Money Hunt

 By Hal Brown
   Chris Karl wasn't certain how well his business meeting had gone, but he was hopeful his pitch for Fairfield-based carepackages.com, an online business delivering just what the name implies, went well.
   As his partners Mike and Ryan Moran watched in the Stage 18 sound stage in downtown Norwalk, Karl was peppered with questions from attorney Cliff Ennico, investment banker Miles Spencer and Niles Cohen, Managing Member of New Jersey-based Capital Express L.L.C., a private investment fund which Spencer is also a part of.
   Norwalk resident Spencer and Ennico, of Fairfield, are the hosts and inquisitors on Money Hunt, one of public television's bright lights, which lifted off from Norwalk public access television Channel 27, into national public television.
   The Money Hunt format pits two entrepreneurs against each other each episode. They each get about 10 minutes to pitch their business plan, as they're peppered with questions from the hosts and that episode's Money Hunt "mentor." After the presentations, the plan is picked apart and the mentor picks which plan seems more viable. The mentor offers a business card and promises to advise the winner on how to grow the company.
   Karl, formerly of MTV Networks and Mike Ryan, a Fortune magazine alumni, both worked in business development out of the New York office of Pointcast, an online news and information service.
   "We all received care packages in college," Karl said. "We saw the proliferation of communications on the internet. Everyone was trying to figure out how to support their business with communications such as digital greeting card companies. There's no way to drive revenues other than through advertising.
   "If you can add an element of commerce or transaction in that communication, there's a way for us to make some money."
   Carepackages, he said, seems to be a nice marriage of the digital greeting card and an actual, physical gift.
   "We thought about how can this web business develop for companies like Colgate, who sell toothpaste. How can we get toothpaste on the web and make it make sense?" Carepackages would seem to work because it can package "noncompetitive products like a Duncan yoyo, a tube of toothpaste and a box of Crackerjacks. That makes for a nice little gift for a son or daughter at school."
   And, with the increased exposure for their products, companies "are willing to support us in our efforts to do that."  Karl didn't falter in the hot seat, fielding questions about his company's capitalization, how the orders will be filled, how much product is perishable, how he'll appeal to target markets, and what problems might arise from going into business with two brothers, among other things.
   As the second contestant, Braun Mincher of TeamCellular.com of Fort Collins, Colo., was pitching an online car phone accessories business, and seeming very persuasive. Karl was unsure what to think of his own appearance. Accustomed to longer, drawn-out business meetings with opportunity to spiel a little more, he was a little dubious but still hopeful.
   "To tell you the truth it went so fast I didn't think I did that well," he said. "I definitely didn't have short concise answers, but hopefully I was able to get the point across in some kind of way."
   Karl's carepackages.com concept carried the day. Although Minscher's car phone accessories plan sounded good, Ennico, Spencer and Cohen had concerns. For one thing, the company did not have agreements to carry their items exclusively online.
   "If you don't lock up exclusive sources of supply, your suppliers become your competitors," Ennico said later. "People don't always think about that. Some of these companies are going to use this guy as a stalking horse to find out if the internet is going to work for him, then they're going to pull the plug and work it themselves."
     Carepackages isn't the first local business to appear on the show.  NortheastFoodTech. com, an online restaurant supply company, and 1-800-Birthdays, both based in Norwalk have appeared on the show in the last few years.
   "We do get quite a few people from southern New England and Connecticut to be on the show,"Ennico said. "We always try to showcase at least one or two local companies every season."
   "There's a lot more (local startups) than people realize," he said. "Although Connecticut, to be honest with you, is a hostile state for someone starting up a company. We're really not oriented toward entrepreneurs in the way that say California is, or Georgia. Despite that, there's a lot of entrepreneurial activity. We try to reward that on the show."
   Ennico likes Karl, the Morans, and others like them.
   "I always like to say whether we like somebody's plan or we don't like somebody's plan, these people are all our heroes, " he said. "All of us dream about it. One in 5 Americans dreams about starting their own company. Only a very small fraction of those people are ever going to do anything about it. The people that do are our heroes.
   "The sheer effort involved in trying to get a creative idea off the ground is worthy of celebration," he said. Entrepreneurism "is not a nice, easy life. You have heartbreaks and you have tremendous successes and everything in between. You experience the full range of emotions."
     "We're a good combination, Miles and I," Ennico said. "He's basically a venture capitalist. I'm of course a lawyer who specializes in entrepreneurial companies. I'm general counsel now to about 15 different startups.
   A Yonkers, NY native, Ennico grew up there and started his career as a journalist, as a crime reporter for the Yonkers daily.
    "I covered the Son of Sam," he said, an experience he was recalling for an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal.
   After that, he said, "I went to law school, worked on Wall Street for a number of years and decided I didn't like working for large companies. When I married and moved up to Fairfield in 1995 I looked for a local law firm that didn't have any corporate lawyers. I said I don't want to do wills, I don't want to do real estate, I just want an extra office and let me work with some of your local companies."
   "It just worked out very, very well," he said.
   Spencer has lived in Norwalk the last 15 years.
    Norwalk, he said  offers "a lot of bang for your buck in  terms of settling somewhere, instead of Norwalk's high falutin' sisters, Darien, New Canaan, et cetera. There's a realness in Norwalk that I really enjoy, in fact I'm a big fan of the mayor's I think he's done s great job and I've told him so.
   "It's a neat place to live, I was born in western Pennsylvania, grew up in western Pennsylvania. It's the city that's probably more like that in southern Connecticut than anything else. It's a real place."
    Spencer and Ennico met appropriately enough at an awards dinner for Fairfield County entrepreneurs, where both were being honored. They struck up a friendship, began to invite each other along on their individual presentations to various business groups and finally began making their appearances as a team. 
   The show was spawned at an 1995 appearance at a Fairfield middle school after an audience member asked why they weren't on radio or TV.
   Why not? they asked themselves.
   "Two weeks later Miles had this crappy little set built that looked like a Superman logo on legs. We were on public access, Channel 27 in Norwalk," Ennico said.
   That was the beginning of a year-long learning curve.
   "While Miles and I obviously know a lot about small business and law, neither of us were TV people," he said.
   Spencer bought a video camcorder and they began practicing at his office, with his mother behind the camera, interviewing friends as would-be entrepreneurs. They hired Joyce Fischman of Norwalk as their first producer and she taught them the basics of television appearances.
    In early versions of the show Spencer and Ennico rated the plans themselves with little number placards, Olympic fashion. That didn't work, despite what seem to be disparate points of view, too often their numerical assessment was nearly identical.
   As a tie-breaker, or a tie-deleter, they hit on the idea of a third person, the Money Hunt mentor.
   "They change with each show. This is a name in the industry, somebody who really knows what they're talking about," Ennico said.
   True to the entrepreneurial spirit, they launched a web site (www.moneyhunter.com) as soon as the public access show got underway.
   The website offers a business plan template, tips from former Money Hunt mentors an other experts, a twice-monthly e-mail newsletter for entrepreneurs and the Money Hunt Community Page with chat rooms, seminars and interactive information resources for investors and entrepreneurs.
   "The Internet site is probably one of the most trafficked sites for small business on the web," said Spencer, who runs the related Money Hunt spinoff companies.
   Norwalk, he said, has been a good place to grow the businesses.
    "It's been a very good source of talented, creative people and competitive people at reasonable compensation levels.
   "We've been able to build kind of a unique little media enterprise here," he said. "There's the first show for television. We did the pilot for a second show on Friday. We would assume within a year's time one will be on cable and one will remain on PBS.
   "We have our first book coming out ("Money Hunt: 27 New Rules for Creating and Growing a Breakaway Business"), a monthly column. We expect radio show in the fall. We do 10 or so live events a year around venture capital conferences. We license the show overseas in Japan and we're now in contract negotiations in five other countries in Europe. We expect to add additional products to the mix in terms of self-help and how-to products for entrepreneurs.
    And for the forseeable future, the show will retain Norwalk roots.
   "This Stage 18 is absolutely fabulous," Ennico said. "We were kind of forced into this move because of WHYY, our presenting station for PBS.  Their studio is undergoing a major revonation and is going to be shut down for two years.
   "We were deparate for a place to shoot. We really stumbled on this place. Somebody we knew knew someone who knew about it. We're very satisfied with the experience, these people are true professionals and they're a lot of fun to work with.
   "We're probably going to try to keep the show here, because it's really a pain to bring 20-30 people down to Philadelphia for a week. We basically take over the Holiday Inn Ben Franklin. We can produce the show (in Norwalk) at a much lower cost.
   Karl, with the Money Hunt mentor's blessing, can hope for success like one of the other guests on his episode.
   Jason Hewitt, another Internet entrepreneur, came back to the show as an alumni. In December he sold his company to Geocities for $33 million in cash and stock. To make things even sweeter, Geocities was acquired by Yahoo in January, which boosted the stock value of the deal even more. Hewitt says his investors got back 30 times their money in the deal.
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