Doing $5 Million A Year With Three Employees: FineArtAmerica CEO Sean Broihier (Part 4)

Sramana: In 2009 you did $1 million in revenue. How have you ramped since then?

Sean Broihier: We crossed $5 million in revenue just two years later.

Sramana: How have you built the business from a team perspective? How many employees do you have, and what functions do they serve?

Sean Broihier: The entire company has three people on payroll: me and two individuals who cover customer service and technical support. Our customer service representative answers the phones, which typically is inbound calls from customers inquiring about orders. She also answers any emails that come into our customer service account.

Our technical support representative is in charge of quality control on all orders. We do quality control at the time of sale because of the sheer volume of images uploaded to the site. We are getting close to 10,000 uploads per day. It is humanly impossible to have someone look at 10,000 images a day and check them for quality. Our technical support representative is also the go-between between FineArtAmerica and the order fulfillment centers. She is responsible for answering technical support emails, which typically come from the artists about how to use the site.

I am responsible for everything else. I do all of the programming, I write the newsletters, and I do the sales and marketing.

Sramana: How do you manage all of the different functions?

Sean Broihier: We have to send out profits to our artists once a month. We send out payments on the 15th every month. Half our artists choose to receive payments via PayPal. The other half choose to receive payments via check. We send checks only to artists who live in the United States because we do not want to send checks all over the world.

I have built myself a dashboard where I click a button that generates a list of every artist who is due to receive a payment via PayPal. I click over the PayPal, load the information into PayPal and click submit. I pay several thousand people via PayPal in that manner in under three minutes. When it comes to checks, I have an agreement with Webmasterchecks.com that essentially follows the same procedure as PayPal, only with checks. My code spits out an Excel file of who is due to receive a payment and I upload that into my account at Webmasterchecks.com. They will send out all the checks on my behalf.

In terms of money coming in, we do all of our payment processing with PayPal. The money comes in and shows up right away in our account. Money going out is very simple. It is just my payroll which is done automatically by ADP. We pay our three fulfillment centers once a month. The business is really money coming in, payroll going out, three big payments per month to fulfillment centers, and payment to artists. It is all fully automated in our system, and we know all the information because we are the marketplace.

I do all of the programming on the site. Any new features that need to be developed are done by me. We are getting ready to offer a new product in about a month. I will write all the code to manage the image rendering and make the images appear on that product.

Sramana: You are demonstrating a modern way of doing business. This is an efficient way to doing business and bootstrap. Do you use any freelance workers?

Sean Broihier: I have outsourced my server administration. When I started the business in 2007, it was running on one server and now we have eight servers. When I do run into an obstacle that I know I am not well suited to address, I find a freelancer to help me address it. I have TV commercials airing now and I have contracted with an animator out of Canada who put together a fantastic 90-second video about FineArtAmerica. It is hand-drawn in the old Disney style. We run in on the website, and he is in the process of cutting it down to a 30-second version that we will run on TV.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Doing $5 Million A Year With Three Employees: FineArtAmerica CEO Sean Broihier
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