Recently I was asked by my good friend Howard (Howie) Nelson, Ed.D. to speak at the 25th annual Gravure Industry day held at the ASU Polytechnic campus in Mesa, AZ. Howie asked me to speak to the students about being an entrepreneur. What follows is a section of that talk which describes (very briefly I might add) the 12 year history of ColorMetrix. I realized some of my readers may not know the history my business partner Michael Litscher and I have been through to get where we are today.
ColorMetrix began 12 years ago as a piece of software written only for the 32-bit Windows operating system (that was Windows95 back then for those of you wondering) in a time when Windows 3.1 was in much greater use. As it turns out, this decision that almost everyone but my business partner Michael Litscher and I thought was not so smart has turned out to be quite the opposite. During 2007, the product initially developed over 12 years ago still accounted for 50% of our sales. If you are going to be an entrepreneur, it is very important to trust your gut, make your decisions and stick with them.
Then, about six years ago Mike and I spent a few days sequestered at a condo in the Wisconsin Dells in the middle of the Winter. Our goal was to design the next generation of ColorMetrix (now known as ProofPass.com). If we knew then that it would take 5 years for the product to be sufficiently developed to sell in the kind of volume necessary we might have said forget it, had a few cocktails and went skiing all day (perhaps not in that order). But again, we made a decision to develop an internet based client server product at a time that it was not really in vogue. We made that decision and stuck to it.
Was it a bad decision? I’ll simply answer by stating that after a lot of retooling and right sizing over the last couple of year ColorMetrix is stronger than ever. Sales-wise last year was not a bad year, but in the first 2 months of this year we have sold 1/3 of what we sold all of last year.
So, in a nutshell ColorMetrix has gone from being a company that collected density and dot gain information from densitometers and put that data in industry standard Microsoft Access databases to being a provider of internet based client server color verification, color process control, and color asset management systems used by some of the largest companies in the world.