Howard Cleveland’s eyes light up when he talks about the speed at which technology is driving changes in business.
As owner of Digital Day, a Fairlawn-based Internet and multimedia development firm, Cleveland says he’s so busy that he’s learned the importance of adapting quickly so that the changes not only don’t pass you by, but that you’re helping drive them yourself.
Cleveland has been a major part of two changes recently that have helped him expand his business and assume a larger role in the fate of start-up Web ventures in Northeast Ohio. They’ve also led to his being named Entrepreneur Of The Year in the category of e-business by Ernst & Young LLP’s Entrepreneur Of The Year awards.
The first change occurred in March, when Cleveland acquired a cross-town competitor, Quest4mation, which specialized in back-end integration and e-commerce, and merged it into his company, Mozes Cleveland & Co., which handled front-end strategy, branding and client-side work.
Cleveland says the move paid immediate dividends for the newly christened Digital Day by expanding Cleveland’s client base. Digital Day beat out numerous competitors to land the redesign of National City Bank’s Web site to incorporate the financial giant’s burgeoning e-commerce capabilities.
Explains Cleveland, “We were able to leverage Quest4mation’s contacts, get in there and win the business for the new firm.”
Digital Day’s revenue has also been a beneficiary of the merger.
“Last year, we did $2.7 million,” says Cleveland. “This year, we did that in the first quarter. We’re on a run rate of close to 8-plus million this year.”
It’s a growth rate that’s still surprising to Cleveland, who founded Mozes Cleveland in September 1995 with a focus on new media design and integration in an emerging field — Internet business.
While Digital Day’s core mission remains the same — to aid its clients in designing Internet and e-commerce strategies, then building the Web site to get them to their goals — the company’s reach is much greater. That’s due in large part to Cleveland’s desire to expand regionally beyond its Northeast Ohio home —he’s in the process of finalizing a joint agreement with a Chinese entrepreneur to open Digital Day East in China — and his quest to stay on the cutting edge.
“The next big thing is going to be wireless and developing content for wireless entities,” he says. “We’re looking pretty heavy into that now.”
It’s a direction that isn’t surprising, considering Cleveland’s past. He began his career as a reporter for the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram before switching to corporate marketing at Nordson Corp. and Preformed Line Products. He then moved into representing high-tech clients as part of then-Watt Roop & Co.’s marketing group. It was there that Cleveland began to focus on digital convergence — the merging of computer, voice, data and image communications technologies that eventually led to expansion of the Internet.
And it’s been Cleveland’s foresight that goes hand-in-hand with the second major change — the establishment of an e-business incubator, Hatchbox.
Hatchbox, which was launched in mid-March with two fledgling e-businesses as clients, provides technical and creative expertise in the design of high-end Internet, intranet and extranet solutions, as well as legal, accounting, capital planning and business planning to spin-offs and start-ups.
The idea for Hatchbox came from Cleveland’s own clients.
“Over the last year or so, people have come to us with ideas,” he says. “People have wanted us to help build (their companies). We’d take a look and realized it took more than a developer. It took legal services, accounting and business planning services, so we worked on two of those businesses and realized they took a lot of time and more expertise than we had by ourselves.
“So it dawned on us to take a model from Idealab or garage.com and found our own incubator.”
As strategic partners, Cleveland approached Jim Hill at Benesch Freidlander, and Dett Hunter at Arthur Andersen. Says Cleveland, “The next thing we knew, we had formed a partnership and launched an incubator.” How to reach: Digital Day, (330) 668-6669; Hatchbox, (330) 665-1716
Dustin Klein ([email protected]) is editor of SBN.
