Building a Portfolio of Bootstrapped Businesses: Ryan Millman, CEO of Undigital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you build that relationship? That is a journey story that would be interesting.

Ryan Millman: In order to establish or build a new university market, we’d go on AOL, search for profiles of people in fraternities and sororities, and reach out for job offers. We were looking for people that would want to be the university consultant. That would be a paid job where we would send them a camera. So, we’d set up people at various universities. They would go out to the fraternities and sororities and get us hired.

Once a few of the organizations on campus had us, and they were able to go see the pictures online, we had this young, hip vibe of a novel technology of having photos on the internet. We were very quickly able to garner a majority of those organizations to use our service. Eventually as we evolved and pivoted services, those companies pivoted with us.

Sramana Mitra: When you say you were putting these photos up on behalf of these organizations, where was their own website? Did you have a container where you were putting these photos up? There was no Facebook yet. There were no social media sites. So where were you putting these photos out?

Ryan Millman: Everything would go live on GreekYearbook.com. Anybody could log into the website. You could see all the universities where we provided services. You could see all the events that were there. You could then go and find your photos, look at photos of friends, and order pictures. Obviously, you could see the advertisers there. So everything was a central repository on Greek Yearbook.

We worked several years to build this event photo business. It was exciting and fun. As we saw people getting their own digital cameras, everyone around would take the same photos as our photographers, we kind of saw the writing on the wall that from a long-term perspective, monetizing the photographs itself was becoming more difficult, which is why a couple of years in, we decided to pivot and get into the more professional services, which were the annual portraits that we were taking. These are professional quality portraits. We pivoted around 2003. So it was several years in, it was exciting, learned a lot, but really the business hadn’t really met its potential with the original service level.

Sramana Mitra: So, the professional photography business still works?

Ryan Millman: It works. It’s a great company, very healthy, and very successful. It’s an annual tradition. There’re thousands of organizations at every college that fall under the Greek letter system. This is something they do every year. You can go back sixty years and see their composite from sixty years ago, the collection of photographs of the men and women that were in the organization at that time. We have annual contracts with each of these organizations. It’s a healthy model, very good business. We’ve been quite fortunate to have been doing it now for over twenty years.

Sramana Mitra: What is the revenue level for this business?

Ryan Millman: It’s a little bit north of $5 million, top line.

Sramana Mitra: How many people work for this business? The photographers are probably all freelance?

Ryan Millman: We’ve got about 15 full-time and about 150 freelance photographers. Our internal staff handles all the service support. We obviously build out all the products digitally and because we have our own manufacturing company, we outsource our own manufacturing company to create all the products and ship them out to the parents.

Sramana Mitra: So the manufacturing company basically caters to your existing photography business. So when you decided to bring in the manufacturing company, that go-to-market was really easy. Is it under the same corporate entity or is it a different corporate entity?

Ryan Millman: All of our companies are structured under a parent umbrella. There’s a lot of synergies between the different businesses, right? So there’s a lot of intercompany stuff that happens between them. They are separate entities, but they do all fall under a single parent.

Sramana Mitra: Why?

Ryan Millman: They fall under a parent company. They’re individual entities. They roll up essentially to a parent company where we have management. There’re cross-functional roles in a corporate entity that cater across the businesses. So think things like accounting. Our accounting departments are in a parent company, but they’re used by all of our shared companies. Each of our companies is set up individually, but then we have some shared services that are rolled up to a corporate.

Sramana Mitra: My question is more about the shareholding of the companies. Who owns these companies?

Ryan Millman: I’m the owner of the different entities.

Sramana Mitra: So all the different entities have different shareholders?

Ryan Millman: No, I own all the companies.

Sramana Mitra: You own all the companies, but they’re different companies? Or they’re one company with multiple divisions?

Ryan Millman: They’re separate companies.

Sramana Mitra: Why do you have separate companies? If you’re the owner of all the companies, why do you have separate companies?

Ryan Millman: Well, that’s the way we structure things. They’re all set up as separate companies.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a Portfolio of Bootstrapped Businesses: Ryan Millman, CEO of Undigital
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