By Phil Power - April 24, 2008
Just off the Walter Reuther expressway in Pleasant Ridge, a tidy little suburb near the Detroit Zoo, Michigan's rust belt past sits cheek by jowl with the beginnings of our knowledge economy future.
Welcome to ePrize, a small firm with a big ambition: To be the Google of the interactive marketing and promotion industry. Location is key, and ePrize is just a jammed parking lot away from the Walker Wire Company. Walker makes heavy-duty industrial strength wire for industrial uses. ePrize manages customer marketing and affiliation programs for an amazing range of Fortune 500 companies and hundreds of thousands of their customers.
The contrast could not be more abrupt.
Inside ePrize – at $60 million in sales and growing at a 40 percent annual rate, according to founder and CEO Josh Linkner – hundreds of staffers sit at the 21st Century version of the assembly line. But instead of a dimly lit factory floor with automobile chassis muscled into place by burly assembly workers, ePrize is filled with bright colors, ergonomic chairs, high-powered computers and free pop and bottled water in every room. Employees are in their late 20's to early 30's, dressed in dazzling variety and "questioning everything," Linkner says.
Henry Ford's great innovation was to invent the way to assemble perfectly machined parts into an automobile – countless identical steps, repeated endlessly during the day with no room for innovation or variation. Old photographs of the assembly line of that era mostly show seemingly middle-aged men, all dressed alike, all performing their assigned functions with no variation.
By contrast, ePrize's employee handbook runs like this: "Many companies use words like 'passion' and 'creativity.' But when we use those words, it's different. These are not merely buzzwords, they are core philosophies that embody who we are. We take things to the edge ... to extremes … to the ultimate level.
"To the power of 'e'."
Josh Linkner, the man behind the virtual curtain, earned a BS in advertising from the University of Florida, then served as Senior Vice President for Rare Medium Group, a web-consulting and venture capital firm before founding ePrize in 1999. After two rounds of financing – and a total of $43 million in investment – ePrize now has offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas and London.
Linkner’s ePrize relies on the Internet, which can be everywhere and anywhere. That means he could locate it anywhere on earth.
So why is ePrize in Pleasant Ridge? Linkner explains. He was born in Southfield and now lives in Bloomfield Hills, so it's near home. But there’s much more. "There are great opportunities to build a technology company here," Linkner explains. "There is a rich talent base in Michigan, a great work ethic and deep and solid entrepreneurial roots. The cost structure, if anything, is lower than elsewhere." ePrize got some help, as well, from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation’s job creation program. In fact, the firm is featured in one of the MEDC's TV ads promoting the advantages of locating in Michigan.
Ilya Snider, one of the firm’s 350 employees, puts it this way: "I like it here. Why leave if you have it all? Climate, family, lots of things to do, downtown Detroit. Everything I want is right here."
Linkner says his biggest management problem is keeping a firm hold on galloping growth. "We’re a lot like what the great car companies were like, a century ago," he explains. "We're just entering our greatest period of growth."
That's exactly the attitude a lot more of us need. Among our other ailments, Michigan is suffering from a bad case of low self-esteem. We can't seem to get it through our collective heads that we have – right here at home – a set of distinctive, world-competitive assets: A hard-driving work force with boundless skills and talents. Great research universities. A wonderful quality of life at an affordable cost. Driven and capable entrepreneurs.
Walking through the hum of ePrize’s 21st century assembly line, I was struck by the thought that here before my eyes was today's version of the Ford Motor Company, of the Dow Chemical Company, of Kellogg's and Upjohn.
Entrepreneurship runs deep in our collective DNA. Linkner and his colleagues at ePrize recognize it; they are the latest generation.
The task at hand for our state is to help others do so, too.
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Editor's Note: Former newspaper publisher and University of Michigan Regent Phil Power is a longtime observer of Michigan politics and economics, and a former chairman of the Michigan chapter of the Nature Conservancy. He is also the founder and president of The Center for Michigan, a centrist think-and-do tank which publishes the Michigan Scorecard. The opinions expressed here are Power’s own and do not represent the official views of The Center. Power welcomes your comments at ppower@thecenterformichigan.net.
One Comment
Thanks for this, Phil. The artfully drawn metaphor of the information assembly line works. ePrize has a niche, and we should all be happy for it and not waste a moment to hold it up as an example of what is possible. As with all information businesses, though; they need to be looking over their shoulder at competition. As with many information-age businesses, that old bugaboo--the barrier to entry--is low. Maybe Michigan should be thinking about letting it be known that we will support start ups when they hit that competitive “wall”. We'll need to shake ourselves of that Old Michigan habit of calling every regulatory initiative some kind of "jobs" program, though. We're going to have to hold our noses and call it something like a middle stage "business SUPPORT" initiative -- otherwise we frighten the capital.
Now I must admit that I am a newbie to this concept of barrier to entry in the industrial organization so don’t quote me. The University has its own expert in multinational conglomerates ; a guy in the economics department named William Adams. I was doing some web crawling and came upon this paper, “Beer in Germany and the United States," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20(1), Winter 2006, 189-205.” and was pleasantly surprised. Another small businessman I know from my son’s soccer team has been trying to educate me on the concept of “the firm”. I still don’t get it, and maybe when I do I’ll fully appreciate the contrast of Walker Wire and ePrize.
Now if ePrize, is still in that renovated warehouse building off I-696 that used to be a manufacturing facility of some sort, you probably used that 2 story elevator that they had voltage problems with about 3 years ago. (An electrical contractor working for them called me in for some engineering assistance). The space is, indeed…groovy in a campy, Google-ish sort of way. I did not get the impression, however, that they were hiring PhD’s, though. The supply of young, smart, ineluctably “attractive” people, in that part of the county was plentiful.
For a more fully dimensioned view of possibilities for Michigan’s transformation, might I suggest a trip to Clutch Cargo’s or St. Andrews Hall? One cannot fully understand the young unless we understand their music. Maybe that is how we get our young people to stay: Tax abatements for nightclubs! Ha! (On the condition they clean up the place of drugs , of course) I say, create a barrier to Sandhill Road’s poaching of our home grown talent with alternative rock. Want more ePrizes? I say, nurture garage bands; not just the “arts” as visualized by the state-paid arts administrators. Music is information. While the music industry is having a hard time; the music itself isn’t. Have a listen to Ann Arbor’s own Tally Hall. Take care.
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