DURHAM – Ryan Allis is like a lot of 23-year-olds: he plays flag football, dances to Soulja Boy and dreams of ending extreme world poverty.
He also freestyle raps, performs improvisational comedy, plays foosball and frequently visits his parents, who live in nearby Carrboro.
But that’s where the similarities end. While most people mid-20s have recently begun entry-level jobs and the long trek to the corner office, Allis is already the CEO of iContact, a Durham-based software firm that employs 74 people and is projected to rake in more than $14 million in revenue next year.
For Allis, being in charge is nothing new. The Bradenton, Fla., native grew a company to more than $1 million in sales by the time he was 18 years old. He wrote a book detailing the experience called From Zero to One Million. He’s also been a guest on the CNBC television show The Big Idea: Donny Deutsch, and he was on the cover of Fortune Small Business.
“My job is definitely a joy and a passion,” said Allis, sipping a soda inside his office in the company’s headquarters. “It’s fulfilling to create jobs and create great products that thousands of companies use, and to give back to our community.”
iContact, which provides software that small businesses can use to send and track e-newsletters, is currently the second largest player in a field of 14 companies.
Allis said iContact probably won’t be the last company he creates. He plans to grow the company to $40 million in revenue, finish his degree at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then attend graduate school at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
“Then I want to come back here and create more companies – create a billion
company in my 30’s and run for Senate,” he said. “That’s the plan.”
Path to the top
Allis’s journey to the apex of his profession began at age 11, when he received his first computer from his uncle, who runs a computer store in Durango, Colo. Allis’s first job was installing memory and loading America Online for senior citizens. He charged $5 an hour.
A couple of years later, he began designing Web sites, and by 17 he had become vice president of marketing for a health care company that sold a treatment for arthritis. Allis, the company’s first employee, helped grow the company’s monthly revenue from $1,000 to $200,000.
“At the age of 17, I was managing a monthly marketing budget of $50,000, which taught me how to get stuff onto Google, begin an affiliate program and run an e-mail marketing program,” he said.
Allis said that balancing school and working wasn’t difficult. He attended school until noon, and then worked until 7 p.m. His formula for success was simple.
“Trial and error,” he said. “If you love what you do, it’s not a problem.”
In the fall of 2002, Allis left the company to attend school at UNC-Chapel Hill. Allis said picked it over New York University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Florida because of the school’s strong business program and the Triangle area’s “strong entrepreneurial climate.”
Both of those factors would help him achieve his primary goal upon entering Chapel Hill: start a business. He met his future partner, Aaron Houghton, now company chairman and chief innovation officer, through the school’s Entrepreneurial Club. Houghton had developed an early version of the e-mail marketing tool iContact now produces.
“I saw the advantage to what he had developed because it was Web-based,” Allis said. “You could access it from the Internet. What we had used previously was very slow; it tied up a lot of your resources.”
Houghton and Allis launched iContact in July 2003 under the name Broadwick Corporation. The pair spent the summer working 100-hour weeks in an office on the corner of Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. Allis said that on a normal day, he woke up around 3 p.m. and working until 9 a.m. the next morning.
“We lived out of the office, slept on futons, cooked on a George Forman grill,” he said. “We figured everything we could do to keep expenses low and keep up revenue.”
By the end of 2003, the company had raked in $12,000 in sales and $17,000 in expenses.
“We worked for a year and a half to lose $5,000,” he said. “But we stuck with it and at the end of 2004, ended the year with 12 employees and $296,000 in sales.”
From there, the company expanded rapidly, raising millions of dollars in investments from venture capital firms and adding more than 60 new employees. The company currently hires about four new people a month.
“This year we’ll end with $6.9 million in revenue, and we’re on track for $14 million next year,” Allis said.
But the job is about more than a revenue stream to Allis. He wants to use entrepreneurship as a springboard to improving access the world’s poor has to education, health care and food.
“The purpose of entrepreneurship isn’t to make money, it’s to create a product that is useful to people and to create jobs and give back to the community,” he said “I have a desire to change the world, to eliminate extreme poverty … It’s something I really care about, and the best way I can create wealth is through entrepreneurship. It enables me to give back to the community and the world.”
To help him achieve that goal, Allis surrounds himself with likeminded individuals. He lives in a four-bedroom house in Meadowmont in Chapel Hill, and his roommates direct documentaries on poverty in Africa and work on Web sites advocating social change.
“In order to live in my house you must be a social entrepreneur,” he said of the house’s informal contract. “I’m not going to let you live there unless you care about changing the world.”
Start soon
Allis has simple advice for young aspiring entrepreneurs: start today.
“You are at a great time, you don’t have a mortgage or a family,” he said. “You don’t have a lot of expenses … You don't necessarily have to start a company right way and get a job in the industry you are interested in. Learn and get mentored by people who have done it, and you’ll get a lot of business ideas just by working in a small company.”
Allis advised that those starting a business be patient. It takes about five years “to get anywhere,” he said.
“It’s like pushing a big wooden wheel,” he said. “It doesn’t move far initially, but if you keep pushing enough, eventually there is enough momentum that it will start moving by itself.”
Allis recommended that young business owners write and frame their goals. He attributed his success to this simple practice.
“My goal was to do grow a company to $1 million in sales by my 21st birthday,” he said. “I missed it by 18 days, but I would have missed it by a lot more than 18 days had I not
set the goal.”
Brandon Milford, 29, vice president of marketing for iContact, has known Allis since Aug. 2004. He said that Allis’s work ethic sets him apart from the competition.
“He has an amazing work ethic,” Milford said. “He has a bias towards action.”
Milford said that Allis also creates a work atmosphere that is relaxed and stimulating.
“He always has an open-door policy,” he said. “We can go in and chat about anything. He’s a great person to work for.”
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