Sean McCormick started his business this past September, but is already looking ahead five years when he hopes its revenues top $25 million. Then he’ll sell it and start a new business – although he doesn’t know what that one will be quite yet. “Six years from now I’ll have another idea,” he said. “There’s so much developing in the interactive space every day that the next thing isn’t close to being created yet.”
Norwalk, CT January 24, 2008 — Sean McCormick started his business this past September, but is already looking ahead five years when he hopes its revenues top $25 million. Then he’ll sell it and start a new business – although he doesn’t know what that one will be quite yet. “Six years from now I’ll have another idea,” he said. “There’s so much developing in the interactive space every day that the next thing isn’t close to being created yet.”
Right now, mobile marketing – sending text messages to cell phones – “is kind of a buzz word when it comes to a marketing strategy,” he said. “I think that in the next five years it won’t be just a buzz word, but will be a mature industry. And it might be the next thing for me to get into after this business.”
His idea for his current business came last summer when “I started reading articles and saw that a lot of companies being purchased by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo were performance-based marketing companies,” he said. “I saw a large rift in the marketplace for mid-level companies – companies from $5 million to $30 million in sales. The companies Microsoft and Google bought were only servicing the Fortune 500 companies, which left a huge rift in the marketplace for small- and medium-sized businesses to engage in online performance marketing.”
That’s where he’s focusing his 4-month-old business that, he said, achieved profitability at the end of December, just three months after he started. “My goal was to break even within the first year and have 10 employees to service our clients, but I’ll have 15 to 20 employees by then,” he said. “My goal was to have revenues around $2.5 million the first year, but we’re on pace to surpass that – it’s hard to say by how much right now.”
The 26-year-old McCormick calls his company Ifficient because, he said, he’s ensuring his clients’ Internet advertising budgets work in the interactive space (the “I”) efficiently. “Companies are buying banner advertising without optimizing their marketing campaign to ensure the highest click-through rate,” he said. “Everything we do has a performance initiative behind it, and if our clients aren’t happy with the results, they’re able to cancel the campaign at any moment.”
So far, none of McCormick’s 35 clients have canceled their Internet marketing campaigns, he said. Those clients range from online universities to consumer package goods to clothing retailers. “We’re helping them increase their prospect database by putting targeted campaigns on Web sites that allow a user to request more information about a product.”
To do that, McCormick has merged online marketing with some spiffy technology that he said does two things. “The first is that it monetizes Web sites, which means Web sites can earn additional income by partnering with us to integrate our ad serving into their Web page,” he said. “The second thing is that the technology validates the user that signs up for one of our advertising offers. It checks the e-mail address to make sure it’s valid, matches up with the USPS database to ensure the address is valid, and validates the telephone number to make sure it’s a real number.”
Competitors “are doing this, but not the extent that we are,” he said. “We have a bunch of different databases that we subscribe to that allows us to check e-mail addresses, addresses and phone numbers.”
Lifestyle business
McCormick grew up in Wilton, working in his parent’s small chain of pet stores in New Canaan, Darien and Stamford “doing anything from cleaning fish tanks to closing the books at the end of the day to managing a staff of seven employees in the Darien store.” What the experience taught him was that “I didn’t want to be in retail,” he said. “It’s really hard to build a franchise when you’re competing with large department stores. I would prefer to build something that’s unique and really provides a service to clients.”
He got a taste of that while he was attending the University of Rhode Island and started two small summer businesses with friends. “One was an odd-jobs company here in Fairfield County, raking leaves, making dump runs, doing cleaning-up projects.” The business was called The 25th Hour, “that last hour you wish you had in the day to get everything done.”
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