MarketStorm LLC Core business: Branding and product marketing Revenue in 1996: $98,000 Revenue in 2001: $650,000 Employees in 1996: 1 Employees in 2001: 2 Goal: To develop brand recognition for MarketStorm and clients Driving Force Entrepreneurs in the technology sector who don’t always understand how to identify markets for their products Company that specializes in marketing technology firms finds it sometimes must tell clients they need to go backward before going forward The niche Nelson Dodge and his marketing firm, MarketStorm LLC, had carved out for itself before this year sounds like it would be enough to make a living off of: Take a small tech company and shepherd it and its new products to market. “I have been working with these little technology companies long enough to know a particular process for selling high-tech products,” Dodge said. But selling isn’t all that’s required, particularly when engineers at high-tech start-ups don’t always understand the marketplace value of what they’re working on. “I’m an engineer, my people are engineers,” said Mike Moldovan, CEO of G3 Nova Technology Inc. of Westlake Village, one of MarketStorm’s clients. “You have this great stuff you’re trying to sell and you don’t know how to do it.” G3 Nova is working on a new network load testing system, its first product. “Getting what I have out in a lot of magazines itself is not very helpful,” Moldovan said. In fact, that’s all Moldovan and the CEOs of some other companies with next-generation technology say they typically get from marketing companies looking for their business. Realizing that technology companies in one way or another still in their infancy need something more than simple exposure in the media, Dodge took on a new partner, Randy Troast, this year and began offering services to clients that, according to Troast, “extend further back in the product cycle.” That’s what high-tech companies like G3 Nova, ProBar Inc., Medea Corp., Dolphin Interconnect LLC, Coyote Network Systems Inc. and, in an earlier manifestation of MarketStorm, Xircom have asked it to do. For instance, ProBar was ready to move from a custom service-based business model to a product-based model, something its CEO, Rob Hobman knew little about. “We have a system-level product (bar code technology), which is hard to market,” Hobman said. “Identifying a market and getting to it are two different things.” Dodge said Hobman “didn’t have a product marketing infrastructure in place.” MarketStorm helped develop a brand, including a change of name for its primary product. Which is something Dodge did for Xircom as well years earlier, only in a grander fashion. “These guys (at Xircom) had recently invented something new that was well timed,” Dodge said, but MarketStorm came on board just weeks before a major COMDEX convention where their first product would be introduced. Dodge changed the name of the company (“The previous name, GMH Datacom, was useless,” he said.), developed a strategy and charged into COMDEX. “They were really just three guys in a room,” Dodge said, “but they came out looking very composed and much bigger than they were.” Last year, Intel Inc. bought Xircom for $750 million. Dodge said MarketStorm’s clients “are typically run by engineers. Their perspective on the world tends to be ‘better engineering.'” While those engineers may be absorbed sometimes obsessed with the technology they can spend years developing, that long period of gestation in relative isolation often leaves them with little awareness of what is actually going on in the marketplace. Troast and Dodge call what they offer clients “productizing.” Before they ever talk to a client about how best to market what it has to offer, they will first deliver a “whole” product audit, assessing whether the market is ready for what the company has and the likelihood of success. Dodge started MarketStorm in 1996. He did just fine marketing the kinds of companies he has been around most of his career but, he said, he felt he could take them only so far “forward” when, in some cases, they needed to take a step or two “backward” first. Troast spent the previous couple of decades at mostly small companies, managing software product development and marketing and sales teams. “Then I decided to make a full-time commitment to this,” Troast said. In MarketStorm’s first year, 1996, revenues amounted to $98,000. This year, he and Troast expect $650,000, mostly in fees from clients. And they expect to do for themselves what they try to do for clients: “We want to grow both our clients and MarketStorm into recognizable brand names, not just Nelson and Randy,” Troast said.