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Hungry Like the Wolf
With an office space in the midst of the burgeoning East 4th Street neighborhood, across the street from Flannery’s Pub and House of Blues, Tenth Floor’s young workforce (the oldest employee is 37) has quite the playground at its fingertips. And though the company prides itself on having fun, don’t think it’s all play and no work at the interactive marketing and content management software company. At Tenth Floor LLC, the early bird really does catch the worm. When Scott Moss, who joined the firm in January as its director of business development, rolls in to the Tenth Floor office before dawn, he is often the third or fourth person there. “In every company I’ve worked for, I was always the first person there,” Moss says. “I get here and I’m number four to arrive, and it’s killing me.” “We love our job,” adds President Tony Pietrocola. “We want to come in to work. “Everybody here knows the mission. Everybody here sees the results,” he says. “It’s very open; it’s very creative. And people here are just hungry.” The 31-year-old Pietrocola, a Cleveland native, moved to Chicago and worked for Apple Computer Inc. for a few years after graduating from the University of Toledo. In 1999, he moved back to Cleveland and worked for a local dot-com company. “We saw basically what not to do during the dot-com crash of 2000,” Pietrocola says. “We started right when the market got to the absolute bottom,” Pietrocola says. “There was really no where to go except up.” Still, the first few years were challenging. “It was very difficult to convince, especially large corporations, why they should do business with someone who is just starting,” Pietrocola says. Though the company offers clients Web site design and online branding services, Pietrocola started the business with the idea to create content management software, which he named BASE-10. This easy-to-use program assists companies with their marketing campaigns and e-mail distribution, and allows them to manage their own Web sites. Today, it is the bulk of Tenth Floor’s business. The company has 12 resellers across the country that sell BASE-10. Pietrocola hopes to increase that number by seven by the end of this year and hopes to have a reseller in every state by the end of 2009. In 2003, Tenth Floor established an office in Minneapolis. Today, that branch has four employees and contributes about 35 percent of the company’s revenue. Pietrocola is looking to open a third office sometime in 2007. With a combined workforce of 15 employees, Tenth Floor has about 50 projects at any given time, and hundreds of ongoing clients, large and small, across the country. The $3-million company is poised to increase its revenue by more than 75 percent this year. “When you look at people who are on the cutting edge of technology, and doing some really cool things with the Internet, I think we’re one of those companies,” Pietrocola says. # # # Read the article at www.inside-business.com |
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