The Serial Entrepreneur

The Serial Entrepreneur

ENTREPRENEUR by Dave Szymanski | Tampa Bay Editor

St. Petersburg executive Mark Swanson has started a number of technology companies over the years, including Telovations, a telecommunications firm in Tampa.

t. Petersburg businessman, computer engineer and former Army helicopter pilot Mark E. Swanson calls himself a "serial entrepreneur." The 46-year-old Army Major has started nine companies, and has sold most of them.

"There was a time when I was creating about one business a year," Swanson says. "We all need to pick something in life. I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur. It was more affected by my wanting to be my own boss than any specific idea. It was a little backward."

Today, he has slowed down his business creation, but hasn't slowed down as an executive.

He continues to manage and lead a number of Tampa Bay area businesses as a chairman, including Telovations, a Tampa telecommunications company; Swan Holdings, a real estate investment firm; and Bacchetta Bicycles, a recumbent bicycle manufacturer.

Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Swanson's family moved to St. Petersburg, where he went to high school. His father was a teacher who came to visit family in Florida and decided to relocate.

After graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point as a computer engineer in 1982, he flew Apache helicopters for the Army. The Army picked Swanson to form and command the first activating AH-64 Apache Helicopter Unit.

While doing loops, rolls, blowing things up and leading people, something clicked.

"I had a good time," Swanson recalls. "I enjoyed the small units. I thought I could replicate that running small businesses. I enjoyed leading small groups versus being a staff officer."

Harboring an interest in new technologies, he also believed that smaller, more nimble companies could outmaneuver larger established ones.

"If you focus your efforts on a particular thing, you will win in the long run," Swanson says. "Business is always in a constant flux. If you figure out new and innovative ways, you can beat the big guys, who are fat, drunk and happy."

Beginnings in Atlanta

He went to Georgia Institute of Technology for a master's degree in management of technology and in 1992, Swanson started an Atlanta company called The Digital Image, which designed and delivered image database software for the real estate and retail industries.

In 1994, he spun another company out of Digital called Swan Interactive Media, which built intranets for companies.

It eventually built full Web sites for companies such as Sun Trust, enabling the bank to do credit card transactions over the Web. Working with Apple Computer, it put together 360-degree tours on Web sites for companies.

It was in Atlanta that he met his future wife while running 10Ks in a running club.

"I lived near Piedmont Park," Swanson says. "We would run around the park and then drink beer. We had a good time."

In 1997, Swanson then merged the company with Swann iXL, a video and Web front-end company in New York. He became CTO in 1997, president in 1998 and eventually took the company public in 1999.

In December of that year, he left iXL and started AppGenesys, a technology managed service provider in San Jose, Calif. The company focuses on the process of staging, testing, tuning, deploying, monitoring and scaling Web applications for clients. AppGenesys secured $50 million of first-round funding from Chase Capital Partners, DynaFund Ventures, Flatiron Partners, Inktomi Corp., Intel Capital, iXL, Kelso & Co., NeoCarta Ventures and Softbank Venture Capital.

But he and his wife decided that they didn't want to raise a family on the upper west side of Manhattan.

Moving to Tampa Bay

So that year, he moved to St. Petersburg to be closer to his parents. For the first year, he continued to commute to San Jose, Calif. every week, leaving Mondays at 5:50 a.m. on a direct flight. On the five-hour flight, he brought two laptop batteries and had uninterrupted time to knock out about 100 emails.

"I was a premiere flyer on Delta and United," Swanson recalled. "I ate out all the time. My sleep was messed up. That got old."

He would fly home Fridays to his wife and two children. Sometimes his wife would have a list of things she wanted him to do. He would play with his kids. Then he'd pack Sunday and leave Mondays.

By June 2001, he left AppGenesys, determined to take some time off. He was happy to be back in the Tampa Bay area, where he had a lot of friends and business contacts and less traffic than Atlanta.

"It has a good business environment and a good quality of life," Swanson says.

However, about two months later, his brother-in-law asked him to help start a St. Petersburg company to make recumbent bicycles, Bacchetta Bicycles Inc.

"He was a big bike fanatic," Swanson says.

Starting the bike company had an added benefit: Swanson lost 30 pounds, down to his ideal weight of 190, by riding his bicycle more.

The company used its Web site to invite customers and potential customers to post comments about the bike. While this opened the company up to criticism, it also drew many accolades.

"At the end of the day, the users create your message," Swanson says.

Swanson appears on the Bacchetta Web site along with the rest of the management team, sans tie, in a white T-shirt.

In 2002, a neighbor asked Swanson to come on as chairman and help him grow a local company called Quick Rich, a promotional products company, which they renamed and re-incorporated as Perk International.

In 2003, another friend asked Swanson to come on as CEO for Cerebit, a company that made network software that screened transactions over the Internet, making them secure. Besides running the company, Swanson helped them raise venture capital. It closed a venture round in November 2004. Swanson resigned, but retained equity in Cerebit. In August 2006, Swanson sold Perk.

He then bought warehouses in St. Petersburg and Sarasota, some duplexes and started Swan Holdings, a real estate investment company. One of his assistants runs it now, collecting rent and managing maintenance.

Starting Telovations

While working for Cerebit, Swanson learned about VOIP, or voice over Internet protocol, a way to use the Internet to make telephone calls. He worked for a year independently on the concept for a company that would later become Telovations, a telecommunications firm. He met Rick Schonbrun, the future CEO of Telovations, through the Tampa Bay Technology Forum.

To be successful with Telovations, Swanson knew he needed to maintain a good sound quality with telephone calls made through the Internet. Other similar companies would drop calls, or callers would hear warbling and echoes.

So he and Schonbrun put together a prototype for the company, using T1 lines to get callers from their computers to the Telovations network. They also tied the network into cell phones, so the desk phone and the cell phone would ring on the same number. And they bundled in Internet hookups. They got 60 to 70 customers and took the idea to venture capitalists and raised $6.5 million to start the company.

Swanson also became an equity investor in other Gulf Coast companies, including High Wall and Real Digital Media in Sarasota. He also sits on the board of other companies, such as Electronic Learning Products, an educational software company in Tampa.

When he's not running or investing in companies, Swanson is scuba diving, fishing or flying his Diamond Star plane, which seats four. He keeps it at Albert Whitted Airport in St. Petersburg.

He's concerned about taxes, which on one of his properties shot from $3,000 a year to $8,000 in less than three years. Swanson had to double his rents.

"People can't find another place to live," he says. "That's the issue we need to give attention to. You can't own a corner deli anymore."

Despite his long work history, Swanson admitted that he never had a job interview. He admits he got spread a little far with too many companies, but he paired it back. No regrets.

"Life is actually very short," he says. "You can take orders from other people or take a few chances. We've created a system in our country where if you take a risk, you can pick up the pieces and start over."

10 things to consider

Mark Swanson offers the following advice:

1. Hire carefully and be ready to either move people or let them go if they don't work out. You must have great people on the team because an average team produces average results no matter how good of a coach you are. When you reassign employee's let them know you are doing them a favor. There is no sense languishing in one position when you could thrive in another. A manager's job is to find a position for the worker to thrive in - whether that is in the company or outside of it.

2. Create an environment where people love to work and actively develop a culture that encourages people to work together, share ideas and remain highly motivated. When one person achieves great results, everybody involved should share in the credit and feel good about it. Facilitate off-duty group events and team-building exercises. Encourage fun and wacky things in the office as a reward for productivity.

3. Find subordinates who do their jobs better than you can, then teach those people how to do your job. Train your replacement. If you develop somebody who can do your job well, that frees you for some other challenge.

4. Have your employees set goals. Almost always, I found that people would set more aggressive schedules and delivery standards than if I had created them myself. People will accept and bend over backwards for a "bottom-up" deadline they helped set but they'll be cynical about a schedule imposed from the top. Make it clear to your employees how they can be successful and that you expect them to meet their goals.

5. To be a good manager, you have to like people, be honest and open. Encourage people to tell you what's going on (good or bad) and give you feedback about what people are thinking about the company and your role in it.

6. Give people a sense of the importance of what they're working on, its importance to the company, its importance to customers. Make them feel like the stuff that they work on makes a difference to somebody else.

7. Make learning important. Create an environment that makes people learn something new every day. Spot check people to find out what they learned everyday. Make sure that you invest in the tools and allocate time to make sure people are learning stuff all the time.

8. Take on projects yourself. Lead by example. From time to time, prove you can be hands-on by taking on one of the less-attractive tasks and using it as an example of how your employees should meet challenges. You have to demonstrate competence for your team to have confidence in you.

9. Don't make the same decision twice. Spend the time and thought to make a solid decision the first time so that you don't revisit the issue unnecessarily. If you're too willing to reopen issues, it interferes not only with your execution but also with undermines future decisions. People hate indecisive leadership.

10. Do something you really enjoy. You just can't compete unless you love what you are doing. If your employees see you enjoying yourself, they will more than likely enjoy themselves too and be more productive. Enthusiasm is contagious.

REVIEW SUMMARY

Executive: Mark

Swanson, entrepreneur and chairman, Telovations

Industry: Telecommunications

Key: Save businesses communication costs.