Opportunity seems to be beating a steady cadence on Todd Sullivan's door. But unlike the many who say, "I oughta…" - and then don't - Sullivan always answers.
The president and CEO of Spirit Shop, an Ann Arbor-based online company that makes custom apparel and gear, Sullivan just loves that startup feeling.
"I really enjoy when it's just a concept, and saying, 'What are the best, quickest, most efficient steps to making this a going concern?'" says Sullivan.
"For me the exciting thing is really the beginning. I feel like it's the riskiest, and I'm at a point in my life where it's easy for me to take risks."
His three-year old company counts more than 100,000 schools as clients, and last year Spirit Shop, which serves K-12 customers, merged with MyGarb, another company he'd started. MyGarb served the college market and handled the manufacturing end of the business. The two companies combined grossed $1.3 million in 2007.
So, anybody want to buy a company?
Once Sullivan, 37, has done right by his investors, he'll be on to explore the next opportunity. This is a guy who started a car waxing business to earn spending money in high school – a business that grew from a solo gig to Sullivan and a friend to Sullivan and a handful of friends before he graduated from high school.
In college he happened to room with the last Soviet citizen to attend Yale, and when the Soviet Union fell apart the two of them raised money and went to the former U.S.S.R, roaming Moldova and Georgia, helping people to navigate the crumbled infrastructure and their businesses running again.
Back in the states, he spent a year playing professional hockey in the San Jose Sharks minor league system, and spent the bus rides between arenas figuring out how to build a better inline skate. He patented a suspension system for these inline skates and, with his brother, Sean, built a company around it.
"I love coming to work every day, working on something that is novel - particularly when it's something I'm creating," he says. "I think the real challenge is there's never a roadmap, the challenge is figuring out what are the steps."
They don't all work, of course.
A patent fight sunk his plan to produce kids' sports equipment – like baseball bats and paddles – lined with paper-strip cap-gun caps. Doesn't take a lot of imagination to guess what happens when you hit something.
Caps are a great product, Sullivan explains. You're basically selling paper at a huge markup. With cap guns out of fashion (because of their resemblance to the real thing), reloadable bats and paddles had great promise. But Sullivan couldn't get the patent, and despite all he learned about consumer product packaging and dealing with big box stores, the product died.
"One in ten (ideas) don't work," he said. "I never call them failures. You always learn something incredibly valuable that makes the next one more likely to succeed."
By the time Sullivan enrolled in the MBA program at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, he'd already sold his first company, Shockz, for $250,000 and launched MyGarb.
The idea actually started with Sullivan's father, who's also an entrepreneur. He challenged his son to figure out how a T-shirt that cost $1.10 to make could sell for $8 at WalMart and $30 at Banana Republic. Sullivan followed the money and found a lot of it tied up in shipping and warehousing. As he figured out a process that put the design step online, automated production and shipped the product directly to customers, there was that knocking sound again…
"I was always pretty good at identifying a need," he says. "I wasn't so great at building the organization to service that need, so I went back to school."
He shopped around several programs, settling on the University of Michigan's because of its strong focus on entrepreneurship.
As a fairly nontraditional MBA student – not many spend a year playing professional sports, try out for an Olympic team or build and sell a business before grad school – Sullivan was the guy who always had the startup perspective.
"I'd say, 'Yeah that's the traditional way to do it, but this is the way we'd realistically approach it when you only have four people working for you,'" he explains. "[The MBA program] gave me lot of opportunity to reflect on what I had done. I would recognize something that I'd been doing all this time and it was like, 'Oh that's what they call it.'"
He took the idea for Spirit Shop to school with him, fleshed out the sales and marketing parts of the business plan and launched it after he graduated.
The eight-person company absorbs all the time Sullivan can give it right now, but even in graduate school he had other startup ideas germinating. He's applied for two more patents, and though his roots are on the East Coast, Sullivan says he'd like to keep his next company in Ann Arbor. He has a lot of friends here, a good, regular pickup hockey game and a genuine fondness for the place.
"I think the local community, particularly the people who've been successful in entrepreneurial businesses, feel a sense of duty to help other people out," Sullivan said. "That may be in other places in the country; maybe I'm being cynical saying I don't think it is. But I think you get a real sense of camaraderie, particularly in Ann Arbor and among U-M business school alumni. They really seem to band together.
"In a lot of conversations I hear, 'What are we going to do to help people who are really struggling?' I think that the people I get to talk to take those issues very personally."
Amy Whitesall is a Chelsea-based freelance writer. Her work has appeared in The Ann Arbor News, The Detroit News and Seattle Times. She is a regular contributor to metromode and Concentrate. Her previous Concentrate article was Greenovation.
Photos:
Todd Sullivan Looking to Break Into The U of M Market-Ann Arbor
Some High Schoolers Checking Out the Garb-Supplied by Spirit Shop
Sweaters and Shirts from Spirit Shop-Ann Arbor
The Spirit Shop Mascot-Ann Arbor Office of Spirit Shop
Wayland High Swag-Ann Arbor
All Photos by Dave Lewinski
Dave Lewinski is Concentrate's Managing Photographer. He's got Spirit. Hey, Hey Let's Hear IT!!!
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