Entrepreneur of the Year

Ed Estes Wins Prestigious Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

Start with little 'bang,' build from there

First, he founded digitalBANG, a small but growing shop of programmers and e-business consultants in Over-the-Rhine. Then he developed a process of business brainstorming, needs assessment, return-on-investment analysis and application development designed to turn big corporations on their ears.

Rather than going in, guns blazing, and trying to sell companies big, expensive IT solution that they don't need, Estes and his team start with the basics. They find a small project they can do in a few months to show bottom-line results, then sell the client another, and another, and so on—all following a collaborative "vision plan" drafted when the process began.

"It's a big paradigm shift for a lot of businesses, so it's a much harder sell," Estes said. "So what we say is, 'Give us a small project, let us get in there and show you how this is going to change what you're doing… so it's better and saving you money.' And once we do that, we've got a client for life."

So far, it's been working.

DigitalBANG more than tripled in size and revenue last year over 1999, to $1 million and 13 employees. Estes expects to finish 2001 with 35 workers and $3 million in sales. It has about 50 ongoing clients including Procter & Gamble.

As a result, he is faced with a host of "problems" that many business owners would envy—from finding a desk at work in the morning, since he gave up his to a new hire; to deciding where to open the first satellite office.

The future "is going to be big" Estes said.

Within five years, he expounded, digitalBANG should have 300 employees working at a corporate campus in Greater Cincinnati, with another 30 to 50 people working at small satellite offices in 10 to 15 cities. He envisions the campus as a brainstorming utopia, where big corporate clients could spend three to four days envisioning technological advancements for their companies that digitalBANG developers would then turn into reality one bit at a time.

"We don't work with a company as a vendor, and we don't want a company to come to us and say, 'Here's what we want you to do for us and just do it.' We want to get together and not talk about technology, but about the business as a whole—and not just about one little piece of technology," Estes said.

That's what the BANG—basis, application, nuance and growth—is all about. Yet many corporations are used to dealing with sprawling consulting firms and spending millions before seeing any financial return, Estes said.

Estes is putting together a board of advisers, to better understand how to salve digitalBANG's growing pains. Accountant Crystal Faulkner, of Cooney Faulkner and Stevens LLC, is signed up. In addition to helping build her firm, she has been active with a number of local high-tech startups.

"Ed is full of energy. He's got very creative ideas. He's very much a visionary person," she said. "And the neat thing is, he's surrounded himself with people who have really complementary skills. It's really smart."

Estes is intent on making his mark on the IT world.

"Our goal is that when someone looks at our projects, they'll say, 'Wow—digitalBANG must have done that."

Q&A WITH ED ESTES
Q: What was the hardest part about starting your company?
A: I think it was patience. I don't believe in talking about it, I believe in doing it and showing results. So being patient and building the infrastructure and documenting our process has been the hardest thing.

Q: What is the biggest challenge facing your company?
A: Educating companies about the way we do business and why we're different. That's why we're not so much selling now, we're going in and doing education. That's why we're putting on seminars and such—to help (potential clients) get over their fears, because a lot of companies have been burned and they're not sure why they should spend more money on technology now.

Q: What advice would you give aspiring entrepreneurs?
A: The biggest thing is to make sure you plan out your business and make sure you document it—but don't be afraid to just go for it. Failure's not so hard. And every very successful person or company has had a lot of failures and learned it's not the end of the world. You learn from them and go on. It's only through the failures that you're going to succeed. You need to focus on the future and not the past.

VITAL STATISTICS
Name: digitalBANG LLC
Founded: 1997
Address: 542 E. 12th St., Cincinnati 45210
Phone: (513) 421-6200
Web site: www.digitalbang.com
Business: Information technology consulting services and application development
Employees: 15
Structure: LLC
Owner: Ed Estes
Revenues: $1 million in 2000; $3 million projected 2001
Bank: Firstar
Accountant: Cooney Faulkner & Stevens LLC
Attorney: Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP

OFFICERS
President/CEO: Ed Estes
COO: Joseph Balbo