ENTREPRENEUER OF THE YEAR OVERALL WINNER: BARRY SHEVLIN

ENTREPRENEUER OF THE YEAR OVERALL WINNER

BARRY SHEVLIN

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, NETWORK LIQUIDATORS

by Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

Old Things New

Barry Shevlin has $500 million dreams for his company, already a big success that started off with a $3,000 loan.

A few days before Thanksgiving in 1989, Barry Shevlin should have been thinking about turkey and cranberries. Instead he was worrying about wind gusts and electrical shocks.

Here's the scene: Shevlin, then 19, was working for the local cable company on Long Island, N.Y., not far from the blue-collar Queens, N.Y. neighborhood he grew up in. He spent his days climbing cable poles and splicing wires. The money was good - sometimes as much as $1,000 a week - but the job itself was a bad combination of dull repetitions and changing whether patterns.

"There had to be a better way to do this," Shevlin thought to himself that biting cold day in late November.

There was. Shevlin, in the days long before Google, took a trip to the central office of the New York City public library, which had stacks upon stacks of phone books for every state in the country. Shevlin picked up a few Florida Yellow Pages, thumbed his way to cable companies and began making calls.

He found a company that was hiring and by New Years' Day 1990, Shevlin had moved to St. Petersburg. He took a temporary job with Paragon, a local cable company. That job turned into another one, which quickly turned into more opportunities. He soon started the first of what would be several companies, sandwiching one colossal failure.

But it's Shevlin's current venture, Oldsmar-based Network Liquidators, where he has made his biggest mark. The seven-year-old company, which is going through an explosive growth spurt, has become one of the leading buyers and sellers of used networking equipment in the country.

The financial figures are eye-popping: The company has gone from just more than $6 million in 2004 revenues to $44.1 million in 2007, 635% growth. And more growth is projected, to as much as $68 million this year and as much as $120 million in 2009.

Growth like that earned Network Liquidators the 95th spot on Inc. magazine's 500 fastest growing companies list in 2006, with a three-year growth rate of 895%. The next three years of projections from Shevlin, the company's chief executive officer, could land it back on the list soon.

All this from a company, that, at its core, buys old pieces of electronic and technological equipment from one company, fixes them up and resells them to another company. It's simplicity meets profitability.

"I had never heard of a company like this before," says Tom Calcaterra, Network Liquidator's president, who joined the company in 2006 after working in executive roles for well known Tampa entrepreneurs Pete Warhurst, founder of mobile storage company PODS, and David Dunkel, founder of staffing services firm Kforce. "When I first started talking to people about the company, I really had no idea how they did it."

Still, despite his success, in many ways Shevlin retains an aw-shucks, just one of the guys persona.

His modest windowless office in the Network Liquidators headquarters sits with an open door a few feet from the cubicles of his four top salesmen. That's where Shevlin spends early mornings and late evenings chit-chatting about everything from client issues to the travails of his four children - all teenagers - to his beloved Tampa Bay Rays baseball team.

Shevlin still picks up all his incoming work phone calls, including ones routed directly to his house - no personal secretary or screener. And he lists is AOL online instant messenger account on his business card.

"I really enjoy what I'm doing here," says Shevlin, 37. "I love coming to work everyday."

A turning point

Shevlin has plenty of reasons to love coming to work these days. For starters, if the revenue projections pan out, Network Liquidators will be one of the largest 100 companies on the Gulf Coast by 2011.

What's more, while a bulk of the company occupies a 40,000-square-foot warehouse and office in an Oldsmar corporate park, this is a business that has less than 100 employees, with none of the headaches a manufacturing company or a research and development firm might encounter.

The company does have four remote sales offices, one each in Denver, Salt Lake City, Santa Barbara, Calif., and Syracuse, N.Y. It has a few sales outposts in Europe, too, which accounts for about 20% of the company's annual sales.

Past managing sales in far-flung places though, Shevlin's biggest challenge, on a broad basis, is management. And the management of Network Liquidators represents what Shevlin calls the company's biggest turning point.

In 2005, when the company was at just about $1 million a month in sales, Shevlin knew he needed outside help to grow more. He was dreaming up big-picture goals, such as reaching $500 million in annual revenues over the next decade.

So Shevlin sought a dream team of top managers, and he found it in: Calcaterra, the company's president, who formerly worked for PODS and Kforce; Joe Serra, the executive vice president of sales and marketing, who spent nearly two decades in management roles with Tech Data Corp., the Clearwater-based technology products and management firm; and Steve Torres, who joined the company as its new chief financial officer last year after working in executive positions with several prominent local publicly-traded technology firms, including Jabil Circuit, Syniverse Technologies and Tech Data.

The company's growth line shot up as the management team zeroed in on some tasks and challenges. "The last decision you could give me credit for," Shevlin says, "was hiring those managers and leaders."

A sixth sense

To be sure, putting the right people in the right places to succeed is clearly several strands of Shevlin's business DNA. But most of his inner circle of friends, peers and colleagues point to something else entirely that has been Shevlin's trump card: His ability to come back from both minor and major setbacks.

That, and there's what some call Shevlin's mystical-like ability to figure out stuff, from technology to how and when a given market is going to shift.

"He's always had an uncanny sense to smell a market opportunity," says Mike Kogan, who in addition to working with Shevlin in several business ventures is also his cousin. "He can always just taste it."

That sixth sense goes as far back as high school on Long Island, N.Y., Kogan says, when Shevlin built up a lucrative baseball card business. It also stretches to topics outside Shevlin's comfort zone, such as explaining complicated technology systems from companies such as Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks in layman's terms.

"He just has a better view on how to make technology things simple," says Ronnie Collis, a top sales producer for Network Liquidators, who has known Shevlin for seven years.

Still, Shevlin's business smarts sometimes come in second to his resiliency on the priority board. "Barry doesn't get down," says Joel Schneider, a New York-based attorney who has represented Shevlin on both business and personal matters. "He's one of those fighters that just keeps on punching to get out of something."

On a personal side, Shevlin fought through an arduous and expensive custody battle with his ex-wife to win back custody of two of his children a few years ago; his other two children are from his second, current marriage. On the business side, Shevlin's most celebrated comeback was what he considers one of the darkest times of his entrepreneurial career: Businessmall.com.

The idea behind that Internet company, like many others to came to out of the technology craze, seemed like a good one at the time. Essentially, Shevlin and his team, which included Kogan and a few other business partners, intended to create a portal for small and medium-size small businesses to research markets, trade contact information and shop for business-to-business products.

But the Clearwater-based company grew its top-line revenue with little focus on profits, Shevlin says. The unsurprising result was the company burned through money quickly and by 2000, just over year into the venture, it was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

Then the board of directors, including several people Shevlin had asked to be there, asked Shevlin himself to resign from the company. By 2001, businessmall.com had officially ceased operations.

The failure took a toll on Shevlin, financially and emotionally. "It was one of the worst times of my life," Shevlin says. "It was devastating."

Shevlin didn't sit idle for long. He took a few short-term independent contract jobs, working on e-bay software programs for a few clients, for example. He continued to refine his self-taught computer programming skills.

But almost as important, Shevlin learned a valuable lesson for a growing company: Be careful what you agree to when you take outside money, such as venture capital funds. Sometimes, he learned, it's better to forge ahead slower with organic growth than to take the big and fast growth approach using other people's money, especially when the latter option includes giving up strategic control.

Getting going

Dealing with the fallout of a dot-com bust was the last place Shevlin thought he would be while growing up. For a time, he figured he would end up following his father, the closest person he had to a business role model, into a real estate career.

But Shevlin's father died of cancer when the younger Shevlin was 15 years old and after high school and a short stint at Hofstra University, Shevlin was itching to get going with his life. That led to the cable company jobs and the move to Florida, which ultimately led to him starting his own cable installation business.

And then, one Friday afternoon in 2001, after the businessmall.com debacle, Shevlin's friend and onetime colleague and employee, Scott Hooten, asked if he could borrow $3,000. Hooten told Shevlin he would pay back the $3,000 plus another $600 the next Friday.

Hooten further explained he could buy five Cisco switches for the $3,000 and resell them to a company in Syracuse, N.Y. for $5,000. "I figured $600 was a fair amount to get in on this scheme," Shevlin says with a chuckle.

But Shevlin also realized there was serious potential in this untapped market. "I realized there was a lot of opportunity in this industry," Shevlin told the Review in 2006. "It was highly fragmented, a lot of really small companies. Very few people had a sophisticated backend operation to run a business efficiently."

Profit turnarounds as meager as $600 would now be considered peanuts for Network Liquidators. The company instead faces other challenges, such as expanding its product lines without diluting its heralded customer service.

Shevlin plans on responding to all the future challenges in the same determined way he's gone about previous challenges.

That includes leaning on a variety of people for advice and as a sounding board. In addition to his wife, Kathryn, his top sales staff and his managers, Shevlin regularly attends meetings of two Tampa-area chief executive support groups, including the CEO Council of Tampa Bay.

The support groups are helpful in terms of gaining the perspective of executives in a different industry, Shevlin says. But there's one executive Shevlin has yet to meet and chat with: Stuart Sternberg, the onetime Goldman Sachs partner and Wall Street millionaire who now owns the Tampa Bay Rays.

Shevlin would love to talk both baseball and business with Sternberg, his local business idol.

"He's living his dream," says Shevlin. "I think that's pretty cool."

Entrepreneurial TIP:

Q. What mistake have you learned the most from?

A. "If I had to pick one, I'd say it was not taking the time to really understand the 'fine print' with some of our lending arrangements," says Shevlin. "I certainly won't make that mistake again, because now I have a better idea of what questions I should be asking and what I should be looking for."

BY THE NUMBERS

NETWORK LIQUIDATORS

Year Revenue* % change

2005: $10 million

2006: $17.5 million 75%

2007: $44.1 million 152%

3-year ave. annual growth: 113.5%

Employees

2005: 17

2006: 35

2007: 80