Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at theBusinessMakers.com. It's now time for another Smart Strategies to Keep Your Business Growing, put on by Oracle and the Houston Business Journal. And, Bill, man, this is not a business-as-usual event. This is really cool. Tell us about it and what motivated Oracle to do this?

Bill: Yeah, well, we wanted the opportunity to talk to our customers and get our customers' exposure to entrepreneurs who'd been there, done that, and have navigated through these tough times over the last several years. And we've got four entrepreneurs here that have built businesses that are growing in these times, and it's a lotta fun to watch and listen.

Russ: I hear a lot of this talk about opportunities in these disruptive times.

Bill: Yeah. It's all about - I mean, there's no question. There's a lotta fear out there. But there's also a lotta opportunity with this chaos. And so the objective here is to position companies as much as they can to take advantage of those opportunities that take a left turn and truly embrace change.

Russ: Real cool. All right. Well, tell us about this cool panel of veteran business guys we've got with us this morning.

Bill: Sure. We have Larry Lawson, who's the CEO and founder of eCardio. We have Gray Hall, who's the CEO of Alert Logic. We have Charming Charlie himself, who's a specialty retailer, and Jerry Lasco, who's the founder of the Tasting Room and Lasco Enterprises.

Russ: Wow. Okay, really cool. A diverse group here. Well, let's start with you, Larry. ECardio. So you're out there. You actually have a portable heart monitor. That's your product that is serving people with heart problems. And so you have many people out there wearing them right now.

Larry: Oh, we're monitoring well, I guess at any given time probably as many as 16,000 to 20,000 patients.

Russ: Okay. Real cool. So I guess you even could see how they react to bad stock market situations, right?

Larry: Absolutely? We see an increase - a spike in our business when there's a - an opposite spite in the market.

Russ: Wow. That is so cool. Well, I know there's this interesting story about how you started funding your business.

Larry: Well, you've heard of the friends, family, and then fools looking to them for your financing needs. Well, I didn't have many friends that had any money. Certainly didn't have family. Went to the banks and they just snored on me, fell asleep. And so many people thought that I was the fool, 'cause I'm -

Russ: 'Cause you did it?

Larry: - took my own money and I took everything I had, sold my country club memberships, whatever it took, and put $1 million of my own capital in the company and funded it that way. And -

Russ: And now you're doing what kinda revenue?

Larry: We're about $60 million each year.

Russ: Okay. So it was a good risk to take.

Larry: It was a good risk.

Russ: All right. Cool. Well, Gray, let's move onto to you now. Alert Logic. I'm very familiar with Alert Logic. We actually had your founder on the show probably about three or four years ago. And at the time, I remember the whole focus seemed to be on security, but you guys, like innovators, have sort of moved into another area, still involving security. Tell us about that.

Gray Well, you might say we secure the cloud. And that's really not too far afield from the original vision. So our founder, Misha, back in 2002, had a vision of delivering security solutions as a service from a centralized computing environment, which is essentially what the cloud is. What we've done more recently is to take that to the next level by enabling cloud service providers and other types of service providers to deliver security to their customers using our solutions.

Russ: Boy, Bill, with the popularity of the cloud, that's what everybody talks about, probably most of us use it nowadays. I didn't think too much about security until I heard Gray talk about it.

Bill: We're definitely seeing a lot more of our customers moving things to an environment where they outsource that to a facility and they need to have the security that Alert Logic provides.

Russ: Right, absolutely. Cool. All right. And now to you, Charlie. Charming Charlie. Describe your business to our audience.

Charles Well, we're the largest specialty retailer that focuses on completing an outfit, and not starting an outfit. We are currently operating 96 stores in 23 states. And we focus - our customer is Gen-X, Gen-Y, and Baby Boomer, evenly distributed. And we're agnostic to ethnicity, and income - socio income level for our customers.

Russ: Okay. But most of your customer - like a great majority are female, right?

Charles 99.5 percent are female.

Russ: 99.5. Okay. So I'm curious, how does a guy like you know how to merchandise female products?

Charles Hiring great merchants. Our main focus is getting the right goods to the right store at the right time at the right price. And that's what we do.

Russ: Okay. Well, I also caught the way that you merchandise is sort of grouping by color, which seems to work well, right?

Charles Yes. And, actually, what we really focus on is retailers listening to our customers. What we do is every six months, we focus and probe our customers, asking what we can do better, what we can - what issues are we having in the stores, what they like. And we like to force rank why they really come in the stores.

And we had a common thread in the focus surveys about three and a half years ago. And I said, "Why don't you guys just put all the accessories by color? It's so much more intuitive and easier to shop that way. It saves us time." So we said, "Ah-ha. So let's test that." And the sales started increasing. And so from every store after that, we changed all the stores, and we merchandise all the stores around - across the country by color.

Russ: Okay. Really cool. Now up next, Jerry Lasco of Lasco Enterprises. I'm very familiar. Interviewed you about four years ago. But describe what you're doing these days.

Jerry Well, we in - we think of ourselves in the wine business. We're a wine-centric business, but that entails both wine bars, restaurants, and wine retail. So we have a concept called the Tasting Room which was our original concept and we're building our third currently right now. And we have a restaurant which focuses on gourmet comfort food in a completely different atmosphere and environment that most people would think of as a wine environment.

And we're in three cities now, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston, of course. And we're looking to expand that across the country. And it's funny listening to Charlie because he talked about making a big change to organizing things by color. And in essence, that's what we did when we started the first tasting room.

So we did everything basically by taste. Our lightest white wines were over here, to the medium bodied, to the light reds, to the full-bodied reds. And no matter what great variety it was or whatever country or origin, we put 'em in there on how they taste. And that's a lot like organizing it by color.

Russ: Okay, really neat. Well, I gotta tell you, people always talk about starting a restaurant or even a bar and how risky that business and difficult. Here we are in a down market. But I tell you what, every time I've been to any of your establishments, it's hard to get in. You guys are doing something right big time.

Jerry Well, I go back to business model. And I think we focus primarily on the experience. Our mission statement is to maximize the experience of the guest.

Russ: Sure. Well, it definitely works. Really cool. Now, back to sort of the subject matter, the fact that here we are in sort of a tough economic time. Gray, Bill was asking you guys about cost control in this period of time. And you really emphasized that it's important to set that culture, not just when it's down. Talk about that a little bit more.

Gray Well, sure. Yeah. Culture tends to have a long lead-time in terms of cause and effect. So, for example, if you're running the company one way when times are good and then you decide to change the culture when times are tough, I would venture to say that doesn't really work.

What's worked for me in the past has been to emphasize the value of spending company money like it's your own from Day 1. And I think people take their cues from the top. And when they see that the leaders in the business, not spending money unless you absolutely have to, that serves you very well. You're more profitable when you're growing and then when you need to be lean, you're employees aren't surprised, and they have already adopted that mindset.

Russ: Right, really cool. We're living in this time right now where actually flat is the new up. Jerry, I know you've talked several times about being at this point in your company where I mean growth was, number one, A priority. But you kinda stopped for a second and looked at it and said, "Wow. We now have to decide to grow or shrink."

Jerry Right.

Russ: Talk about that a bit.

Jerry Well, you put together a team, a management team. And if you're growth-focused, and you get those folks in place and there's a big expanse - there's a big burden to that. And we were - the stores were all cash flow positive, but basically barely covering the nut, so to speak. There's a time in every company where you have to make some decisions. Are you gonna develop a human resources program? Are you gonna do these things to better the company? So as we made those decisions that's what we were gonna do, you realize, "Boy, we better start growing our revenues at a rate or we're gonna have to start shrinking it back down again and it's all gonna be a waste."

Russ: A lotta people that don't get out there and take risks like you guys, don't understand that. It's hard to grow. Now it's particularly hard to grow when you're dealing with government reform. And man, oh, man, Larry, health care reform. Is it impacting your business?

Larry: Absolutely. Yeah. Health care reform is impacting anyone that's in the medical devices or health care. Obama Care has put health care almost on its ear from the standpoint of payers, Medicare is all messed up out there.

Russ: Right. Do you have a lobbyist or anything like that, or does that do any good in this kind of environment?

Larry: Well, absolutely. We have lobbyists that work for us in Washington that work with the AMA helping us determine definitions of CPT codes and that type of thing.

Russ: All right. Now I told all you guys this when we started that at the end, before I let you go, I wanted to know what general advice would you give an aspiring entrepreneur here in 2010? And, Gray, let me start with you.

Gray Okay. Well, the first thing that comes to mind is secular trends. People that look at a successful businessperson and what made them successful don't distinguish between people that were successful because of a fad versus people that were - that sorta were right about a major long-term lasting trend. And that's important because it's much harder to control whether or not you're successful as a result of a fad. So figuring out where those trends are gonna be sorta wind at your back is hugely important to any aspiring entrepreneur, and it increases your odds of success -

Russ: Absolutely.

Gray - magnitude. And then the second thing I would just say is follow your heart. If you're not passionate about what you're doing, even if you're right about the trend, your odds of success go down.

Russ: Right on. I believe. Larry, what about your advice?

Larry: Well, I would advise a young entrepreneur to seek out the most appropriate attorney and CPA, first of all, that he can find for himself. Share his vision with them. Make sure they buy into his vision. And just as you said, follow your heart and stay true to your dream.

Russ: Okay. Cool. And Jerry, what about you?

Jerry Well, I think from an entrepreneurial aspect, one of the things that goes in my head all the time, is what problem are you solving. And actually, when we started our company, I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking of it from the idea standpoint, "This is a great idea." But there's a lotta great ideas out there, but they can't all be monetized. So now I try to think of it as, "What problem are you solving?"

Then the second aspect is something that I'm really focused on right now. That's the difference between the entrepreneurial leader, the individual that comes up with the great solution and vision, and then the difference between that leader and a leader that runs a company very well, different skill set.

Russ: Very interesting there. All right, Charlie. It's up to you now.

Charles Sure. I agree with Jerry on what he said. But definitely if you have an idea - a big idea that you wanna start, definitely look at the industry and see if there's a true need or demand for the product or service you're trying to provide. That being said, and the next thing I would do is before I would put a lotta capital into the business is maybe form a customer advisory council to say, "Hey, this is my idea. What do you customers - what you think about it?" before I start just investing in a new business. And if you have a green light from that, definitely stay to focus and follow your heart.

You gotta focus, focus, focus, because along the way as an entrepreneur, you're gonna - there's gonna be a lotta people saying, "What are you doing? Why are you doing this? This doesn't make sense? You're taking on too much risk." And along those lines, as you grow, you need to be able to adapt to change.

Russ: Okay. All right. I really thank you, and I thank all four of you. And, Bill, these are cool events. I think you oughta keep rolling, man. You don't need to stop now.

Bill: I love it. I think it's a great chance to be able to get folks in the communities to learn from successful entrepreneurs. It's a wonderful thing to do to teach and learn and take away nuggets of wisdom.

Russ: All right. All right. And that wraps up today's Smart Strategies to Keep Your Business Growing. You're listening to the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at theBusinessMakers.com. Okay. That's a wrap.