DuPage County is home to some unusual businesses along with the more conventional ones. Firms that deal in rare sports films, edible cookie dough and flavored pet medications are among those with DuPage County addresses.
Jim Harmon and Bob Phifer know them all. As the entrepreneurial force behind ShopDuPage.com, an online directory of DuPage County businesses, they make it their business.
ShopDuPage.com provides the names, addresses, phone numbers and maps and driving directions to the services and merchandise that shoppers in DuPage County need and want.
Those who visit ShopDuPage.com can print out coupons that offer savings at restaurants, and click links to reach Web sites of DuPage businesses.
If they want to see a movie but don’t know where it’s playing, they can type in the title and obtain a list of all DuPage theaters screening that movie.
They can arrange to have the site send them e-mails each Friday morning listing the times of showings at their favorite theaters.
In search of an idea
Phifer and Harmon came up with the idea of launching a Web site devoted to DuPage County businesses two years ago, after selling an Oak Brook-based business software company they founded in 1991.
“We were sitting around the office saying, `What’s the next big thing we need to get into?'” Phifer said.
“We felt that as strong as the Internet had become, it was still weak in terms of trying to find a product or service locally.”
“We said we’d like to create a tool like the Yellow Pages with complete and comprehensive local listings, but one that like the Web itself would be available 24 hours a day and would be always changing, with Web site links and rich content.”
Narrowing the focus
There was another issue to consider. Harmon and Phifer knew that to make the idea work, they needed to narrow the directory’s geographic focus.
DuPage seemed the ideal choice. The county has tens of thousands of businesses and is noted for well-educated, affluent residents with Internet access.
The two began tinkering with the site in fall 1999 and launched ShopDuPage.com in March 2000.
Their experience in computer software and hardware allowed them to build the site themselves.
Still, getting off the ground had its challenges.
“The problem with the site was a chicken-egg kind of thing,” Harmon said. “How do you get the audience if you don’t have the listings? And how do you get the listings from businesses without being able to promise them an audience?”
Phifer and Harmon bought lists of DuPage businesses, eventually accumulating 55,000 such enterprises.
They then had to locate the Web sites of those businesses so they could provide links. They wrote programs that searched the Web for DuPage business Web sites 24 hours a day for weeks and found 25,000 such sites.
An additional hurdle was building consumer awareness of their Web site.
Harmon and Phifer used newspaper, radio and cable television advertising, arranged for a banner to be towed by an airplane above Naperville’s Ribfest and promoted their site on the plastic bags covering 100,000 home-delivered newspapers.
They joined local chambers of commerce and appeared at community festivals to sign up Web users and businesses.
Revenue from many venues
The site reaps revenue from banner ads, e-mail sponsorships, building and hosting Web sites for local businesses, e-mail management, and online coupon management.
“That’s been one of the most successful parts of the system,” Harmon said of online coupons. “You think of the Internet being used by affluent people, but everyone loves a bargain.”
Added Phifer: “When the economy is softer, businesses that wouldn’t normally do promotions will do them to bring in additional traffic.
“We’re seeing more coupon revenue now than we have since ShopDuPage.com started.”
In fact, the economic downturn that has deep-sixed many Internet-based businesses has benefited ShopDuPage.com, the two entrepreneurs said.
As the downturn has deepened, players that might have competed with them have either dropped Web sites or decided not to establish them.
“It’s a good time to build the business while some of the competitors are afraid to come in or are going out of business,” Harmon said.
The business has been profitable since July 2000, and traffic on the site grows by 5 percent to 20 percent a month.
The site has 300 advertisers, 50,000 users a month, 110,000 to 120,000 page views a month and 25,000 e-mail subscribers, Phifer said.
Harmon and Phifer run the site mostly by themselves, with some help from employees hired on a project basis to handle graphics, sales and development. That suits them just fine.
Phifer and Harmon have been friends and partners since meeting on their first job out of college in 1982.
Then employed in the computer department at commercial printer R.R. Donnelly & Sons in Chicago, they left to establish a Chicago-based accounting software company called Microdynamics.
They closed that company in 1984 after a year in business but quickly established another enterprise. This one, an Oak Brook-based firm called Paradigm, was a reseller of hardware and software to business clients.
A year after its founding, Harmon left to join Andersen Consulting as a consultant specializing in developing software systems for clients.
“I kept slogging away back at the farm and by 1991 had amassed more than 100 customers, mostly wholesalers and distributors,” Phifer said.
“In 1991 everyone was getting off the mainframes. We said, `We need to get back together and form a new venture focused on the move from the mainframe to networked PCs and UNIX-based systems.'”
The result was Oak Brook-based Paradigm Systems Software, which Harmon and Phifer built into a $2 million-a-year, 15-employee company before selling to their largest competitor in 1997.
They stayed with the firm for a couple of years before launching ShopDuPage.com.
Embarking on new venture
Last month, Harmon and Phifer began a new business-to-business site as a spinoff of ShopDuPage.com.
Suburbanbiz.com is a partnership with the Business Ledger, an Oak Brook-based business publication.
The site provides business news, information and buyer guide listings, allowing Phifer and Harmon to leverage their understanding of DuPage businesses and the technology investment they’ve made in ShopDuPage.com.
“They’re creative entrepreneurs,” said Jim Elsener, publisher of the Business Ledger.
“A lot of these dot-com companies didn’t make it because they didn’t think out their business models very well. Phifer and Harmon thought about how to make money in their business model in a practical fashion.”
Elsener added, “They’ve got a pretty good team there. Jim Harmon has a pretty good handle on the technical side, and Bob Phifer is more the salesman/marketing guy.
“We’re pleased to partner with them.”
Sanguine about prospects
Neither is particularly worried about the cloud hanging over many Web-based companies.
Phifer said that when personal computers were introduced in the mid-1980s, it was widely assumed they would be on everyone’s desks within a year. But it was closer to a decade before such mass acceptance came.
“Technology adoption is something that takes longer than everyone thought, but turns out much larger than anyone thought,” Phifer said.
Harmon is similarly upbeat. Ten years from now, when the phrase “let your fingers do the walking” is uttered, “what that could mean to them is going to their computer keyboards and typing in `ShopDuPage.com,'” he said.
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Jim Harmon
Title: Managing director, ShopDuPage.com.
Age: 43.
Years in field: 26.
Family: Wife Sonia and daughter Phoebe, 18 months.
Hometown: Chicago, on the Southwest Side.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in computer science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1981.
Recommended book: “From Dawn to Decadence,” by Jacques Barzun. “It’s just perspective [that] there’s nothing new under the sun. You have this perspective in technology that you’re creating a world completely different than it was before. But there have been developments in the past that had the same kind of impact on society–and in some ways greater impact–than anything we have today.”
Turning point: “Getting involved with computers. Writing that first complex program, a program that you could play checkers with. You could build this entire world in your head and see it played out on the computer.”
Bob Phifer
Title: Managing director, ShopDuPage.com.
Age: 40.
Years in field: 26.
Family: Wife Nellina and sons Ben, 6, and Brett, 4.
Hometown: Chicago, on the Southwest Side.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in computer information systems from Drake University, Des Moines, 1982.
Accomplishments: Named one of Tomorrow’s Leaders Today in 2000 by the Business Ledger of Oak Brook.
Recommended book: “The E-Myth,” by Michael E. Gerber. “It’s a book about the myths of being an entrepreneur, with advice on how to build a business rather than a job. It’s a book I always recommend to people who want to start a business.”
Turning point: “I wandered into the keypunch lab at Bogan High School, wrote my first program and was bitten by the bug. . . . By the time I’d gotten to college, I’d had more programming experience than most upperclassmen.”
