Child Entrepreneur Kevin Sproles: CEO Of Volusion (Part 6)

SM: How many people do you have in your company now?

KS: We have 150 team members split between California and Texas.

SM: How is your staff of 150 split up in terms of function?

KS: In California, we have three major departments. We have tech support, which is managed by our chief customer officer. That is our largest group here in California and it is a call center. We also have software development, which consists of developers and QA people. Our third group is IT operations, which consists of the hosting infrastructure. We have about eighteen developers and seven on our IT operations staff.

In Texas, they are primarily sales and marketing. Their sales group is call center driven as well. Their marketing group does everything from pay-per-click to management of our website. Our website designer is there. Corporate marketing is also there. Demand Generation is something we want to grow out more. We have a director of sales to manage the sales group. The last group in Texas does Web designs for those customers who want a custom-built template for their store. It is one of our fastest-growing areas. They also offer our customers SEO, social media marketing, and other professional services.

SM: You have a very profitable business with a great P&L from what I can gather.

KS: We have had to be profitable; otherwise, we would not be able to grow.

SM: What do you want to do with the company? Do you want to keep it private?

KS: We want to continue to grow. We are on a fast-moving train and we do not feel anything other than the desire to keep going forward. We both have so many ideas to keep the company growing at such a fast rate, and we have the funds we need to continue to grow it. One of our big initiatives that we just opened is a UK office to expand our business internationally. We already sell to a lot of international markets. We have done a lot of work over the years to get our product to work in the UK, Australia, and Canada. Those were easy steps because they were English-speaking countries, but their tax rules were all different and shipping couriers are different. We are really expanding that way while we keep growing in the United States.

SM: Whom do you consider your biggest competitors in the United States?

KS: Our biggest competitors are eBay and Yahoo!. They have two offerings which are not their core business. Yahoo! has a product, Yahoo! Stores, which right now is the biggest provider. eBay has Pro Stores, which is the third largest. We are going after the number one spot very hard right now.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Child Entrepreneur Kevin Sproles: CEO Of Volusion
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