Duplicating efforts
Boston Business Journal - by Jill Lerner Journal Staff
Most modern offices have copier machines. Still, that fact hasn't stopped the proliferation of full-service copy stores such as Kinko's and Copy Cop.
At a time when people can pick up a CD burner for a couple of hundred dollars, Jeff Starfield, founder of Boston-based CD duplication company CD/Works, wants to be the Kinko's of the CD world.
"There's no established name when you talk about duplication," said Starfield, 53, a native of South Africa. "There's no Kinko's that leaps to mind. We'd like to be the name that leaps to mind."
The 7-year-old company creates CDs, DVDs and specially shaped CDs for any purpose in quantities ranging from one duplicate, to thousands of copies. The disks can then be distributed to employees, prospective clients or just used to store information that would require as many as 430 traditional computer floppies, or assemble 100 songs from your rock band.
Last year, such duplicate orders generated just over $700,000 in revenue for the company, according to Starfield. After recently signing a deal with online storage web site MySpace.com, to burn CDs for its customers, Starfield said his company is on track to pull in more than $1 million in the coming year.
CD/Works has five full-time employees who work from 1,500 square feet of office space on Soldier's Field Road, just beyond the Harvard University football stadium.
"So I haven't gotten very far," joked Starfield, a graduate of the nearby Harvard Business School.
The reality is, the entrepreneur actually has covered extensive ground both geographically and on a career path that included his founding a chain of pizza restaurants before going high-tech.
Starfield came to the United States in 1972 for business school after earning the equivalent of a bachelor's degree in sociology and economics, and a post-graduate degree in computer science, in Johannesburg, South Africa.
"I didn't believe that South Africa was a place that I'd want to have a family," Starfield recalled. "I didn't like the politics, and I felt there was going to be a lot of trouble ahead."
But he did return upon graduation, hoping to import an incipient video game craze from America to South Africa. When his idea for a Pong-like game failed to takeoff, Starfield leveraged his business degree into a job as a management consultant. He never gave up the hope of making it in America, and three years later, Starfield took his American wife and headed back to the United States--job prospects be damned.
Fate intervened, and en route to his new home, Starfield stopped in London to visit friend David Dutton, founder of the Pizzaland restaurant chain. Soon after arriving stateside in 1977, Starfield started Ruggles pizza restaurant in downtown Boston on Washington Street.
By 1993, he had started the precursor to CD/Works in an office above the Washington Street restaurant. When he closed the pizza restaurants, Starfield turned his undivided attention to the CD business.
"A lot of jobs in the early days involved explaining to people what CDs were," said Starfield, who incorporated the business under the name Zerious Electronic Publishing Corp., so that people wouldn't think he was running a music store.
But businesses, including Starfield's first client, Harvard Business School, eventually appreciated the tremendous storage potential that CDs offered, and soon CD/Works claimed many universities, financial institutions and advertising agencies among its clients--businesses looking for large numbers of duplicates for meetings or press kits, all within a small turnaround time.
Starfield said for an average job, duplicate CDs usually cost between $3 and $4 each. But prices are based on the economies of scale, so that a 1,000 CD order will average about $2 per CD, but a 100 CD order will cost about $5 per disk. Customers usually courier CDs or send them by mail to the Soldier's Field Road office. CD/Works also makes custom-shaped CDs and CD business cards. The cards come in any order size but cost about $3 each for a set of 500, for example.
Michelle Doherty, product manager for Upper Saddle River, N.J.-based Prentice Hall Interactive Math, said the quick turnaround time is why her company outsources from 1,000 to 5,000 CDs of their software to CD/Works each year. The duplicates are then sold as part of Prentice Hall's software package to college bookstores.
"It's something that we outsource just because we don't have the technology and hardware to do that sort of volume," she said.
Carolyn Shin, a technical support engineer for Newton-based Drawbase Software, for whom CD/Works duplicates up to 200 CDs of its space-planning software per month, also cited "fast turnaround" as a selling point.
Recently, Starfield signed a deal with online data storage web site MySpace.com that offers the site's 6 million users the opportunity to burn their data onto a CD. For $9.95, CD/Works will download a user's video file, music file, e-mail or PowerPoint files, burn them onto a CD, and send the disk to the user through the mail.
As his business grows, Starfield is looking to raise between $1 million and $2 million to start shops in other parts of the country.
Although he is the first to note the cost of CD recorders continues to fall from the roughly $10,000 price tag he encountered starting out, Starfield stresses that, like a copy store, the attractiveness of his service transcends purely economic considerations.
"It's expensive, compared to doing it on your own, but it's not expensive if you don't have a CD burner. And it depends how you value your time," said Starfield.
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