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Leveraging Technology to Grow Your Business: Miguel Rabay

 

Miguel Rabay's Story: How often has someone with a great recipe thought about turning their savory creation into a company?

Miguel Rabay had the courage to do that with the gourmet garlic spread concocted and hand-made by his wife Jane. Combining the product's taste and health appeal with Miguel's business savvy, ChezJane has become a six-figure enterprise within a year.

And now ChezJane is aiming to double sales in 2006. Miguel has landed it on the shelves of some supermarkets, has a plan for supplying gourmet bakeries on a wholesale basis, and is even trying to make it a part of gift baskets that retail at Costco and Sam's Club warehouse chains.

Miguel is a serial entrepreneur. He founded a software firm in 1999 and sold it in 2002. As he and Jane, a stay-at-home mom with a business degree, pondered the entrepreneurial possibilities of her garlic spread or the idea of Miguel's starting another software company, he was stricken with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Miguel shelved his plan to start another software company as he battled the cancer.

But he and Jane went ahead with ChezJane. And while garlic has many proven health benefits, it was something else that turned Miguel's health around: the success of what he calls a "million-to-one shot" at finding a donor who was a 100% match for a stem-cell transplant. Miguel is feeling hale and hearty these days. And he and Jane are throwing their energies into Chezjane.

"We try to focus on our core competencies and then outsource what we're not competent at," Miguel says. "If you cut corners, you get what you pay for. And because we've had the discipline to stick with our approach, it's worked."

Miguel's Key Move: Leveraging Technology to Grow Your Business

As a digital maven, Miguel wanted to make sure that he leveraged information technology in every possible way to get ChezJane off to a good start and grow the business, ranging from a sizzling website to the use of Microsoft software to serve as the back-office guts of the company. Technology also helped him fulfill two other important criteria: that he and his wife are able to run Chezjane from home, and that they are able to do it essentially alone.

"We couldn't have achieved the level of success we have without leveraging technology to the hilt, even though the product is great," he says.

First, Miguel avoided simple technology-related mistakes that he says many home-based entrepreneurs fall into. He began regularly backing up the data on his hard drive every three months, for example. "Even if you just want to burn it onto a CD, it's critical to getting a copy of your data offsite somewhere," he says. "Information is a key part of running a small business."

The smaller the business, Miguel says, the more important it also is to only have to enter data once into a computer – and have the software spread that customer-contact information, or that financial number, or some other bit of data everywhere else as necessary within the company. He recommends Microsoft Small Business Accounting, or something similar, and integrating it with Microsoft Office.

Miguel also is a one-man band on the internet. He uses his T1 broadband service to facilitate quick and effective online research, allowing him to do the kind of information gathering and analysis for Chezjane that it might have taken two or three people to do just a few years ago.

He also quickly built a web site, ChezJane.com. But importantly, Miguel kept his ambitions in check. Initially, the site served only to boost ChezJane's brand recognition and to provide customers with recipes – not to conduct e-commerce.

"We learned that people want to taste the product before they buy it online, so we had to build up our distribution first," he explains. Miguel also asked online visitors to sign up for ChezJane's newsletter, helping build a database of customers.

ChezJane also purchased a small-business server from Dell for about $2,000. "Servers are pretty cost-effective these days," he says. "And I didn't need a big server – just something that was solid and cohesive."

Miguel stresses the importance, even for home-based businesses, of having their own server, because it accommodates the extra computers that can come as you grow a business and add employees. "You don't have to change servers too often, either," he notes – maybe only every five years, versus perhaps every three years for a desktop PC. "And it increases your productivity to the nth degree."

As the business has grown, Miguel has rarely missed a trick where applying technology would help him grow the business by becoming more efficient, saving money, or goosing marketing or sales. He began posting press releases on the ChezJane website, and he's added a web cam that can be used through instant messaging.

"I can do a web-conference call with a distributor or potential customer anywhere in the country," he says. "When you can't make the trip, it's nice to leverage the face behind a name. That kind of IT helps me keep focused."

Now ChezJane is ready to jump into e-commerce in a big way. Miguel is investing about $10,000 in building a more robust website with full e-commerce capabilities and plans to purchase a larger server, for about $3,000.

"Four or five years ago, nobody really had a clearly thought out online strategy for capturing customers, but now Microsoft has SharePoint Portal Server, which allows a small company to manage various web-related documents securely.

"Now," Miguel says, "we're looking at building a very robust e-commerce site that will leverage the installed base of customers that we've build over the last four years. It'll be as important for expanding our sales as anything else we do."

Miguel's Bonus Insight

Because ChezJane markets its spread in part on the widely acknowledged health properties of garlic, Miguel targeted Whole Foods Markets right away as a crucial outlet. But he's not alone in that: As the main gatekeeper of what new products succeed in the booming natural-foods marketplace, Whole Foods buyers are literally besieged with small companies like ChezJane that want to secure a spot on the chain's shelves.

But unlike many of the people behind these rival products, Miguel demonstrated persistence and responsiveness. "It took us six months, but finally we got hold of the right buyer even though they were overloaded with vendors like us," he says. That persistence helped ChezJane break through on a regional basis at some Whole Foods Markets in the Northwest.