When he closes his eyes, Ben Chestnut, the CEO and founder of MailChimp, the Atlanta-based email marketing service, can recall the smell of perms, hair spray, perfume and cigarettes that permeated his mother’s hair salon as he was growing up in a small Georgia town.
Yes, he cleaned ashtrays and did “whatever I could do to help” his Mom’s efforts to maintain a successful small business. In the process he acquired “the smell of entrepreneurialism,” he said drawing a laugh from the attendees during his keynote address at the 2018 Small Business Rock Stars luncheon held March 19 in the Venetian ballroom of the Fox Theater downtown.
He also helped his Dad sell the fish that they caught.
His first personal entrepreneurial venture led him in the 7th grade to start selling rock candy, which he made from a recipe of mixing milk, melted sugar and food coloring that he poured into a cookie pan. Smashing the confection into shards was a particular attraction, he confessed.
But his success selling the candy at local playgrounds quickly spawned a score of middle school-age “copycats” who launched “cutthroat price wars, espionage and conflict.”
He even was sent home from school once for disrupting a playground and confessed that he was scared “out of my mind,” then relieved when welcomed proudly by his parents.
It was his memory of that fear and how to cope with it, he said, that served him well in his entrepreneurial career starting MailChimp. His recounting of the company’s slow progress resonated with the attendees representing more than 170 small businesses from throughout the state.
The Georgia Department of Economic Development and the Georgia Economic Developers Association teamed up to honor four small and mid-sized companies for being unique and impactful with increases in sales, exporting product lines, providing jobs and economic impact. The Georgia CEO media firm joined them as sponsors of the annual event.
The 2018 Small Business Rock Stars selected a range of firms including an already highly decorated company for its genetics research, a new and used book store that started with a single outlet and now is nationwide, a manufacturer of Southern-oriented handicrafts and a supporter of community-based pharmacies.
AKESOgen from Gwinnett County has been awarded in the past the Georgia BIO Deal of the Year Award (2015), and the Inc. 500 Recipient Award (2015, 2016 and 2017). AKESOgen also was recognized as the 23rd fastest-growing healthcare company by revenue in the U.S. in 2016 based on the Inc. 500 figures.
The other Rock Stars are Gottwals Books from Peach County that offers franchising options, Southlife Supply Company in Thomas County that started by making earnings from shotgun shells and STRAND Clinical Technologies from Colombia County that offers community pharmacies turnkey tools in order to foster improved patient outcomes.
Mr. Chestnut empathized with both the successes and struggles of the Rock Stars and the representatives of mid-sized companies at the luncheon. He went so far as to admit that he generally turns down speaking engagements, especially from Silicon Valley-based venture capitalists.
Instead of a stock success story with a supercharged trajectory that lead MailChimp to its 20 million customers in more than 295 countries, he spoke of the worry and setbacks that he and co-founder Dan Kurzius experienced along the way. “MailChimp gets all kinds of recognition. It’s an overdone success story,” he said.
Nor did he forget to recall the role played by chance and whimsy providing an antidote to the importance of venture capitalists and ironclad strategic plans.
They founded their company in the midst of the dot.com bubble after Mr. Chestnut had been laid off from a web design job at Cox Interactive Media Inc. With their limited severance checks they launched the Rocket Science Group, which offered design consulting for local companies.
As email emerged, their customers asked if this technology could be used to reach their customers promoting them to repurpose some old code they had used to create a failed online greeting card business.
The side project was named MailChimp because ChimpMail, a domain name that they wanted already was taken. Their commitment to the image of a chimpanzee dated back to a logo they had used for their unsuccessful online greeting cards initiative.
Over the next few years, they discovered that they weren’t so passionate about web design but were fired up to help small businesses grow.
Mr. Chesnut spoke of the whimsy and good vibes that went along with this focus and in a sense the rest is history. Rarely does a CEO speak so openly of the fears he experienced. While they started focusing on the development of their marketing email in 2005, it wasn’t until five years later in 2009 that their business really started to take off.
An early goal was to be able to drop having to depend on McDonald’s value meals and get to the point where they could afford $8 hamburgers from the Fuddruckers chain. With success, however, they stopped thinking so much about the hamburgers and more about “the underdog” businesses they served, he said.
“The truth is that we took a long meandering path,” he added. “I think our story is more about passion than planning.”
Their pleasure led to good humor which they incorporated into their marketing and which they found was appreciated by their small business audience. “Some of this stuff a chimp can do,” they acknowledged to the delight of their customers as the word spread and they began to provide more services.
Mr. Chestnut in an understated, somewhat modest way, did offer what he considers good advice. “Good things take time,” he said. “Nothing goes as fast as you want. We’ve been at it for 17 years and only now are we getting started.”
This from the CEO of a company that is on track to top $500 million in revenue this year and employs 700 people.
He also put in a good word for “maniacal laughter” to keep fear at bay.
He advised to “learn your business by your own values and care for the freedom to take risks and do unconventional things.” One risk he cited was their decision to offer free services to companies that had less than 2,000 recipients of their emails.
Apparently that worked out, he said, with their customers’ recognition that “You grow. We grow” because they signed up thousands of new clients whose companies’ 2,000 limit was reached.
And he praised Georgia’s educational Hope scholarships which enabled him to attend the University of Georgia and the Georgia Institute of Technology where he received a degree in engineering design and learned that physics wasn’t really his interest.
“I encourage all of you to keep at it, even when it is tough,” he said. “You are being watched. Your children are watching you. I can’t think of a more exciting time,” he added. “I’m proud to share my Georgia roots with y’all.”
While advising that the business owners reinforce their brands with passion, he also interjected his favorite quote about success from the 1946 account by Viktor Frankl of his experiences in a concentration camp titled Man’s Search for Meaning.
“…success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the bi-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself…”
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