Traverse City is an absolute jewel, a gorgeous resort town nestled amid verdant hills and azure bays.
But it's also increasingly a high-tech hotbed whose entrepreneurs' work is appreciated worldwide.
I met with some of those folks Friday when the Great Lakes IT Report's Spring Tech Tour 2009 hit the City by the Bays.
My morning started with Victor von Schlegell, president of Appia Communications, the voice, data and managed services provider he founded in 2000.
Like all the Traverse City tech companies I talked to Friday, he said business was good. Not great, but in this economy we'll all take good, won't we?
"We're not up as much this year as we were this time last year, but we're up," von Schlegell said. "I think that's because our customers are cutting back a little -- instead of having 50 phone users they have 42. People are also looking very carefully at their services -- we're getting a lot more requets for sevice audits. The good news is, we are still selling deals because we are a cost reduction play."
Von Schlegell said Appia is almost always able to save its small and mid-sized customers 25 to 30 percent over their existing voice and data services. How? Von Schlegell isn't sure, but "I think it's because the legacy phone companies don't understand small and midsized businesses and don't price appropriately for it."
Appia does its work in the market for phone services between 30 and 500 users. It also offers network monitoring, video, Internet access and network design.
Appia is now up to about 35 employees, 12 in Traverse City and the rest in offices in Chicago, Indianapolis and St. Louis, where its network operations center is located.
More at www.appiaservices.com.
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Next I headed over to the grounds of the former Traverse City Regional Psychiatric Hospital, a group of handsome five-story yellow brick buildings set among huge trees and now known as Grand Traverse Commons.
My meeting was with high-tech patent and trademark attorney Enrico Schaefer, whose Traverse Legal modestly claims on its logo that it's changing the way law is practiced.
Schaefer, a Detroit native, was president and general manager of a health care-related Internet startup in Boulder, Colo. from 1994 to 1997. He came back to Michigan in 1997 to practice law for another firm before starting Traverse Legal in 2005.
Traverse Legal gets almost all its business from the Internet. Schaefer says that's because of a Web site design technique that brings the company to the first page of Google searches in its areas of interest -- search terms like copyright infringement, cybersquatting, Internet law and more. It's a simple technique -- "We have the best content and actual experts who can solve the problem," he said.
As for the firm's location, he asked, "Since technology allows you to live anywhere, why wouldn't you live in Traverse City?"
And he said business is booming, up eightfold in the past six months. The company is up to six attorneys, has opened an office in California, and is about to open another in Florida.
Traverse Legal also manages a number of other Internet businesses, including a talk radio site called Vertio.net that offers, among other things, legal podcasts. It runs 11 legal blogs and of course Twitter and Facebook feeds.
The firm is also different because it provides almost all its services on a flat-fee, defined-deliverable basis rather than billable hours. Its Web site draws around 300 unique visitors a day, which sure sounds like a lot for a small law firm.
And you absolutely have to love a lawyer who does this: http://legalblogwatch.typepad.com/legal_blog_watch/2009/04/how-to-really-get-in-an-adversarys-face.html.
Schaefer said he truly believes his kind of law firm -- small, nimble, specialized -- is the future of the profession.
"We can see a new piece of technology and implement it within days," he said. "Slow moving big behemoth companies simply cannot compete in today's marketplace because they cannot innovate, and we're in an economy where innovation is everything."
Overall, he said, "lawyers need to get with the program. The deal is, lawyers are traditionally anti-advertising and they don't want to give information away. But the bottom line is, (Internet marketing) allows you to be global, and showing some expertise at that level only tells people that they really do need you to represent them."
More at www.traverselegal.com.
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Next I stopped by the offices of Cerise Neutraceuticals, where family cherry farmer and butcher shop owner Ray Pleva is trying to boost human health while boosting the Michigan cherry industry.
Pleva points to increasing research on the antioxidant nature of cherries as being the uber health fruit. He's selling the chemical heart of the cherry in lotions, in dietary supplements -- even in another part of the family business mixed with hamburger as a healthier lean meat.
There's anecdotal evidence of the cherry supplements and lotions helping with symptoms of everything from arthritis to Crohn's disease to hormonal imbalances to chronic headaches. Along with positive early indications from researchers at the Van Andel Institute in Grand Rapids and at Central Michigan University.
Pleva was in Lansing last Wednesday seeking out meetings with Traverse City-area state representatives and senators to boost Cerise products. Pleva said selling more of the products means a boost to the cherry industry and the Michigan economy, since Michigan produces 75 percent of the nation's tart cherries. (He also complained that Gov. Jennifer Granhom wouldn't meet with him, saying that a representative told him she's meet with him "when the time was right." Responded Pleva: "Just how bad do things have to get before the time is right?")
He said Cerise products meet with President Barack Obama's call for econmomic ideas that are innovative and cut health care costs. He's also seeking tests of the products with the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Pleva's father started a general store in the unincorporated Leelanau County town of Cedar in 1919, and his older brother started a butcher shop there in the 1940s. The family has also operated a cherry farm for decades outside nearby Maple City.
More at www.cherrylotion.com.
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Next up was Lisa Wehr, the thoughtful, affable boss behind Oneupweb, the top-notch online marketing firm.
"Business is great," she said. "It's been a little scary waiting to see if what is going on in the world is going to impact us, but so far it hasn't had a huge impact. It's a little like after 9-11, which was a really scary time too. We weren't sure how it was going to affect our business, but the 12 months after that turned out to be one of our strongest growth years."
Oneupweb is now up to 44 employees at its drop-dead-gorgeous headquarters on M-22 north of Traverse City, and is still hiring -- looking now for staffers with strong writing and customer service experience.
The company continues to spread its expertise, Wehr said.
"Search is our roots," she said. "Now we're a digital marketing firm, because so many things afffect search, we have to be experts on all those."
Wehr said social media in particular has had a huge impact on search.
"Do a search on any brand," she said. "Now if you're in social media outlets they're going to show up for your brand. And those outlets also can be optimized."
The biggest problem in digital marketing these days, she said, is "reputation management," because your critics can be completely anonymous online and say virutally anything without any consequences.
Wehr doesn't think that's fair, and said participants in social media should be forced to identify themselves. She said companies and individuals must be vigilant and monitor what people are saying about them and their brand online.
"Having gone through this myself with an ex-employee I can see why some kids commit suicide," Wehr said. "It's painful as hell."
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And so after far too short a time I bid goodbye to Traverse City. Regrets, I've got a few: I barely got to spend any time at all in Leelanau County, my favorite place in the universe (particularly that stretch of M-22 from Leland south to Empire). I also didn't get to say hello to my old friend Cinder (I didn't see your note about how close your office was in time, sorry) much less look up anybody from the Record-Eagle or even my sister-in-law.
But now I'm all set in Marquette, ready to meet with some more tech ventrepreneurs Way Up North who are willing to give me a part of their Saturday. Cool!
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