At first blush, she’s modest and soft-spoken, but Rebecca Braun lives up to her surname when she begins to speak.
Braun’s ambition and intelligence hit like a combination punch and her verbal excitement spreads to whomever she’s talking with, especially when she’s pitching her business, SupplierInsight.
Brushing the snow off her parka and red wool hat, she enters the dark, empty dining room of the University Club early on a mid-winter day. Invigorated, either from the subfreezing temperatures or just sheer enthusiasm about her company, Braun is loaded with energy. This despite the trials and tribulations she’s endured over the past few years she’s devoted to bringing SupplierInsight to market.
“Don’t give up,” she says.
It’s her No. 1 rule, and the most important lesson she’s learned from the last three years.
“Believe in your product and believe in your team,” she says. “If you believe deeply enough, other people will see that. They may not understand completely, but you can push through that. You can build a team around that, investors around that, a product around that and a company around that.”
A Harvard Business School graduate, Braun majored in linguistics and minored in Russian as an undergrad with aspirations of becoming a spy for the CIA. Those cloak and dagger dreams were shattered once the Soviet Union fell apart in the late 1980s and interest in Russian studies plummeted.
“It was a superpower,” Braun recalls with a smile. “Now it’s a little country nobody really cares about. I still enjoy embarrassing myself trying to speak four words to people I meet on the street.”
In 1998, Braun and her husband, Charlie, moved from Boston to Shaker Heights so she could take a job as vice president of Kirtland Capital Partners, a Cleveland-based management buyout firm. She previously was a principal at The Pantheon Group in Boston, a strategy consulting firm.
While the safe, corporate lifestyle was appealing, for Braun, it wasn’t enough. There were business ideas brewing in her head that she just couldn’t shake. The Internet was changing commerce and she watched as her friends and co-workers left their jobs to pursue new opportunities. But that heady atmosphere vanished upon her arrival in Cleveland.
“I was surprised by how little people were speaking, thinking or dreaming about technology,” she recalls. “I wasn’t necessarily thinking about starting a company, but I got here and saw so much opportunity.”
Braun and her business partners, Bart Blackburn and Chuck Scholl, originally planned to launch a business-to-business e-marketplace where users could buy and sell engineered materials and components. But in their research, they discovered the hardest part of doing business online was matching the right suppliers with the right buyers and vice versa.
Finding the lowest price wasn’t the sole answer. Braun says she learned that buyers didn’t know who was reliable, who was responsive to disputes and who was honestly equipped to do business over the Internet. That’s when the trio developed the SupplierSeal Solution, an electronic seal that contains ratings on industrial suppliers.
The SupplierSeal tracks the supplier’s industry certifications and association memberships, reference checks, facility reviews, e-readiness and dispute resolution ratings. Not only does it help buyers feel better about the company they’re doing business with, but suppliers benefit as well because they’re able to stand out from the pack and have an impartial party validate their credentials.
And, with estimates revealing that 86 percent of purchasers are expected to be online within two years in search of sourcing information about their suppliers, SupplierInsight was suddenly ahead of the game.
It begins with R&D
Braun and her team left their jobs and spent three months talking to suppliers and buyers and conducting market research to develop the product.
During this phase, Braun encountered a crisis that many start-ups face — questions about when they would be able to sell the product.
“A product needs to get out to market. It needs to be released, and that’s a challenge,” Braun says. “I think we managed to do that right. We’ve got a nice robust product, and we’re getting it out at a good time.”
One thing that hasn’t changed from the early days is the company’s daily business strategy meeting, which Braun calls “gut wrenchers.” The idea is based on a speech she heard by Keith Krach, CEO of Ariba Inc.
“If you’re not making life or death decisions for your company every two months, you’re doing something wrong,” Braun says. “Every two months, something comes up that is such a huge decision that it could kill your company. But, you’ve got to do it because it could propel your company ahead.”
Targeted financing
Like many of Braun’s start-up peers, SupplierInsight’s founders went in search of financing to complete product development at a terrible time –the beginning of the Great Shakeout.
In early 1999, investors nationwide lost millions as slipshod dot-coms fell by the dozens. Not only was it hard to sell a new Internet idea to an angel investor or venture capital firm, but some were downright rude.
“It is a challenging and humbling experience,” Braun recalls, adding she’s not bitter about the treadmill she was forced to run upon. “I would do it again in a heartbeat. You learn a ton by going out there and having people walk over you. They are the doubters, the skeptics, and they should be.
“They teach you a lot and they make your product and your company better.”
SupplierInsight’s investors — including a recent influx of cash from Cleveland-based Capital One Partners — are what Braun calls “medium involved.” They are a mix of investors who are there every day and those who don’t want to be involved but believe in the business.
“They’re incredibly experienced and bright,” Braun says. “There are varying levels of knowledge, which is perfect. If everybody knew everything about the industry, that could actually be dangerous.”
Braun won’t reveal the size of the investments garnered as a result of her tenacious fund-raising, saying only that it is a “standard seed deal.”
Strategic partnerships
Braun and her partners developed two key strategic partnerships to help spread SupplierInsight’s presence over more of the Web and help fortify its reputation among investors and customers.
Late last year, the company linked up with eWinWin, a locally-based e-marketplace that allows both buyers and suppliers to lower prices through demand aggregation. As more orders are placed for a given product, the average unit price is automatically lowered for all buyers.
The system, developed by eWinWin founder Greg Mesaros, allows suppliers to cut costs and improve efficiency through planned production. SupplierInsight will benefit by getting its SupplierSeal offered to suppliers who use the eWinWin site. Braun says Mesaros is “an industry visionary.”
In January, the company partnered with National Quality Assurance Inc. to conduct SupplierInsight’s facility reviews for suppliers. NQA will inspect operations, quality systems, manufacturing processes and plant infrastructure.
With those partnerships in place — and thanks in part to the Internet’s continued growth –SupplierInsight now reaches potential customers in 46 countries. That’s key in today’s competitive manufacturing marketplace and opens the door for it to take advantage of emerging markets in China, Korea and Taiwan.
“That is a driver which is undeniably the way of the future,” Braun says. “I see a steady growth trajectory for the company. I think big and then act small. I would like our company to be as successful as TRW, Eaton or FedEx. You might say that’s huge, but of course it’s huge. You wouldn’t be in this unless you thought it could be huge.
“But you have to start with steady growth and see where that takes you.” How to reach: SupplierInsight, (216) 781-1100 or www.SupplierInsight.com
Morgan Lewis Jr. ([email protected]) is a reporter at SBN Magazine.
