March 27, 2003

BY DAV ELUNDY

Manish Patel calls himself the accidental CEO, because he lacks an MBA or other traditional credentials. But what he lacks in degrees he tries to make up for with good timing and a relentless pursuit of the American Dream.

Born in India, Patel's father emigrated to the United States with $8 in his pocket when Manish was four. Later, after earning his electrical engineering degree, Patel spent five years doing application engineering and sales support before joining Oak Brook-based NGT in 1995 to do Internet certification. Wanting to get more involved with the Internet, he then persuaded Libertyville-based Arlington Products to hire him as its first Director of e-commerce even though nobody there even knew what e-commerce was.

Name: Manish Patel Title: Chief Executive Officer Company: Where2getit is a Wheeling-based provider of intelligent location-based marketing services. Passion: Building a business

Patel, 36, finally followed his dream to become an entrepreneur in 1997 by founding Where2getit. As a provider of store locator services for companies like La-Z-Boy and Reebok, Patel's biggest challenge these days is competing against AOL Time Warner-owned MapQuest and Microsoft-owned Vicinity. According to Patel, better service is the key to beating the 800-pound gorillas. With a claimed 97 percent customer retention rate, his strategy seems to be working.

"Right now we're making money and the giants are losing money, so we must be doing something right," says Patel.

Q. When did you come to the United States?

A. I was born in India, but I came here when I was four and consider myself an American. My dad came here with $8 in his pocket to pursue the American Dream. He promised his mother he would come back after five years once he earned $5,000. But five years became 10, which became 20, and now we've been here 33 years.

Obviously there is no going back in that we couldn't survive there. I actually just got back from seven weeks in India--my first vacation in seven years. It's a great place to visit, but everything there is a day-to-day struggle. Spending time there really reminds me how much this country provides and how lucky we are to live in the United States.

Q. How did you get your start in computers?

A. My dad was a computer programmer long before it became a hot field for Indian immigrants, so I sort of grew up in that world. I studied electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, and spent my first five years after college doing application engineering and sales support for different companies.

I never really liked engineering, so in 1995, I joined a small Internet trading firm called NGT in Oak Brook. We specialized in certifying people in things like TCP/IP, security and other Internet topics. It cost about $150 for someone to get our certification, but it added about $10,000 to their salaries, so that became a huge business. After about 18 months, I joined a Libertyville-based firm called Arlington Products to help get them on the Internet.

Q. You didn't have much of an Internet background at the time. Why did you want to focus on it?

A. At the time, I knew a bit more about it than everyone else on the block so I was able to morph myself into the e-commerce guy. When I was negotiating for the Arlington job, I said I wanted the title of director of e-commerce because that's what I wanted on my resume. Nobody had any idea what that meant in 1997, but they said, sure.

I stayed there for about eight months, and then my boss left to start his own business. I actually ended up founding Where2getit with my boss's aunt. We started with literally no investment--the earn-one-dollar, spend-one-dollar mentality--back in September of 1997, and we've been building the company ever since.

Q. What inspired you to start your own company?

A. I had always wanted to own my own business. When I was a child, I wanted my dad to found a business so I could help him with it. In my spare time I read business books--I just soak that stuff up. I know you ask people what their passion is. I don't have any other hobby like scuba diving or fishing. My passion is really building a business. That's what makes me tick.

Q. What does Where2getit do?

A. Our primary business is location-based marketing for big companies like La-Z-Boy, Reebok and Seiko. We provide the electronic maps for their Web sites, so customers can type in their address and find the nearest store.

Our main competitors are MapQuest, which is owned by AOL and has 1,400 locator services clients, and Vicinity, which was recently purchased by Microsoft and has about 300. We're the third-largest with about 130 clients, so we're smaller, but we're in the same league with the big guys.

Today we're also doing a lot of e-mail marketing and phone-based locators, where customers dial an 800 number and we connect them with a dealer in their area. One of our newer projects is a system of online coupons for Popeye's Chicken, where customers can print coupons online and then walk into the store and get a discount on a bucket of chicken.

Q. How can you compete against giants like Microsoft and AOL?

A. We effectively have to do more with less. ...We can't even begin to compete with them on R&D or marketing spending, so we have to focus on the value we provide our clients.

I believe we have such an extraordinarily high retention rate for clients because we provide better service and a better value. It's a lot of touchy-feely stuff, but concretely we do it everyday. That has translated into great long-term relationships with clients like Seiko, which has been with us for five years; Rockport for four; La-Z-Boy for three.

Right now we're making money and the giants are losing money, so we must be doing something right.

Q. What's the dumbest thing you've done in this business?

A. Buying into the notion in early 2001 that as a 12-person company, we needed a management team. I wanted to be like [former GE CEO] Jack Welch but some of his thinking just doesn't ring true in a smaller company. In effect, I abdicated responsibility to those individuals and didn't believe in what we had built already.

We thought we were bigger than we were and could do anything for anyone. Quite frankly, we were bloated in many ways that, if it wasn't managed properly, could have brought us down.

Q. Did you lay off the expensive management team?

A. I like the term, "I made them available to industry."

Q. It sounds like there was a time during the bubble when you started buying into gold rush dreams.

A. Oh, sure. After AOL bought MapQuest for $1 billion, and after Vicinity went public and became a $12 million company sitting on $100 million in cash, we obviously wanted a piece of that. I read all the business books and went to the seminars. It was like a buzzword a day: management team, domain expertise. We were even told once that we were too old to be running a business like this.

But if we had let ourselves go too far down that path, it was a path out of business. Lucky enough for us, it was always only our money and our necks on the line on a day-to-day basis, so we were saved from really buying the advice.

Q. What do you get out of all those business books you read?

A. In every 300-page book, you're lucky if you get one grand idea. I've gotten to the point where I can recognize the pattern and find it. But the main reason I read them is because I enjoy them.

I've always felt like the accidental CEO. I'm not an MBA. I'm just a guy who happened to choose the Internet in 1995 when it was just coming around. The accidental feeling will hopefully go away in time, but sometimes I feel like I'm looking over my shoulder and need every advantage I can get.

I'm always worried the guy across the table can do it better, smarter, faster, cheaper than I can. Reading is a motivator for me to keep moving forward and stay ahead of the competition. We're always keeping six months ahead of where our clients want us to be, always rethinking what the risks of the business would be. It's a constant drive to improve.

Q. What has led you to trust your gut more than your latest book?

A. I think the best lessons are learned in the School of Hard Knocks. If I can make 99 mistakes, then that 100th idea is going to be the epiphany. We all need to get through our mistakes so that at some point we can do something brilliant. If you're not making a mistake, at the end of the day, I don't think you're trying.

Dave Lundy is president of Aileron Communications, a Chicago-based strategic communications firm. He can be reached at dsl@aileroninc.com.