June 11, 2006
 
SMALL BUSINESS PROFESSOR: High Tech Entrepreneur Prizes Small City Culture
 
By Bruce Freeman and Diana Layman
Scripps Howard News Service
 

Stephen Culp, founder of Smart Furniture, runs his Web-based custom fixture, display and furniture business out of the relatively small community of Chattanooga, Tennessee. (SHNS photo courtesy Stephen Culp)

Stephen Culp, founder of Smart Furniture, runs his web-based custom fixture, display and furniture business out of the relatively small community of Chattanooga, Tenn. The central locale, small town atmosphere, and long-term dedication of his employee base help make the component-based business a success.
 
Culp lived in Chattanooga as a child, but experienced many adventures elsewhere. He earned a degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1991, which included a year abroad where he was fortunate to be present during the piece-by-piece destruction of the Berlin Wall. Culp also did an internship at the United Nations, a two-year-tour with the Peace Corps in Hungary, and earned a law degree from Stanford Law School, before returning to Chattanooga in 2001.
 
Culp's experience with the various bureaucracies he encountered in the 90's convinced him that being an entrepreneur was the right path for him, but his view of the dot.com boom and bust while at Stanford taught him that the business has to make sense. One law school field-trip took him to Yahoo!, then in its infancy and experiencing growing pains. It wasn't the technology that caught Culp's eye, it was the difficulty that Yahoo executives were having with office furniture. Rapid growth and the need to reconfigure their offices based on that growth was giving the execs at Yahoo! a headache.
 
Culp's "aha!" experience came when he started thinking about how to make simple furniture modular and component-like. Within a framework of what Culp calls "resource efficiency," he sometimes refers, tongue-in-cheek, to his product line as "Legos for adults."
 
Using the Web as a design tool allowed customers to configure furniture for their own needs, redesign and purchase more components when necessary, and have the furniture shipped directly to their door. On their website www.SmartFurniture.com, Smart Furniture does with furniture and fixtures what Dell does with computers -- taking a component-based product line and mass-producing it while allowing each customer to custom design for their personal needs.
 
Culp built his first prototype in 1998. He worked on getting patents and his business plan through 2001. The business model for Smart Furniture was workable, but Culp needed venture capital money to get the business off the ground. He chose Chattanooga because of his history with the community. The cost of living is reasonable, the surroundings are beautiful, and, from a business standpoint, its status as a shipping hub cut his shipping costs by 15 percent. The support he received from the business community and local government was phenomenal. In 2003, Culp participated in the Tennessee Venture Forum Competition, presenting his business plan to venture capitalists. By 2004, he had secured venture capital from two different firms.
 
The Small Business Professors' Words of Wisdom
 
Stephen Culp's advice is not to spend more than six months working on a business plan because within two weeks of opening your business, your original plan will probably be obsolete. He believes you learn so much within the first two weeks that it's the time you spend updating the plan with your feedback and new knowledge that keeps the plan valuable. Culp's experience taught him that as many as one-half of the decisions new business-owners make may be wrong. Realizing this and embracing those mistakes as a cost of business, while simultaneously learning never to make the same mistake twice, is key to longevity. He also urges making your message plain, rather than fancy. It's not complicated to communicate and sell effectively, he says, it's just hard work.
 
Culp also credits his decision to move to a smaller town like Chattanooga as an important factor in his success. Smaller towns have a less transient workforce, which makes it easier to train and keep employees, which in turn effects quality, continuity and accountability. He believes that his visibility in Chattanooga contributes to his corporate identity and loyalty -- the community has a stake in the welfare of his company and wants him to succeed.
 
Case History:
 
www.smartfurniture.com
 
Bruce Freeman is president of ProLine Communications and an adjunct professor at Kean University. Diana Layman is president of Waterview Associates and a professional business writer. Entrepreneurs with interesting success stories can e-mail their ideas to bfreeman@proline-com.com or visit www.smallbusinessprofessor.net.