamba Juice Co.
San Francisco, California
People who start a company want to hang on to it. They want to protect what they've started. But they really need to let the people inside the organization -- and even those outside it (subcontractors, vendors) -- bring ideas to life. You have to let go a little bit.
At Jamba, we became too bureaucratic and tried to control everything, and that slowed us down. We had an idea: We'd offer juice boosts that people could take home for times when they couldn't get to Jamba. Two years later, we still hadn't implemented that idea in even one of our stores. The old way would have been to test the idea by conducting an internal project. The new way is to partner with a vitamin-supplement company and tap into its resources to bring our idea to life.
Back when I was the sole owner of the company, we didn't have a strong network. A few years ago, the question facing us was "Do we want to be a small, regional company, growing slowly and controlling everything? Or do we want to be a national brand?" For us to be national required growth, and that required us to raise more capital. Realizing our dream meant owning a smaller piece of a bigger company.
Jamba Juice (www.jambajuice.com) has 270 stores nationwide and brings in about $150 million in annual sales. Kirk Perron previously worked at Safeway and Vons grocery stores.
President and CEO
iMediation
Paris, France
There's a new wave of managers and leaders who can quickly build a company and take that company global. They start up in many countries at once, so that after 12 months the company has a balanced business in Europe, the United States, and Asia. The old, restricted view that you can start in your domestic market and then progressively expand, taking countries one by one, is completely obsolete. You need to find the right leaders and managers -- people who are used to living in various countries and dealing with various cultures.
At iMediation, our managers represent eight nationalities, and we launched the company simultaneously in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. Of course, that approach is a little more costly: You have to provide sales, marketing, and personnel services in many places. On the other hand, it forces you to be much more aggressive from a business and marketing standpoint, because investors insist on seeing revenue right away. We started to sell and market our product six months earlier than a Silicon Valley company would.
The challenge is to build a company that is global in its reach but local in its execution. The point is not that we have our headquarters in Paris and that we tell our people in America what to do. The local team knows better, so we assign clear duties and emphasize communication.
iMediation (www.imediation.com), founded in March 1998, is a global provider of e-commerce solutions to manage cross-selling, comarketing, and distribution. Before joining iMediation in the fall of 1998, Didier Benchimol spent four years serving as vice president and general manager of Netscape Communications Europe. Previously, he ran Vulcan Ventures for Paul Allen's multimedia companies in Europe.
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