When the
Technology Innovation Center opened its doors in
downtown East Lansing last fall, the event was celebrated at a local bar. In attendance were the center's tenants—cutting-edge firms and technology companies—and a host of local media and leaders.
Nicholas Chilenko was among them, having just moved his company,
Nicholas Creative, into the Center as one of its very first tenants.
Like everyone else, he spent his evening hobnobbing over drinks and talking shop—sharing tales of his nine years spent running his own successful web site design business, and a year and a half long stint as creative director for the prominent Detroit agency,
Motor City Interactive. But aside from this lengthy list, what really made Chilenko stand out among his contemporaries was the drink in his hand—a cup of coffee.
The bar-based gathering didn't change the fact that Nicholas was not yet 21 years old.
“The first response I usually get from clients is ‘Holy crap—this kid is young!” Chilenko says. “But if they listen to me for five minutes, I can very quickly build credibility.”
Nicholas CreativeFor a man of only 20, Chilenko has remarkable control of his life.
Chilenko works to educate small businesses of the value of having a web site, and to help them use it as a tool to communicate. Through his company, he creates integrated solutions that provide businesses not only with web sites, but with content management, blogs, and marketing plans, all in a neat package.
“I sell how important it is to have all those elements of your online marketing strategy working together for you,” he says.
Chilenko has already established a solid organization, with a network of established programmers that are able to perform the support work he needs to bring his designs to life.
And while most of his clients are smaller-scale, local businesses, Chilenko works to help them find the potential to move beyond being local.
“There is no reason,” he says, “that small businesses can’t work with national clients.” Case in point, Chilenko’s company claims an account as far away as Lake Havasu, Arizona.
Early EntrepreneurChilenko got an early start—when he was five, his father opened a small retail store, and young Nicholas seized the opportunity to hawk his dad’s wares on the sidewalk outside the shop. If he made a sale, his dad gave him a cut.
Two years later he started his first personal enterprise. The family lived on a golf course, and Chilenko discovered that he could collect stray golf balls and sell them for a tidy profit to passing golfers.
He began building web sites at age 11, starting with small businesses like his parents' landscaper. He still likes to tell stories about his clients’ disbelief that they were holding serious business meetings with a junior high school student.
Along the way, he was learning important lessons about working with and maintaining clients.
“I was learning about design and web programming, but I also learned how to run a business,” he says.
His client list expanded to include firms such as his family dentist, and he began to attract media attention. Today he proudly shows off yellowed newspaper clippings of photos of a very young man with an easy smile sitting in front of his computer. Some early clients have been working with him for nearly a decade.
While still in high school, Chilenko sold “about a dozen” of his clients to Motor City Interactive, a well-known web site design shop located in the Detroit area. The firm then hired him on as their Creative Director.
He didn’t yet have his driver's license.
“I worked on a co-op basis,” Chilenko says, “which got me out of a few hours of school.”
During the year and a half he worked with Motor City Interactive, he managed over 30 accounts and was exposed to some high-profile clients like
ABN/AMRO,
Ford,
AAA, and
Comerica Bank. Not all of them knew they were consulting with a 17-year old.
Launching in East LansingSomehow, Chilenko managed to find the time to study and do well in high school. He even got a jump start on college—he graduated high school in 2006 and immediately entered
Michigan State University (MSU) as a sophomore.
He also left Motor City Interactive that year, and launched Nicholas Creative.
“I hated building other peoples' business; I wanted to run my own,” he says. “And the beauty of my business is that I can run it out of wherever I want to.”
At times, that included his college dorm room. Chilenko is now in his last semester at MSU and will soon have earned a degree in marketing.
“I still enjoy doing all the things that most college kids do," he says. "It’s just that when they go to work they’re looking for jobs, and I’m trying to build a brand for myself. In some ways, it’s the same thing—it’s my name, it’s my brand, and I’m just trying to get my name out there.”
Chilenko is constantly at work. Even a trip to Costa Rica to celebrate his upcoming graduation is part of a job for a client that manages vacation properties there.
He's also constantly on the lookout for opportunities to complement the growing success of Nicholas Creative.
He is a partner in a business that generates sales leads for commercial banks and financial planners, but with a twist—the business is based on a technology that enables rapid deployment of a large number of web sites, each carefully optimized for select key search terms.
“We partner with companies to help them generate their own infrastructure and develop their own leads, instead of relying on other companies to bring them leads,” Chilenko says.
Staying Put“My plan is not to be local—there is no reason to be,” Chilenko says. “I can work from anywhere, with anybody. It doesn’t make sense to have those limitations.”
But don’t expect to find him leaving East Lansing anytime soon, either. While he does maintain a secondary office in the Metro Detroit area, he’s grounded in the Technology Center.
“I love coming to work here,” he says “and being around a lot of younger professionals.”
Being in East Lansing, with 50,000 students to tap into right across the street, makes it easy for Chilenko to find business partners and contractors. “That’s the biggest reason why I like it here and would want to stay around here,” he says.
And as Chilenko enters the last few weeks of his student life, he looks forward to a few post-college changes.
“I’m looking forward to not having to take tests anymore,” he says.
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Jeff Shoup is a Lansing native, musician, and freelance writer. He is trying to recall why he wasn’t building web sites at age 11.
Dave Trumpie is the managing photographer for Capital Gains. He is a freelance photographer and owner of Trumpie Photography.
Photos:
Nicholas Chilenko at his office in the East Lansing Technology Innovation Center
All Photographs © Dave Trumpie