With a floundering website and staff layoffs, David Watson turned to his faith–and it changed his whole approach to business.
Rentping Media CEO David Watson and his wife moved into their first apartment in Omaha sight unseen.
“We both had full-time jobs and didn’t have time to look around at places to live,” Watson said. “I thought to myself, ‘There has to be a better way.’”
In 2008, Watson seized an opportunity to invest in his father’s property management business in Lincoln, Century Sales & Management, LLC. He analyzed how the company was spending money on advertising, and discovered the return on investment was not what it should be. But what was the alternative?
Mistakes were made
He had spent summers during college leasing apartments in 10- and 20-plex buildings for Century, and was struck by the number of appointments who either didn’t show up or took one look and left. What if the company shot video walkthroughs of available apartments and put them on the web?
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Easier said than done, at least in the beginning.
“It took us awhile to get to even an amateur level,” Watson said. “It was tough to get a stable shot, and to deal with variations in lighting. You might be looking out a window in bright sunshine, then turn around and shoot a dark corner.”
Then there was the challenge of keeping up with rapidly-changing web and mobile technologies.
“It was costing us $100 an hour for website updates, and we only had one guy trained to shoot video,” Watson said.
Despite the challenges, Watson started rentping.com and found a market among property management companies in Lincoln and Omaha.
“It’s basically a website with walkthrough videos, and it’s still active in Lincoln and Omaha but is no longer the main focus of our business,” Watson said.
Watson decided to roll the dice on expansion by hiring sales people in places like Des Moines, Kansas City and Dallas.
“It fell flat,” Watson said. “We made a couple of bad hires, and also a couple of good ones. But no one wanted to be on a website that had little traffic and few other local companies.”
In late 2011, Watson made plans to lay off a large portion of his staff.
“Literally 45 minutes before the layoffs were going to be announced, we signed two new contracts so we cancelled those plans,” he said. “The contracts were terrible, and we still should have laid people off.”
“Our product was all about our brand”
This is where a pivot occurred with the business.
“I’m a man of faith,” Watson said, “and a passage in the Bible about considering other people to be more important that yourself caused me to completely re-think our business model.”
“Our product was all about our brand, rentping.com,” Watson said. “We flipped our business model to be all about the customer.”
The result was the launch in early 2012 of rentpingmedia.com, a company that focuses on building and maintaining web sites for property management companies.
“We sold absolutely nothing for the first six months, and I thought I’d made another big mistake,” Watson said. “We landed our first deal in June 2012 and now do business with companies in more than 30 states.”
Rather than trying to drive web traffic to their own web site, rentpingmedia.com uses a common platform to create custom sites for each of their clients.
“We focus on software as a service and full-service marketing support,” Watson said. “The common platform allows us to optimize search engine results for each client and also to quickly roll out any changes made by Google and other search engines across all of our client sites.”
Rentpingmedia.com now has 21 full-time employees, and last week moved into new office space in southeast Lincoln. The space is still under construction so employees are finding nooks and crannies to set up while the work is being finished.
So what advice does Watson have for other startups?
“Make sure your product or service is truly valuable to people and beneficial to society,” Watson said. “Then get after it.”
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Rod Armstrong is Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for AIM in Lincoln, Nebraska. He is a regular contributor to Silicon Prairie News.
One response to “Rentping Media CEO saved his company–because the Bible”
That is great. I know we try hard to run our company using Biblical principals when we make business decisions. We have found it to be very beneficial. We also use Biblical principals in how we manage our success.
“One gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want. Whoever brings blessing will be enriched, and one who waters will himself be watered.”
Proverbs 11:24-25