Eclectic Multimedia Core Business: Creative multimedia services Revenue in 1999: $100,000 Revenue in 2001: $325,000 Employees in 1999: 3 Employees in 2001: 5 Goal: To move from business-to-business communications to a full-service advertising agency Driving Force: The desire, not to be artists, but to help clients make a profit The founder of eclectic multimedia has learned that profitable clients are more important than having the opportunity to express himself artistically When Josh Barinstein talks about the beginnings of his creative services agency, he sounds like many entrepreneurs describing their first years in business, even down to the devotion he and his partner shared as they sorted through all the start-up challenges of getting Eclectic Multimedia off the ground. “My partner and I made some drastic changes in our lives,” Barinstein said of the Newbury Park company that now enhances or converts textbooks to interactive and multimedia formats for some clients, and designs advertising campaigns for others. Of course, those years during which Eclectic Multimedia was in development were even more complex than for some start-ups because, as Barinstein finally admits nearly a third of the way through an interview with a reporter, his partner is also his wife, Cecelia. In fact, the company was founded five years ago in the kitchen of their Westlake Village apartment after Josh Barinstein left his job as a software engineer with Tekelec. “She and I just decided it was time to go out on our own,” he said. They didn’t bother with venture capital funding. “We didn’t know to ask,” Barinstein. “We borrowed from our parents, we sold what stock we had. We just dove into the deep end.” And they landed one of their very first major clients over coffee in that first apartment because of a blurb in a local newspaper noting their Web site had won a design competition. But even if Eclectic Multimedia appears at first glance to have the trappings of a classic mom-and-pop operation, it is far removed from the simple environment usually associated with family-owned businesses. Barinstein still calls the company the “seeds of an ad agency” but, at this point, a large part of their work involves turning traditional books and, most often, textbooks being printed by publishers like Prentice-Hall into multimedia and/or interactive experiences for readers: Director-based CDs, Web CDs, Web sites, even PowerPoint-based CDs. Not exactly the country store. At this point Eclectic Multimedia has at least 12 major clients, among them Prentice-Hall, Maps.com, Spirent Communications, UCLA and Baker & Taylor. Publishers come to us and say, ‘We’ve got a textbook and nothing about it is interactive,”‘ Barinstein said. “So, they say, ‘Build for us an interface, build a CD title for us.'” Often that means creating a multimedia CD-ROM to accompany the book. But it can also mean developing a Web site, or a hybrid out of all three. “We take the text and build a design,” Barinstein said. And for other clients, Eclectic Multimedia develops what might be considered a conventional print advertising campaign, complete with trade ads, catalogues, brochures and business cards. Nevertheless, the two started out, as Barinstein puts it, with no clients, no marketing plan and as noted earlier no money. About the third month they were in business, they got around to building a simple two-page Web site for themselves. It ended up winning an Adobe Dream Team competition. The prize included a certificate, an expense-paid airplane trip to pick that certificate up and some software a lot given Eclectic’s modest beginnings. It also offered an opportunity to send out a press release patting themselves on the back. At least one person saw the one-paragraph blurb that wound up in the Ventura County Star. “This gentleman read it and said, ‘You sound pretty good,'” Barinstein said. “So, he visited us at our apartment and said, ‘I’d like you to do some interactive maps for me.’ “I thought, ‘Wow, what’s that?'” But interactive mapmaking turned out to be Eclectic Multimedia’s first real business success. Jerry Westby, that first client who at the time had his own multimedia development business and is now with Sage Publications Inc. of Thousand Oaks, said, “It turned into a trust and convenience factor.” Westby and Barinstein eventually created a number of interactive maps for Maps.com in Santa Barbara and, Westby said, “We went on to develop CD-ROMs for Prentice-Hall.” Now, Barinstein said, he expects as much revenue from Prentice-Hall in 2002 as he anticipates from all of his clients in 2001, an estimated $325,000. Which is a long way from the $5,000 he and his wife managed to make in that first quarter they were in business back at the end of 1996. And they’ve learned something about running a business. “Early on we thought we’d be artists,” Barinstein said. “But we’re not Picassos. We’re producing visual communicative pieces that are selling. “It was a transformation for us to realize that we’re not here for our art, but to help our clients make money.”