The boss' management strategy. (The Briefing).SIX months ago Sherman Sherman, city (1990 pop. 31,601), seat of Grayson co., N Tex., near the Red River; inc. 1858. Originally on a stagecoach route, it is a highway and railroad junction. Manufactures include electronic equipment, processed foods, military equipment, and metal products. Oaks-based Pocket PC Films, which has a patent pending on a software program for downloading downloading - download films to hand-held PCs, got the break it'd been hoping for: Lion's Gate Entertainment signed a multi-year contract with the then-three-month-old Pocket. Orders quickly began rolling in, marking a turning point for the company. "That's when we knew we had a real business," says Pocket's president, Darrell Griffin Darrell Griffin is a rugby league player with Huddersfield Giants, and an England international. His former clubs include Oxford Cavaliers, London Broncos and Wakefield Trinity Wildcats. He is notable as being a top flight rugby league player from a non-traditional area. . In fact, orders were coming in a little too fast. So fast that Griffin found himself in need of cash to cover expansion of the company's distribution operation. But investors were in a fickle fick·le adj. Characterized by erratic changeableness or instability, especially with regard to affections or attachments; capricious. [Middle English fikel, from Old English ficol, mood at the time. To get their attention, Pocket had to prove the deal with Lion's Gate wasn't just a fluke fluke, parasitic flatworm of the trematoda class, related to the tapeworm. Instead of the cilia, external sense organs, and epidermis of the free-living flatworms, adult flukes have sucking disks with which they cling to their hosts and an external cuticle that . Meanwhile, Griffin was trying to run a quickly growing operation with the most minimal cash flow. As Griffin recently told Business Journal reporter Jacqueline Fox, Pocket PC Films was caught in a business version of "Catch 22." "We knew we had a product, but people wanted us to get some cool content because anything in entertainment is name-driven. "Our initial angel investor An individual who invests his or her own money in a private company, which is typically a startup. An angel investor is not an employee or member of a bank, venture capital firm or other financial institution that normally makes such investments. doubled his stake in our company, which gave us the cash flow we needed to meet orders, so that's helped us grow. Unit orders have doubled since the spring, and we've only recently inked contracts with other content providers. "Another real challenge for a business like ours is, you may start out with a great product, but you need major distributors to get the products into stores. We just kept beating our heads against the wall until we were able to knock it down. "Most of the big retailers won't deal with smaller companies, primarily because they have no way of being sure that a small company can supply the industry. So we actually went through an aggregator that has helped us get into a number of stores. But in order to attract those distributors, we needed to show that we could get more cool content. So between getting the content providers interested and a distributor to pick up the product, it's a real balancing act. "It's really all about persistence (1) In a CRT, the time a phosphor dot remains illuminated after being energized. Long-persistence phosphors reduce flicker, but generate ghost-like images that linger on screen for a fraction of a second. . There's an old saying in business: In order to get a lot of 'yeahs,' you have to take a lot of 'no's.' Well, we took a lot of 'no's,' but they got us one step closer to yes." |
|
||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion