Tampa Bay Regional Winner

Tampa Bay Regional Winner

Mark Swanson

Founder, Multiple Businesses

Mark Swanson has never been to a job interview.

He has been constantly occupied by starting businesses on his own, so he has never had to ask someone else to hire him. The 44-year-old Swanson has started about a half-dozen companies throughout his career, four of them in the Tampa Bay area.

"I'm trying to go through my whole life without being in one [interview]," he says with a chuckle. "Well, at least until I'm 50. I'd actually like to know what goes on in interviews."

At the rate he's going, though, he might not have to go on any interviews at all.

Swanson is chief technical officer and chairman of Telovations, a technology company offering phone service through the Internet, known as VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). Less than a year old, the company started grossing $50,000 a month in February.

Telovations is only the newest venture for Swanson, who actively manages three other startups. In the past five years, he has founded a bicycle manufacturing company and two other Bay-area technology firms.

"It's just the thrill of creating something out of nothing," Swanson says. "It's very rewarding."

A West Point graduate, Swanson helped create the first Apache Helicopter attack unit in the U.S. Army. He even used his creativity skills to get into the U.S. Military Academy. When he was 17, the St. Petersburg native went to a holiday party for West Point candidates where Congressman C.W. Bill Young was seeking to find the one youth he would endorse for acceptance into the academy for the year.

Swanson caught Young's attention by taking a bold step. "I was kind of feeling a little crowded out," says Swanson. "So I went to the piano and started talking to [Young's] wife."

She asked Swanson to play a Christmas song and a few minutes later, the congressman's decision was made. He picked Swanson out of 10 contenders that year.

A weird time

After graduating, he served as an Army aviator in the 1980s. At 25, he was involved in forming the first Apache unit.

"We had no manuals," Swanson says. "No one really understood the tactics to deploy these helicopters. You had to basically form the policies and procedures yourself," he says. "It was probably the most rewarding experience I've had."

He has tried to duplicate that experience ever since, mostly by building companies from scratch.

When he was stationed in Texas, he quickly figured out how to take advantage of the real estate bust in the area. He started using credit cards to buy repossessed homes and flipping them for a profit. Seventeen houses later, he had made about $150,000.

He left the Army in 1992 and invested that money in his first business, an Atlanta-based database company that managed digital images. Eventually, he split the company with some partners and took off for his next venture, Swan Interactive Media.

He was right on the wave of the 1990s Internet boom. Swanson's firm was acquired by IXL, a multimedia company, and Swanson started a spin-off in New York City called Appgenesis, a company that helped retailers such as Kmart deal with fluctuating seasonal Web demand on their e-commerce sites.

That business grew to a $7 million-a-year venture. But Swanson quit as CEO just as the tech boom began to unravel.

"People think I time it intentionally," Swanson says, but by that time, he was feeling the effects of years of putting in long hours. And he had decided to move his family closer to his parents in Tampa to take a break.

"It was kind of a weird time for me," he says. "I had had this goal when I was 30 that I'd be a millionaire by the time I was 40. But I didn't really have a goal after that."

'A zillion things'

He stayed away from business for a while. "I thought I might want to be a race car driver," he says, now chuckling at the notion, and he enrolled in a week-long course in Las Vegas.

It didn't take.

"It was a lot of fun. But it's something that would require you to be away from home on weekends," he says. "And I wanted to be more of a family guy."

He went back to starting businesses again in 2001. His first project was Bacchetta Bicycles, a high-end maker of recumbent bikes. The company generated $1.1 million in sales last year and reported a 10% profit.

"The only bad thing about Mark is he's got a zillion things on his mind," says Mark Colliton, Swanson's brother-in-law and co-founder of Bacchetta Bicycles. "It's hard to keep him focused. He's really got a lot of energy."

After Bacchetta Bicycles, Swanson started Perk International, an e-procurement company that fulfills and manages marketing materials through Internet technology.

By 2003, Swanson was becoming known in Bay area IT circles. He was getting a lot of ideas from budding entrepreneurs. He started Cerebit that year, after reviewing a business plan for a technology company that can manage the distribution of digital data.

Cerebit sells its products to financial services, healthcare and other companies that need to control how employees access certain data. Among its high-profile clients is US Airways, which hired Cerebit last year to help track its promotions and loyalty award programs on the Internet.

Swanson is also excited about his latest venture, Telovations. The company now has about 60 clients. He says he plans to remain active with the company at least until he's 50. And then, he wants to focus on more philanthropic projects.

He already has a head start on that front. On top of his entrepreneurial activities, Swanson co-founded militaryfamiliesfoundation.org in 2003. The non-profit raises money to support families suffering from the death or disability of soldiers who have served on the War on Terror.

The foundation collected and sent $65,000 worth of phone cards to troops overseas during the holiday seasons of 2003 and 2004.

"He's a very fun person, a good person, someone you can trust," says Swanson's friend and former business partner, Blake Patton. "People sense that about him. I think that's part of why he's been so successful."

-Isabelle Gan

Revenues 2003: $1.4 million 2004: $3.4 million 2005: $5.7 million

(142.8% increase) (67.6% increase)

Average annual growth: 105.2%

EMPLOYEES 2004: 21 2005: 33 2006: 31