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I'm Michael Stratos and I'm from the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area. I went to undergrad at
University of Pittsburgh and my undergrad degree was in Biochemistry yet I don't work
in the medical field whatsoever. I went to school and got a degree in Biochemistry
and got accepted into medical school, but decided I really didn't want to work in the
medical field, but I had always enjoyed computers and did a lot of that while I was in school.
I actually made money in school doing a lot of computer work for friends and what not
in college, so that summer in between my senior and before going into medical school, I decided
to go out and get a job in the IT field and I really enjoyed that summer, so I chose not
to go to medical school.
You know I was getting kind of acclimated with working in the IT field and thinking
of starting my own business and doing consulting for other companies, and so, for the medical
company, which was an ambulance service that I worked for, I started automating payroll
and doing a bunch of different things, so I figured "hey, I could offer this as a service
to other companies in that area", so I started doing that. And, you know Joe, was nice enough
to allow me to kinda work out of his office in that entrepreneurial attitude.
What you'll see here is throughout my history is I started a lot of smaller companies and
tried to grow them. I had Networks Interactive, Payroll Express, and a company called SBA
where myself and one other guy that did accounting and a third guy that did marketing and I did
that part-time with them as we tried to grow that business. This would probably be pretty
common with most entrepreneurs is that they always try the next thing. If this doesn't
work, well I'm gonna try something else. And they do this and they do that. You never give
up. You accept failures, because you learn from them and try the next thing. So, I go
from Networks Interactive and I merge and form a company called ISEN. We, my partner
and I, kind of grew that fairly quick. When he was trying to do it, it was maybe making
a couple hundred thousand dollars a year and then within the first year it went from a
couple hundred thousand to about $1.6 million in revenues and then, by the third year, it
was probably like about three point eight million in revenue.
The data company really started to float the telephony company and he owned 100% of the
telephony company and only owned a portion of the data company, but he was feeding a
lot of stuff over to the data company and it wasn't working out right, so we ended up
splitting up, couple law suits, and that's another you have to learn is that when you
do this stuff, you work in business, its inevitable, that you're going to have to have to deal
with attorneys and legal matters, so that was a very interesting experience for me,
getting sued while I was separating from a company and going through that process while
I'm trying to start another company, so again, you'd be surprised at the stuff that an entrepreneur
goes through, throughout their life of trying to start businesses.
Ideal Integrations has been in the Pittsburgh Top 100 Fastest Growing privately held companies
in Pittsburgh for the last 6 years. In 10 years we've never not been profitable, we've
never not exceeded our previous year's revenues, so it's been going pretty good, but the other
thing is that we are always challenging what we do, so we set the bar high and we don't
try to be like our competitors, we try to think outside of the box and not necessarily
say "this is how the rest of the industry does it, that's how I'm going to do it." Everything
that we do, even if it's going well, we challenge it and say "can it be done better?" We don't
accept lowering our bar. That's not acceptable and I guess the other thing I can say is,
as an entrepreneur, everyday I go to work scared. Even now, I mean, it's a little bit
less, but you can understand that, early on when I first started Ideal Integrations, I
didn't have as much as I do now, my wife was pregnant, I was being sued, so you can imagine
all that stuff going on, getting through that. Moving forward, it doesn't phase you nearly
as much. You get a little bit thicker skin when you go through a lot of that stuff. Everything
kinda flows to you, so one of the other things, as an entrepreneur or business owner, certain
phrases you just can't use like "I can't deal with this", well I don't know what that means.
I have to deal with it, because who else is it going to go to? Or "This is too much" Those
types of things. What it is is whatever is coming your way.
For anybody to be successful, you have to intentionally struggle. And what I mean by
that is, everyone gravitates towards doing things that they enjoy doing, right? When
you own a business, you have to be very good at things that you don't enjoy doing. You
don't have a choice. So if you choose not to be good at those things or you choose to
avoid those things, then your business or you professionally, will suffer because of
that.
One of the things I would say is, when you are an entrepreneur and you are successful,
what you find is that a lot of people will come to you with good ideas of the business
that they would like to start. And I'm not 100% in support of anybody who wants to be
an entrepreneur and wants to start their own business, but I do challenge them when they
do come to me with an idea, and most people will come to me and they will say "This is
a fantastic idea..." and I'm sure you've heard these phrases "...It can't fail." And my response
is "It absolutely can fail! Anything can fail." Even a really good idea can fail if it is
not executed right and it's not thought out right. So the first thing I said to them is
"When you came up with this idea, about this business, that is 'fantastic', how did you
approach it? Did you approach it from the standpoint of saying 'look at how good this
could be?' or did you challenge it and say 'how can it fail?', 'How bad could it be?',
'What are the factors that would make this not be successful?'"