South Florida Business Journal - by Jeff Zbar
Date: Friday, January 7, 2011
It’s 5 a.m., and Benzion Aboud likely can be found lying in bed, surfing on his BlackBerry, collecting ideas for his next business venture.
Within an hour, he’ll have e-mailed himself a few items – article links, ideas to explore, ventures to investigate. Later in the week, he’ll call a meeting of his company’s senior executives for IT, advertising and distribution. He’ll scratch his ideas out on his office whiteboard and they’ll share their thoughts.
“I can tell by the look in their eyes if the people around me share the same passion for an idea once I’ve explained what I’m doing,” said Aboud, CEO of Saveology.com, the Fort Lauderdale-based comparison-shopping service. “That’s when I know we have something to work on.”
At 40, Aboud is an entrepreneurial lifer who has already founded and grown a half-dozen businesses. The son of working-class parents in New Jersey, he opened his first business – a wireless phone store – while still at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He left school after two years, and in 2002 sold his 120 mall-based kiosks and small storefront locations to Cingular Wireless.
His next business was a satellite television service reseller. He eventually became EchoStar’s (now DISH Network) largest partner. Sales topped 300,000 customers by 2006. He soon diversified into cable, television and home security resales under what became Saveology.com.
Key questions he asks himself: Is the business sustainable and scalable? Does it match his core competency, talent pool or existing infrastructure? Part of Aboud’s success stems from capitalizing on the wheel’s he’s already invented. Like all his businesses, his latest venture, SupportSquad, taps the infrastructure he has in place – namely, some 600 people who handle 450,000 calls a month from two call centers in Florida and New Jersey.
“It’s all about leveraging different parts of the business,” he said. “By leveraging our size and experience, we can invest $150,000, where it might cost someone else $1 million.”
Hockey great Wayne Gretzky said he was successful because he went not where the puck was, but where it would be.
“My customers used to be in the mall,” Aboud said. “Now, they’re online.”
Read more: Early to rise, quick to market leads to entrepreneur’s success | South Florida Business Journal
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