Name of your website?CZ Imaging Group
Your name?
Zdenek
Your Location (city, etc)
Miami and St. Lucie
Please give us a short summary of your website?
Company website for CZ Imaging Group.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
We wanted to showcase our business online. Part of our business is online document management accessible to our customers and having main website available makes the transition easier.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
First website was one for DataCrunch Company, which is another company that I'm involved in.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
CZImaging is named from company name CZ Imaging Group. The CZ stands for Cesar & Zdenek, the two guys that came up with the name to start with.
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
Our business provides great value to small businesses throughout south and central Florida. We keep our overhead to minimum and we're not afraid to pass the savings to our customers.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
The website goes with the business. The goal is to grow the business. As any other company, ours could be for sale if a good buyer shows up, until then we're putting our energy behind building our infrastructure and relationships that will allow us to expand.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
This particular venture has been first discussed in early 2005. We're still in implementation phase and as with any startup, the ramp-up of income is not immediate. Major part of our income is produced from scanning real estate related documents at this time and our customers directly feel the mortgage crunch so our current goal is preserving revenues by adding more customers to offset volume drop.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
Our development budget is squarely focused on our home grown document management system with only fraction of it slated for company website enhancements. We're able to do so by contracting feature rich content management suite. With an unlimited budged we would probably use most of it going after several new and great income opportunities that we have already identified as closely related to our core business.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Short answer is yes. Longer answer is that previously mentioned DataCrunch company does hosting and colocation and has been for last 8 years. DataCrunch's current infrastructure feeds off 1Gbit and several 100Mbit lines with plenty of room for additional computers.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
Of the larger issues, I would say, is the unprecedented speed and depth of decline in business of 3 of our top 5 customers as they are directly linked to mortgage issuance.
What has been your biggest challenge?
I would say biggest challenge was going from zero to one. Our first scanning contract covered 1.5 million pages of paper to scan. Once you have an infrastructure, even large jump in contracted volume can be considered incremental. It is easier to start small and then grow. Getting everything in place to be able to service this account was quite challenging. I would say it was a good problem to have, I'd love to have to solve more of those.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
In terms of promoting our business in general, it seems that direct mail campaign to highly targeted audience performed slightly better than Google or MSN advertising. From online performance, I would say MSN was marginally better but with much lower volume than Google leads. Since we use geographical targeting and have limited advertising budget, even after doing it for about a year now, I cannot say which was better for us.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
Going into building our website, I had a very good idea of where we need to go and how we need to get there so no surprises there.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
We have no choice but to run our website as long as we are in business and there is internet out there. I don't know last time i used any sort of offline information to look for business (save for prospects hunting). I suspect this is a trend and it will continue. Running a website is just another cost of doing business.
When will you build another website or start another business?
As I mentioned before, there are several ideas brewing around our core business offerings. That said, after many years of static content, I'm working on new version of DataCrunch website at this very moment. As for business opportunities - I think I identified yet another one in last week or so and I'm ready to go after it with a vengeance.
What is your website address?
CZ Imaging Group
