NC State Student Entrepreneurs Pair Up to Launch Business Aimed at Helping Other Entrepreneurs

For one, Bryan Young, it’s his third business; for the other, Matthew Laster, it’s the outgrowth of internships that enabled him to hone his computer science and web development skills. Their interests and skills complemented each other, and this month, they are opening an office for Businessempiremag.com, LLC on Six Forks Road in Raleigh, N.C.

They had launched the company as a web-based resource for entrepreneurs in August 2008, and now have added a web building and other services for businesses and landed a few clients. “A large company out of Chicago is offering us our first big contract to develop and market their site,” Young said in early May as he was heading to the Midwest to meet with the new client.

The two entrepreneurs will be drawing on experiences with their own site for that project, which includes a search engine optimization component. Within the first hour of re-launching Businessempiremag.com in January 2009, Young said, “We had 17,905 people come to join our membership program because of a three-month marketing campaign that we did.” He admits that that response was definitely unexpected and that overnight, the site had grown from a ‘cool idea’ to a serious business.

They have just recently developed a strategic alliances with another Raleigh based company. As they prepared the opening of their first office, they were keeping the recent success of their venture a secret from their parents, as they wanted to surprise them when the office was opened. But for Young, the business is rooted in lessons learned from his mother.

Young Had Early Start On Entrepreneurial Path

Young’s first business was a landscaping service that he started at age 12 with the help of his mother, Dorine Young. It did well, and she taught him to save and invest. His earnings grew to about $30,000, money that he intended to spend on his first car when he got his driver’s license at age 17.

Instead, he used it as part of the seed money that launched his second business, Crossroads Transport Services, LLC. based in Fayetteville, N.C., his home town.

“Out of frustration of not being hired to work at a clothing store, I wrote a business plan for a trucking company and we used a little over $120,000 to start the company. In that money was nearly $30,000 that I had saved up over a period of five years to buy my first car or a truck. We chose a trucking company and I took my aunt’s old car for my first vehicle,” Young said.

His mother handles the day-to-day operations of the company, which grew to 22 trucks strong, while Young takes care of the finances and continues to work toward his bachelor’s degree in sports management at NC State. He also has been taking a series of entrepreneurship courses in NC State’s College of Management, working toward a minor in entrepreneurship.

With an impressive freelance portfolio and experience handling more than $1 million dollars in assets at one of his many information technology internships, Laster was a perfect fit for the new enterprise, Young said.

“I met Matt and he was the mirror image of me in the web development world. People always tell us how amazing it is that we work so well together and really let each other focus on what we are good at,” Young said.

Computers Were an Early Draw for Laster

“I got my first computer for my Bar Mitzvah and had broken it about six times within the first three month,” Laster said. “Each time, my parents had to pay a guy to come fix it before I started fixing it myself.”

That launched him on a path that has led to his current academic program at NC State. “I took every computer course offered by my middle school – Centennial Campus Middle School in Raleigh, N.C. – and then every computer course offered at my high school, Southeast Raleigh High School. I built my first website when I was probably around 14 years old for a school project, but did not have a real client who wanted a webpage until I was 16,” he said. That first client was the Lochmere Swim and Tennis Club.

“Since then, I’ve averaged about four active development projects at all times. I did not ever take any management courses and probably won’t have the time – computer science is such an interesting and vast subject and I love every class I take, save math,” he said.

The young entrepreneurs’ new business was registered as BusinessEmpireMag.com, LLC, but they are currently planning to drop the Magazine part of the name as the company has already moved beyond that limiting title. “We feel it causes some confusion and limits what people may think our company is capable of,” Laster said. “When I met Bryan, we both agreed that the concept had a broad range of capabilities that we could incorporate,” he said.

Academic Experience, Contacts Vital

“Our goal (with the new business) is to provide business solutions for small to large businesses,” Young said. “We provide web development, business consulting, and search engine optimization services among other things. We knew that offering these services was inevitable with the type of interactivity with users we wanted to have, we just didn’t foresee it happening this fast. I mean people say Matt and I are very business savvy to be so young, but knowing the right people has been just as important,” he said.

Young credits his family and friends as well as Jennifer Anderson, one of his entrepreneurship instructors in the NC State College of Management, for getting him started on this new business. “Jennifer asked me one day, ‘What was I passionate about?’,” he said. “When I thought about it, it was entrepreneurship and helping others.”

Young said that concepts he learned in her class was one of the things that influenced him to start his latest venture, and she and other faculty in the college continue to offer help and advice.

“You need both hands-on experience and book knowledge to be successful, and that was the whole basis (for the site),” he said. Young and Laster are using their individual personal networks to help other, and consider their new website as a ‘bridge’ between business and academia.

Now Focused on Providing Solutions for Others

They planned for the website to have many different functionalities that are designed to provide benefit when used separately but increase in value for the user when used as a whole. A large portion of the content is community-driven, allowing users to edit and add information, although content is reviewed and approved by Young and Laster before it is posted.

The site includes about 25 interactive features for its users and has been used globally, with visitors coming from places like Poland and the United Kingdom. However, for those starting or running a business in the U.S., Business Empire gets as involved in their companies as they would like.

About his start in serial entrepreneurship, Young says that he doesn’t think there is exactly one way to build a successful company, but every owner “should get down into the business and get their hands dirty, while being passionate about what they are doing. Success in business requires the holistic design and teamwork of many different entrepreneurial disciplines.”

Young said that both he and Laster have worked difficult jobs and understand that those types of experiences are necessary to understand the perspective of the employee.

“You can’t expect or demand an employee to do something that you have never done yourself. We’re hiring 6-10 employees to work from our office and everything I’m asking them to do I have done myself and will continue to do it with them. With my past experience I’ve learned that communication and building a positive company culture are critical for a successful business,” Young said.

Entrepreneurship Plus Coursework: Making it Work

Running a business is by no means easy even if it’s your only commitment, he said. It’s even less so when you work at running a business while in school.

“It’s difficult at times, to say the least,” he said. “Matt and I work 24 hours straight some weeks to meet development deadlines. I guess I have my priorities straight but great time management skills, and building a team around you that you can trust will accomplish the necessary task for your business is important. Dr. Stephen Walsh of the EEP told me that it is a good thing to be the weakest link in the team you build. Through strategic alliances with companies out of Cary, Raleigh, Atlanta, San Jose, CA, and Jacksonville Florida, we’ve managed to build a versatile and effective web development, marketing, and consulting team,” Young said.

He compared his being a student and running a business to people who have children attend school full-time and maintain a job. His ability to ‘get it all done’ comes from efficient time management skills that both he and his business team have gained. Our oldest executive team member is only 28, but his track record and work speaks for itself,” Young said.

As Young completes his minor in entrepreneurship in NC State’s College of Management, future students will be taking those courses as part of the college’s minor in business administration.

“By moving the entrepreneurship courses into a focus within the business administration minor, we are assuring that students will have exposure to the full range of business courses needed for starting and running a business,” said Art Padilla, head of the Department of Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (MIE) in the college. The transition will take place this summer, but students already working on a minor in entrepreneurship will be able to complete that sequence of courses, he said.

Good Time to Start a Business

“Recessions are a great time to start a business but a very difficult time to run an established growth-oriented enterprise,” said David Townsend, assistant professor in the MIE department.

“In general, research indicates that recessions tend to decrease the relative density of a population of small businesses as companies go out of business. However, recessions are a great time to start a venture because you can generally lower the cost structure of running your business (i.e., negotiate cheaper lease rates, hire highly qualified personnel for lower wages, etc.) and as long as the company works to develop a substantial value proposition that really delivers substantial benefits to the end consumer, then they can see their revenue base grow.

About Young, he said: “What I love about Bryan’s venture is that they are focused on delivering critical information for would-be entrepreneurs considering starting a new venture. Given the current challenges in the economic environment, the entrepreneurs utilizing these resources should find it easier to navigate the start-up process.”

Nanci Washington, spring 2009 communications intern, contributed to this story.