Business Opportunities Weblog

January 16, 2006 by Dane Carlson | 1 Comment

Startup Journal:

In 1980, Patrick Martucci, just out of high school, left his hometown of Cleveland with $300, pointing his Trans Am toward Dallas. He landed a $6-an-hour job at a company that was launching an odd, new product at the time — “voice forward mail.”

When he tried to explain voice mail to his grandmother, she thought he was a postal worker. Others, however, caught on. He was soon in the sales department, where he was a natural. “I had the opportunity to watch a product go out the door and gain world-wide acceptance,” he says.

He leapfrogged to increasingly challenging jobs across the telecom industry, setting up distribution channels, running sales departments. A stark opportunity stared him in the face when he worked at a company that provided maintenance on Rolm phone equipment. Mr. Martucci was thrilled to pitch a sale to J.C. Penney, which, after a trial, offered him the maintenance contract for the entire retail chain’s phone service. But his company could handle only Rolm equipment in specific geographic areas, not the full sprawl of a retailer with a mishmash of phone systems. Mr. Martucci says he saw what could have been “a $10 million contract go to $1.5 million, and that bugged me from that day forward.”

THE SOLUTION: From Chicago, he launched United Asset Coverage, which could have struck that deal. It would informally stitch together a network to fix anyone’s office equipment — no matter the brand, and no matter the place, a sort of managed-care approach to the frustrating world of office-machine maintenance.

In Profiles | 1 Comment