![]() Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University and completed additional course work in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.Įthan is regularly interviewed by the media for his views on marketing and PR. He graduated magna cum laude from the S.I. While managing five agencies, he introduced several tools to improve collaboration and efficiency both internally and externally. In January of 2011 Ethan became Director of Communications for Samsung Electronics America, responsible for external communications around all consumer products. He pioneered Edelman Labs, which revamped the firm’s approach to product review programs. He ultimately led a team of 60 as GM and EVP, and counseled a range of clients from startups to brands like GE, Canon, HP and Motorola. In 1998 Ethan began a nearly 15-year stint at Edelman. Lightspeed now has more than $1 million in annual revenues, with more than a dozen clients and a team of 15.Įthan started his communications career as a news reporter for Gannett’s metro and business desk. I caught a little bit of traction in car dealerships.Ethan co-founded Lightspeed Public Relations in 2013, with the mission to harness the skills and learnings from all aspects of his career – while avoiding bureaucracy and unneeded overhead. I would pretty much try to sell to anybody. Sramana Mitra: We’re talking retail sales? Is that what you were teaching?īrad Lea: Mainly car dealership. Sramana Mitra: How did you market that and build that business?īrad Lea: I charged $2,195 to set it up and $1,295 per store to access and use my training system. Did you actually sell your own online course for a while?īrad Lea: Yes, I did that for about a year. Now you have this software and online course. Sramana Mitra: How did you convince them to do that for you for future revenue? Sramana Mitra: Where was this software company located? I talked a software company into building it for me for a piece of future revenue. Sramana Mitra: How did you finance the software development process?īrad Lea: I didn’t finance it. Now I could be present in every organization, speak multiple languages, and provide the repetition and the delivery that’s necessary to learn. I sought out programmers to build this thing that I was envisioning. They were effective but there wasn’t enough repetition. I wanted to emulate the questions that I would ask and the things that I would say in real life. I figured out a way to create my content through video and put it online where it emulated what I did in real life. After I left an organization, they weren’t really trained because you can’t train somebody in two days. Sramana Mitra: What timeframe are we talking?īrad Lea: I realized that it wasn’t effective. Sramana Mitra: You were selling an in-person training service essentially. I’d get $10,000 and for two days, I would sit in their sales room. They would write me a check for $10,000 to be there for two days. I would knock on their doors and ask them if I could train their sales people to sell more. Sramana Mitra: I’m trying to understand how you built this company.īrad Lea: I built it by knocking on a lot of doors and chasing a lot of people.īrad Lea: Use my training system. More people will give up right before they hit a win. If I could help an entrepreneur, the help that I would give would be to not give up. It was just knocking on a lot of doors and trying to convince people. Nobody believed that anyone was going to want to train online versus in person. For three or four years, I was just out knocking on doors, getting behind on my bills, and sacrificing any kind of financial stability for entrepreneurship. It took about three to four years to figure out that I wanted to get into software. Then we’ll get to the SaaS business in a minute.īrad Lea: I just kept going. How, then, did you do that business of delivering your own course? Tell us a little bit of the nuances of building that business first. You said you started the company by actually delivering your own course in the beginning. I’d like to understand how you built the company step by step. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of where you started the business.
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