A FIRST PERSON ACCOUNT OF RUNNING A SMALL BUSINESS.

In 1991, Edwin Solot gambled on a hunch about office services. He left a career in money management to start Faxts Now, a fax-on-demand and broadcast fax service (fax-on-demand is an automated system that faxes documents to those who request them, while broadcast fax is a mass-faxing service). With only three clients in his first two year of business, Solot had a major marketing challenge, in addition to a technical one. Jennifer Smith spoke with Solot about how he did it.

"I had a gut instinct that there was going to be a big market for these types of services. I first used a fax-on-demand system when I was working in money management, and I thought it was fabulous. I ended up talking to the president of the company that had made the software for about four hours. I bought that program and opened up Faxts Now as a service bureau.

"We thought fax-on-demand was going to change the world, because it takes care of repetitive, labor-intensive tasks and can be used around the clock, which is when a lot of people need forms. It's been successful, but by no means explosive.

"Staying alive was the biggest challenge for me in the beginning. For the first few years we spent a lot of time educating people. People don't buy what they don't understand. Things took off at about 1993.

"Shortly after we opened, I got into fax broadcasting, where we send out X number of copies of someone's document. We're buying long-distance service, and then adding value. The greater the volume of a job, the lower the price per minute. The highest price is 17 cents per minute, the lowest is under 10 cents.

"If you're trying to send out 1,000 faxes, it could take hours or days by yourself. We have a computer network with multi-channel fax boards installed in the machines, which allows us to drive about 1,000 outbound fax lines, all computer-generated.

"Mortgage companies were the first to take advantage of the service, which is perfect for time-sensitive information. We next hope to break into the drug manufacturers, who could use us for drug recall alerts.

"I'm a self-taught programmer. I believe I was the first to build a fully automated turnkey fax broadcast system, where the customer can initiate broadcast fax on their own. Back then they used a fax machine to punch in an account number coded delivery instructions, and then faxed the document over. Now they can do it through the Internet."