6 www.review.netGULF COAST BUSINESS REVIEW

may 15- may 21, 2009

Eric Baird wanted to go over the top on a gift for his mom a few years ago.

After all, she was the person who, over Christmas dinner in 1996, came

up with the idea that led to what is now his fast-growing $26 million shipping and p a c k a g i n g business.

So the y o u n g e r Baird asked his mom, Gail

Baird, to join him and his wife on a quick trip to the east coast of Florida. She could go shopping with his wife while he went to some work meetings.

Instead of a girls shopping day, however, it was Gail Baird’s thank-you present that awaited her on the east coast: A brand new Lexus.

It was Eric Baird’s oversized way of saying ‘thanks.’ And while he might not have said it at the time, he could have been thanking his mom for more than a business idea.

He also could have thanked her for simply having him last. Gail Baird gave birth to Eric’s older brother Scott

six years prior to Eric, and to his older sister Deirdre four years after Scott.

And to many in Baird’s life, being the fight-for-attention baby goes a long way toward explaining just how he has taken a ridiculously simple idea — selling post office boxes to Americans overseas — and turned it into a thriving economic engine with 156% revenue growth since 2006, 50 employees and thousands of custom-ers, from ex-pats in Japan to Arabian princesses. Profits are up too, rising 65% in 2008 over 2007 and 30% in the first quarter of 2009 as compared to the same time in 2008.

“He always wanted to be indepen-dent and separate himself from his brother and sister,” says Gail Baird, whose older son is a Wall Street ex-ecutive and whose daughter runs her own e-mail marketing firm. “And now he is the most successful of them all.”

It’s that type of competitive spirit and burning desire to do better than everyone else that has led the Review to name Baird its Entrepreneur of the Year for 2009. The company he runs, Bradenton-based MyUS.com, ships packages to more than 30,000 customers in all corners of the world, including hundreds of items that his clients can’t get directly from Ameri-

Entrepreneurof the Year 2009

TRUE FREE LUNChFrom a simple business model to

the declining value of the U.S. dol-lar, Eric Baird can point to a lot of reasons for his company’s success the last five years. The business, Bradenton-based MyUS.com, has grown revenues 156% since 2006, from $10.147 million to $25.99 mil-lion last year.

One other possible source of the success: Free lunch.

Baird unveiled his lunch-stimulus program a few years ago, in an effort to build employee morale and ca-maraderie and limit downtime away from the building.

It has worked. From fajita Fridays to pulled pork Tuesdays, the move has been a big success. The com-pany’s employees now eat together in large row tables nearly every day and banter with each other. Baird joins them most days he’s in the office.

The lunches, which cost the company about $1,000 a week, have provided Baird with a per-sonal perk as well. Baird used to skip lunch and sustain himself all day

and coffee and cigarettes. Now Baird eats the healthy fare

and drinks V8. He also quit smoking and switched to decaf.

Here’s a sample of a weekly menu MyUs.com serves its employees: • Monday: Chicken breast with rice

and a garden salad. • Tuesday: Pulled pork sandwiches,

baked chips and a garden salad.• Wednesday: Italian pasta salad,

fresh fruit salad and a garden sal-ad.

• Thursday: Assorted sandwiches, baked chips and a garden salad.

• Friday: Chicken fajitas and a gar-den salad.

A Package Dealmark Wemple

Revenues at Bradenton-based myUS.com have grown 156% since 2006, from $10.147 million to $25.99 million last year. For leading that growth, company founder Eric Baird has been named the Review’s 2009 Entrepreneur of the year.

REVIEW SUMMARY

Businesses. myUS.com, Bradenton.Industry. Shipping, packaging. Key. Company founder Eric Baird combines business acumen with a competitive spirit.

Eric Baird has constantly pushed himself to do better at what is now his $26 million packaging and shipping company. The next push: $100 million in annual revenues by 2012.

WINNER by Mark Gordon | managing Editor

www.review.net 7Gulf coast Business Reviewmay 15- may 21, 2009

can-based companies, including com-puter processors, vacuums and the oc-casional 10-foot fiberglass shark.

“We are just like a Mail Boxes Etc.,” Baird says about his company, which utilizes 40,000 square feet of ware-house space spread over two buildings in a Bradenton industrial park. “But we ship it to you.”

Three recent modifications to the simple business model have put the company on an ever faster-growth track, to the point where Baird is pro-jecting the company will hit $100 mil-lion in annual revenues by 2012.

One change is that the company, which was known as Access USA un-til last year, is morphing from being a mail forwarding operation to one that primarily ships stuff. On that end, the bigger the better, since the company’s fees are weight-based.

To facilitate that shift, Baird, 39, is in the process of moving away from some day-to-day parts of th e opera-tion. He recently hired a marketing executive and a technology chief, for instance.

The third modification is more market-based, that of the U.S. dollar. The continued weakness and fluctua-tion of the dollar is driving more inter-national consumers to buy American, which has boosted MyUS.com’s mar-ket share.

entrepreneurial genesBaird hasn’t needed much of an

outside boost when it comes to his entrepreneurial aspirations or his global business sense, as most of that comes from his family, too. For one, Gail Baird has owned and sold sev-eral multimillion-dollar companies, including a furniture business for U.S. Army housewives in Germany.

“We are a family full of entrepre-neurs,” Eric Baird says. “Early on we learned the value of creating your own business and controlling your own destiny.”

And Baird’s ability to improvise in tough times — say, a recession — likely also comes from his family: Eric Baird is the quintessential military brat, having been born in California before moving with his family to Ger-many, Iran, North Carolina, New York and Arizona. He went to high school in North Carolina and college in Ari-zona.

Baird’s choice of college was a prime example of his do-it-my way attitude. His sister had followed his brother to Syracuse University and as a high school senior, Baird’s family expected young Eric to do the same.

But after one winter visit to the school, Baird came home and instead announced he was going to the Uni-versity of Arizona — traveling 3,000 miles to prove he could do it his way.

It was at college where Baird con-tinued to hone his independent, and later, his competitive streak. After col-lege, in the early 1990s, Baird took a job in the ultimate competitive busi-ness arena: Wall Street.

But he only stayed in New York a few years, working on the options trading desk of the American Stock Exchange. He moved to the Bradenton-area in the mid-1990s, where his mother had relocated.

Baird’s circle of friends in the area immediately noticed his friendly yet fierce competitive side.

At five feet eight inches tall, for in-stance, Baird joined a notoriously feisty basketball league at a Sarasota YMCA. But players in the league say Baird played much bigger than his body and rarely backed down from taller or stronger opponents.

“He is a tough little guy,” says Dave Fraser, a Bradenton Realtor who used to play in the league. “In terms of ego and desire, he’s like a pit bull.”

Baird brings the same won’t-lose approach elsewhere, friends say, from a recreational flag-football league where his team recently won the championship to poker games with employees and friends.

In addition to going all out in play and work, Baird goes for the gold in rewards, too. That list includes his Ferrari.

But there is a soft side to Baird. It comes out just about anytime he is around Mackenzie, his six-year-old daughter. Baird is divorced from Mackenzie’s mother and by most ac-counts he dotes on the young girl.

On many Wednesdays for instance, Mackenzie can be seen in the MyUS.com offices, hovering around Baird. She types away on a computer or mimics her dad on the phone. Some-times she grabs a broom and playfully sweeps up an area.

christmas dinnerThe move from Wall Street to Bra-

denton not only brought Baird closer to his family, but it also unleashed his inner entrepreneur.

At the time of the move in the fall of 1996, Gail Baird was running a com-

pany called Shop the World by Mail, which was essentially a catalog of cat-alogs that she mailed to international customers. She discovered a cult-like following of people willing to pay for her catalog because they couldn’t get the specific catalogs she listed any-where else.

Still, at a family Christmas dinner that year, Gail Baird wondered if there were other opportunities in this bus-tling marketplace. And what if Eric Baird could create a system where he could be the middleman to capitalize on it?

Soon after that dinner, Eric Baird had a $30,000 loan from his mom, a free ad in her company’s 1997 catalog and a head full of ideas.

Baird rented space in a cramped 700-square-foot office on U.S. 41 in Sarasota, in the middle of a rundown strip mall. He began writing a mar-keting plan and coming up with long-term revenue and profit projections, although admittedly most of it was guesswork.

Says Baird: “I didn’t really know what I was doing.”

What Baird was doing, however, was working literally day and night to get things going. He would sleep in the office many nights, with his bull-dog serving as his only companion.

Baird’s mission was to basically bring America to the global masses. He would use his credit card to pay for an item a customer ordered. When it got to Sarasota, he would repackage it and put it in the customer’s queue, which was then shipped overseas ev-ery month. The fees came in the ship-ping charges.

Baird’s operation grew by word of mouth. By 2004 the company had moved to a warehouse full of mailbox-es and customer queues. The company surpassed $5 million in sales by 2004 and $15.5 million by 2007. That in-crease landed MyUS.com on the Inc. 5,000 nationwide list of fast-growing companies last year.

‘embracing technology’With the kind of growth Baird has

overseen and now projects at MyUS.com, it makes sense that he’s in the early stages of what can be one of a successful entrepreneur’s toughest tasks: Giving up day-to-day control.

Enter John Godshall and Robert Chodock. The company’s new chief technology officer and chief marketing officer, respectively, were both hired by Baird over the past six months.

“I used to have my hands in a lot of things,” says Baird. “But now I try to keep my hands out of things.”

Godshall and Chodock weren’t hired solely to be Baird clones. Indeed, both executives are on missions to im-prove the company’s internal technol-ogy and its external marketing.

On the technology front, Godshall is revamping the company’s database of orders, which serves as a clearing-

house of customers, delays, prices and purchases. “For a company that only moves boxes around,” says Baird, “we actually embrace technology pretty heavily.”

Meanwhile, Chodock, a onetime branding and sales executive for American Express, is attempting to broaden the company’s presence past word-of-mouth. “There is so much more we can do,” says Chodock. “There is a lot of upside.”

One such expansion was a part-nership the company announced last month with Bradenton-based retailer Beall’s. Now MyUS.com is the official international shipper for the Florida-focused department store chain.

Both Godshall and Chodock say the aspect of Baird that stood out the most in their initial meetings with him was his passion for getting both bigger and better.

“He could comfortably coast at this point,” says Godshall. “But he has a genuine sense of entrepreneurial spir-it. He never wants to stop.”

Bonus BabyThe only thing Baird seemingly

wants to put a stop to at MyUS.com is mistakes. “That’s the one thing I despise,” Baird says of the rare times an employee blotches an order. “In our business it’s so critical to build up trust.”

To accomplish an impenetrable lev-el of trust between company and cus-tomer, Baird has set up a costly em-ployee bonus program that rewards mistake-free consistency, in addition to potential bonuses for sales growth and performance reviews. “The more you ship without mistakes,” says Baird, “the more you make.”

Baird says he quadrupled the bonus per week potential for the company’s shippers late last year, in his obses-sion to eradicate all errors. So now a MyUS.com shipper, with a base salary of about $520 to $600 per week, can earn up to $650 in weekly bonuses. The average payout, Baird says, is about $400 per week.

The mistake-free has program has worked, bringing errors down to a fraction of one percent of all ship-ments. But it comes at a high cost. “Hundreds of thousands,” says Baird.

The company’s expensive bonus program, in one sense, can be traced back to Baird’s youthful yearning to surpass his accomplished siblings: The program is just another way of improving his company.

In addition to the Review and Inc., others have recognized MyUS.com’s rise, both in prominence and rev-enues. Recent awards for shipping success, growth and innovation have come from a variety of sources, includ-ing the Manatee Chamber of Com-merce, the Tampa Bay Technology Fo-rum and the national magazine of the U.S. Dept. of Commerce.

Gail Baird has noticed as well, and not because of her Lexus.

“You always want your child to do better than you did,” Gail Baird says. “And I think he has far surpassed me by now.”

Entrepreneurof the Year 2009

“ ”John Godshall, myUS.com, on Eric Baird: He could comfortably coast at this point.

But he has a genuine sense of entrepreneurial spirit. He never wants to stop.

soup to nutsOn the surface, a shipping and

packaging business has the potential to be profitable, yet boring.

But Bradenton-based myUS.com is anything but boring. Run by Eric Baird, the company’s warehouse is constantly filled with an eclectic — and many times expensive — list of goods. The only items it won’t send are ones that are illegal for shipping, such as certain weapons and drugs.

The five most frequent retail-ers handled by the company are amazon.com, apple, the Gap, Victoria’s Secret and Nordstorm’s. at one time or another the compa-ny’s packages, shipped out to a list of a 200 countries, has included the following: • Jewelry going to an Arabian prin-

cess;• Gold-plated pages of the Koran;• A 10-foot fiberglass shark on its

way to Italy;• High performance motorcycle

parts;• Star Wars Lego sets;• Roomba vacuums;• Boxes of iPhones and iPods;• Michelin tires;• Computer processors; and • A $1,500 handmade sword.

BY tHe nuMBeRs

MYus.coM

YeaR Revenues GRowtH2006 $10.147 million2007 $15.553 million 53% 2008 $25.99 million 67% Two-year average annual growth: 60%

YeaR eMploYees2006 302007 452008 50

Mark Gordon covers the Sarasota-Manatee region. He can be reached at mgordon@review.net, or 941-362-4848.