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Barry's Story

About 5 years ago, Barry was looking into starting a new business, online. As an accomplished businessman he started thinking about what he was going to need to be successful. A website was the obvious starting point. It had to be easy enough to add and change content - because websites live or die on the basis of fresh, useful content.

Next - a way to manage leads and customers. You need to be able to react quickly to new leads and follow up on old ones. Then, marketing. Email marketing to be precise. A permission based list of people who are receptive to hear your message is priceless. And don't forget - online shopping. Selling goods online is a great way to cut out the middle man and reach your customers directly.

That's a basic list. There's more, like community forums, affiliate programs, blogs and so forth. But let's keep it simple, ok?

So, checklist in hand (Barry's a pretty organized sort of guy) he went looking for something to do all this and he found Content management systems and Customer Relationship Management systems. And Shopping carts and email marketing solutions. So he signed up to all these services and downloaded what he needed to download.

OK great, he thought, let's get started!....Or not.

Barry got frustrated. Because running any business is a little like racing a car. You've got to push hard, stay ahead of the pack and be smart about how you race. But Barry's problem wasn't that he couldn't race. He was wasting his time trying to build himself a nice, fast car. I didn't mention it, but Barry is a bit of a coder. And he was finding himself writing code trying to get these products to work how he wanted them. He found himself spending a lot of time trying to keep all his separate systems in sync. And more than once he forgot one of the five or six log in details he was supposed to remember.

Why should he do that? Why should any business person do that? Barry COULD, but it wasn't an effective use of time.

Why hadn't anyone built a nice, fast car that Barry could just jump in and start racing?

With that thought Barry rolled up his sleeves and decided that he was going to solve this little problem. Not just for himself, but for other businessman who weren't able to build themselves a nice, fast car. He named it and his new company Business Catalyst, and BC (as it became affectionately known) hit the scene in 2004. Since then, the product has changed and grown, adding a bunch of great features that complement a wholistic online business approach.