Sometime in November 2006 my good friend, Paul Peltekian, approached me about an idea he had brewing in the back of his mind. He saw that I started my own small production company producing local television commercials and felt I was a good candidate with whom he could share his idea and work together to build a business. We met at the Westfield Fashion Square in Sherman Oaks for lunch on December 17 and discussed the idea more detail. With a handshake, we entered into an amazing partnership.
Over the next couple weeks we focused on what our products and services would be as well as our business' name. My wife, Michelle, came up with "Home View" and we both loved it. We opened a bank account with only $1,500 and on January 2, 2007 we started the paperwork to form an LLC. On January 12, 2007 California's Secretary of State certified our paperwork and "Home View LLC" was born. On January 15, Paul and I held our first Annual Board Meeting in Burbank, CA where we established goals and formed a course of action to meet those goals.
Over the course of the next three months Paul and I immersed ourselves in heavy research as we worked toward establishing our final products and services. We became experts in real estate video tours and architectural photography. Paul worked tirelessly on our website and several other aspects of the business. In March 2007, we used our own professionally equipment and shot our first video tour... real estate agent Allie Black out of Palm Springs, CA. Needless to say, we were very pleased with our product as was Allie. The next tour was Jason Evans out of Simi Valley, CA. Both no-cost shoots provided extremely important content for our website.
Also during this period of time we established several partnerships and deals with companies such as RoverTV; however, we were not making any sales of these products (our idea was that a rover television would give realtors "an open house in the palm of their hand"), so we concentrated on only what was working for us... the video tour. We offered a "No Sell, No Pay" program to agents hoping to gain their business. We poured money into magazine advertisements in Homes & Land and television commercials on HGTV and other networks and we even paid for expensive marketing databases and mass e-mail tools.
It wasn't until May 2007 that we would have our first actual sale courtesy of our yahoo and google ads. Steve Mullins of Hermosa Beach became our first paying customer which was soon followed by another job in Las Vegas. In June we saw more customers and in July we saw more revenue. But it wasn't until August that we saw a dramatic increase in our business... Home View began doubling our revenues. As a result, we concentrated solely on providing a high quality product at a reasonable price and ended our "No Sell, No Pay" program. We also began expanding our business to other states such as Arizona and Nevada. And the best moment came when we wrote ourselves our first checks. By November 2007 the revenues were triple as were our profits.
In December 2007, we found ourselves doing jobs for real estate agents, property management companies, marketing companies, developers and non-real estate companies. We were also capitalizing on partnerships that we created along the way with large Internet websites and the expansion of our business to serve the United States from coast to coast. Our revenues were so good that we were able to invest thousands of dollars worth of high end production equipment which has been coming in quite handy. All in all, we ended the year in the black and made tens of thousands of dollars in revenues over the course of six months. Considering most first year companies either wallow in debt or fail, we feel very fortunate to be so successful.
Paul and I work hard which is a major ingredient of our success. We don't always agree on everything, but we maintain a terrific give and take and sometimes we move forward with an idea that ends up getting scratched later and other times we find that we are well rewarded for moving forward on other ideas. I think they call that good chemistry. And good chemistry is probably the single most important ingredient in a success business partnership. And to think, just one year ago this business didn't even exist... look what we've accomplished.
2008 expects to be an even more amazing year for Home View, LLC. Paul and I are currently working on putting together real estate video seminars not to mention rolling out some very exciting software and/or web-based applications that will help real estate agents better market their video tours all the while saving the agents tons of time. We're very excited about the future and thank all friends and family that have helped us and put up with us as we ventured forward with this business. Thank you!
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