Systematic Approach Pays Off for President of SMBology

 8/29/2008

 Joining clubs and other organizations helped Justin Singer acquire

 the skills and contacts he needed to grow IT firm SMBology

 Houston Business Journal

 By Teresa Talerico 

When Justin Singer, a Rice University computer science grad, started SMBology Inc., mentors advised him to join a club and take a public-speaking class. It wasn’t cheap: Singer, then 23 and juggling his IT company with a private tutoring service, drastically cut his food budget and basically stopped going out so he could spend roughly $9,000 on the class and a Petroleum Club membership.

Craig H. Hartley/HBJ Justin Singer, President of SMBology View Larger

Not only costly, these endeavors proved slightly daunting for a self-described shy guy who had overcome a childhood stuttering problem.

“I knew that in order to get any return out of (the club), I had to go out and meet a lot of people and really take advantage of it,” he says. “And that was a little nerve-racking, being the new guy in the organization. And public speaking was certainly outside my comfort zone.”

But stepping out on a limb helped the technology whiz develop networking skills and cultivate clients. Launched in 2003, SMBology (pronounced “symbology”) now has 18 employees, a joint venture with an Austin advertising firm and customers such as Oasis Petroleum LLC, the Houston East End Chamber of Commerce, radio station KPFT 90.1 and StarTex Power. (Singer met a StarTex rep at The Houstonian Hotel, Club & Spa, another membership that has paid off.)

“Joining those organizations really helped,” he says.”

But along with being in the right places at the right times, Singer and his team have solid technical chops. SMBology offers a full range of IT services including Web site design and applications, e-commerce, software architecture, consulting, development, systems integration and systems management.

Marcie Zlotnik, StarTex’s chairman and chief operating officer, says the two companies essentially “grew up” together. StarTex was founded in 2004. SMBology built its Web site and applications, including a system that allows customers to sign up for service and pay bills online. SMBology also provides numerous other IT services for StarTex.

“We started with them when they were just three people and we were four or five,” Zlotnik says. “They have been able to adapt to our ever-changing needs. We’re a very immediate-need company because we’re so much in the public eye. It takes a lot to support a growing company like ours at the same time they’re growing.”

Of course, SMBology did have some growing pains along the way.

After graduating from Rice, Singer was a software writer at Scalable Software LLC and The OpenSpirit Corp. About two years later, with $5,000 in savings, he started SMBology. To earn extra income, he tutored high-school students in math and science.

In those early, undercapitalized days, Singer relied on creative negotiating: He leased office space, for example, from a friend who provided a discount in exchange for IT services.

SMBology was fortunate to receive several customer referrals early on. But Singer acknowledges that he lacked the business acumen to make a real profit.

“Basically we lost our shirt on the first couple of projects,” he says. “We were able to deliver them well for our customer, but it wasn’t a big deal financially for us because I thought about (them) purely as an engineer and not from a business perspective.”

For example, Singer underbid an e-commerce project for a wholesale florist by at least $10,000.

“I didn’t anticipate all the peripheral things — expenses that would be incurred, the time it (would) take to make them happy, how to translate their expectations into an actual work product,” he says.

“You have to do a lot of investigative work, a lot of discussions with the customer to help them understand what they want and to make sure you understand it. We didn’t do that very well (initially). We ended up (doing) that during the project. What we discovered midstream is that the project was bigger than we thought, and if we had done a better job up front, we could have managed it much better.”

Singer now uses a system to ensure everyone’s on the same page.

First, SMBology meets with a potential client and does “nothing but listen.” Then a second meeting is scheduled.

“We’ll come back and tell them what we think we heard,” he says. “By that time, we’ve had enough time to digest it and say, ‘This is the way we’ll approach this project.’ We capture all these steps in writing, so we’re not only saying what we think we heard, but we’re showing them on paper.”