News
Franklin Park marketing, Web design firm that latched onto dot-com before the boom weathers the bust
Net survivors
Pittsburgh, PA - Tuesday, December 21, 2004
By Corilyn Shropshire, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The women of Tachyon Solutions at times appear a bit too warm, fuzzy and, well, casual -- they favor sleek pants and sweaters -- to be the business savvy, hard-nosed tech executives that they are.
But conventional wisdom says that Jeanette Thomas and Marion Lewis cannot have sustained their 14-year-old marketing turned e-business management firm through the dot-com rubble by being sweethearts, and conventional wisdom would be right.
Affability may be part of their strategy. But shrewd decision-making and opportunism -- abetted with some luck -- is what has taken this Franklin Park-based firm from a two-person boutique to a thriving establishment that employs 15 and generates business by luring clients from outside the region. "Our success wasn't built on Pittsburgh firms," said Lewis, the chief executive officer.
While it's true the Internet boom left many in its wake when the bubble burst, Tachyon is representative of the thousands of firms that survived by getting in early and sticking to their knitting. It, of course, is by no means at the same level as online giants Amazon.com, eBay or Yahoo!, but it does reflect those companies that persevered and are now prospering as the Internet has taken hold in our everyday life.
Tachyon, which builds and manages e-commerce Web sites for mostly small to mid-size clients, embraced the Internet as an advertising and marketing tool while many people were still trying to figure out what it was.
It started in the mid-'90s, when the Internet started to sprout. Lewis and Thomas, who had been doing traditional marketing work for about four years, quickly realized the Net could change everything. "We [decided] early on that if we were going to be a player, we needed to become a tech firm," said Thomas, the firm's president. "Within 18 months, we did that."
The pair hired technical staff and immediately jumped into helping companies speed their business and save money by using the Internet to do the sorts of things they had used paper, pens and faxes to do. They focused not only on building Web sites for their customers, but on helping them take orders online, set up gift registries and manage their accounts.
"Things were moving so fast -- there were even professors at CMU that we're saying the Internet was fad," Lewis said, adding that she and Thomas could tell that while the Web may have been all the rage at the time, it clearly could be lucrative in the long-term.
So when tech bubble burst, the team at Tachyon didn't blink. "We were very lucky, we didn't even feel it," Thomas said. "We were never tied to the tech boom."
The pair attributes their success to their focus on helping non-technical businesses be technical -- and their friendly manner and willingness to speak at networking events and conferences every chance they got. That's how they captured and madeover outdoor clothing and equipment maker Campmor Inc.'s "very cookie cutter" Web site into a functioning e-business capable of taking on such larger competitors as REI and L.L. Bean.
Campmor President Daniel Jarashow said he chose and stuck with Tachyon for 10 years because he likes Thomas and Lewis -- they "get" his company, he said. "They're nice and decent and they understand what we're all about," he said.
Tachyon's coziness and casual rapport is one of its chief selling points.
The two founders deal directly with its customers, holding their hands throughout the entire process. Thomas is present at most encounters with clients and personally guides them from beginning to the end of developing their e-business. Lewis, as the CEO, makes the rounds drumming up business.
Sometimes, however, the business comes to them. It was an old acquaintance in a previous career, for example, that landed Tachyon one of its few local clients: McKees Rocks-based MarketPlace Direct Inc. Jim Kauffman, CEO of the distributor of corporate marketing products, had done the firm's accounting before going on to run MarketPlace Direct.
"We were manually tracking our inventory and we needed a technical solution," said Kauffman, who was familiar with Tachyon because of the work he did for it. "Now we can take orders from anywhere around the world. We can pack and ship the same day. Customers can go online and choose exactly what they want."
For Lewis and Thomas -- two working mothers who launched their public relations and marketing firm in 1991 because they wanted to spend more time with their children -- it's nice to hear from their old accountant who did his work for them back when they were just getting started.
"Back then, if you knew the [Web site language] 'html,' you were a genius," said Lewis, laughing. "We took a risk," added Thomas. "We're business people, not technologists."
(Corilyn Shropshire can be reached at CShropshire@Post-Gazette.com or 412-263-1413.)