Dick Sheehan cast a wary eye at ConnectSpace.com.
“Since I sell to real people, I didn’t know how the Internet can play a role in my building relationships with them,” says Sheehan, president of MGI Business Systems Inc. “I said, ‘It’s another Internet thing. I’ve signed up for 100 different sites and I don’t get a lot of hits.’”
What finally convinced Sheehan wasn’t the technological glitz that impresses many entrepreneurs, but the humans behind it all. Sheehan learned about ConnectSpace from Andy Birol, president of PACER Associates. The pair has worked on other projects together and Sheehan trusted his instinct.
“He said, ‘This is going to be different,” Sheehan says. “I choose my business projects by the people who are in them. I knew several of the leaders and I had good long-term relationships with them, so I joined.”
Within a few days of posting his offer — and a few days after the site’s Feb. 24 launch — Sheehan made a new contact and signed the deal.
And that is what ConnectSpace.com is about. The site was created by the Ohio Innovation Fund to help businesses build relationships.
“We also saw an opportunity to meet the needs of small- and medium-sized businesses that primarily sell to other small- and medium-sized businesses in cities, meaning that they sell namely local business to business,” says Jeff Hanson, vice president of OIF. “We felt that the needs of those businesses weren’t being met very well by the Internet companies that were out there. We decided to launch a business that would essentially help them grow their businesses by connecting them with, as we say, trade and trading opportunities, tools that they need to run their business and relevant information.”
ConnectSpace.com doesn’t charge anything to join or to post offers letting potential customers know what a company is and what it has to offer. Others can review the postings anonymously and, when and if they choose, make contact with the company. Only then are the names of the businesses revealed to one another.
“When I learned about ConnectSpace from Jeff Hanson, I was really intrigued, because effectively, it was a referral network on steroids,” says Birol, who has become ConnectSpace’s Cleveland team leader.
Birol, who writes the Refocus to Grown column in SBN, first worked with ConnectSpace when the dot-com became a client of PACER Associates. Birol has always tried to provide his clients with networking opportunities, and that is exactly what ConnectSpace offered.
The Internet has been touted as the ultimate tool for making business global, giving anyone the ability to sell their product or service around the world. But that ability doesn’t make it practical.
“I worked on a couple of projects with the Internet and they all seemed global or national in nature,” Sheehan says. “And I haven’t seen anybody interested in the local business community.”
ConnectSpace gives business the power of the Internet on a local scale. At the same time, there are plans to create more than 360 ConnectSpace communities across the nation. Currently, Cleveland is the only active site, with more than 350 members, and Hanson would like to build that to at least 3,000 members. At that point it should reach a critical mass, where no matter what type of service or product you’re looking for, there will be someone to provide it.
There are also plans to provide more than simply a place to trade services, Hanson says. News, e-commerce, hiring and benefits tools will also become part of the site. Many of these offerings will be available for people even if they choose not to become members, he says. These pieces of the site should be available later in the summer, about the time they are ready to build the site with advertising and partnerships.
“What I like about it, it was kind of like a matchmaking program for people that have things that they want to sell and for people that want to buy things,” says Birol. “The biggest problem that most of my clients have is that they have trouble being heard. They have trouble getting their message out.
“What ConnectSpace does is it provides an electronic, confidential way of really facilitating those kinds of interactions between business owners and the people in the company.”
Birol says there’s an old rule of thumb that says most people get business from referrals.
“If one friend calls you up with a lead, 100 will,” he says. “Often, those leads are not very good leads. You find yourself, just out of courtesy, going to see a prospect (who is) absolutely inappropriate. The point is that’s not our friend’s fault, that’s your fault. You didn’t define carefully enough to your friend, you didn’t empower them carefully enough, to let them represent you appropriately.”
And getting your name out is one of the most important aspects of the site.
“I’m more excited about getting our name out, meeting different companies, sharing ideas,” Sheehan says. “I hope I get business out of it, but there’s a lot more opportunity than just getting business. You can network better. You can meet companies in your industry, and they’re not as threatened.”
The difference between ConnectSpace and other Internet-based ventures trying to do the same thing is the focus on the relationships, Hanson says. Developing those relationships is a difficult task for busy business owners.
“The market that we’re targeting doesn’t have a lot of time to stay on top of technological trends,” Hanson says. “They’re smart, but they’re busy.
“So, as a result, we’re trying to deliver to them information that they can digest, that they can understand and that they can use.”
How to reach: ConnectSpace, (216) 533-2351 or www.connectspace.com; MGI Business Systems Inc., (440) 942-5666
Daniel G. Jacobs ([email protected]) is senior editor of SBN.