Romancing the software market
Minneapolis Star Tribune – Wednesday, April 27, 2005
by Dick Youngblood
There's precious little romance in the hard-nosed world of business -- at least very little you can talk about in a family newspaper. But the saga of Cem (pronounced Gem) Erdem and the pretty American lass who lured him from his native Turkey to the frosty tundra of Minnesota certainly qualifies.
It's a yarn with improbable twists and turns, including the start-up of a thriving business based on a chance reading of an article in an in-flight airline magazine enroute to Minnesota to woo aforementioned pretty American lass.
But let Erdem tell the story of the summer romance that brought him to Minnesota to marry Elizabeth Streefland, and then to start August Enterprises Inc., a Golden Valley company that has found a million-dollar niche supplying management software to the continuing-education market.
"I was 24 when I met a pretty American girl with lovely green eyes in the Greek islands and chased her from island to island for a week," Erdem wrote in a note introducing himself. The rendezvous came during the summer of 1993 while he was on vacation from his job as reservations manager at the Hilton in Istanbul.
We are not talking a gifted Romeo here: So enamored was Erdem that he first forgot to ask for Streefland's name, then failed to note her itinerary, an oversight that triggered a three-day search on the island of Crete.
Finally, he neglected to get her address and telephone number as she headed home, a problem Streefland resolved with a postcard she mailed to him shortly after she landed at JFK Airport in New York.
Six months later, after a blizzard of letters and telephone calls, "she invited me to her hometown, Minneapolis," Erdem said. "[And] after two hot weeks in a cold February in Minnesota, we decided to get married."
Subzero memories
It was his first encounter with subzero temperatures and he recalls the moisture in his nose freezing up and "my ears feeling as though they were going to fall off." Nonetheless, he returned to Turkey, quit his job, sold his car and motorcycle "and arrived in the Land of Lakes in September '94 with two bags and $14,000 in my pocket."
Here's where the story takes on a truly surreal quality: When he embarked on his hiatus, Erdem had every intention of remaining in the hotel business. But on the flight to Minnesota he was fascinated by an article he read about the potential of the emerging Internet, and he promptly decided on a career change.
Never mind that he knew little about the Internet: He simply bought a computer and a stack of books on programming and website development and spent two months educating himself. In November 1994 he started August Enterprises -- named in honor of the month he and his wife met -- to offer website development and other Internet services.
Still uncomfortable with the American business scene, however, he started out marketing to companies in Turkey. Soon he began adding U.S. companies to the roster, but alas, there weren't enough of them to make it a full-time business.
So for six years, during which his annual revenue never topped $80,000, Erdem took a series of outside jobs -- as a telephone support technician for Compaq, a developer of websites for a competitor and a designer of an internal network for ADC Telecommunications.
The break came from one of his clients in 2000, when the Learning Resources Network, the trade association for the so-called "lifelong learning" industry, asked if he could develop a software product to handle online class registration and other management applications.
Market underserved
Both he and Learning Resources Network put $50,000 into the pot, with the network agreeing to promote the product to its members -- universities, community colleges and public schools.
The result was Lumens software, which not only offers continuing-education organizations a streamlined, 24/7 online registration process, but also an interactive system to help them manage everything from assigning teachers and scheduling classrooms to preparing brochures and organizing online marketing campaigns that target present or former students.
"Basically, we brought to the underserved education market the technology that for-profit businesses have been enjoying for years," Erdem said.
In the ensuing four years, as Erdem has introduced three Lumens upgrades, the market has broadened to include vocational schools, trade associations and museums. And sales have followed suit, growing uninterrupted through recession and terrorist attacks from $380,000 in 2001 to $900,000 last year.
With $700,000 of new business booked by the end of 2004, and with version five of the Lumens software due out in May, Erdem expects sales this year to top $1.5 million.
All of which leaves one question for his wife, a Golden Valley attorney who shares office space with August Enterprises: What in the name of summer romance was she doing encouraging the advances of a total stranger in a foreign land?
"He's cute -- what can I say?" Streefland said with a laugh. "Besides, everything about him was gentle and thoughtful. There was nothing threatening about him at all."
Besides, she added, despite the fact that his English wasn't as fluent as it is now, "there was a lot of chemistry going on."
Dick Youngblood can be reached at 612-673-4439 or at yblood@startribune.com.
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