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Superachievingstudent.com
SMG sophomore juggles books and biz
By Brian Fitzgerald
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Ben Cathers (SMG'06) Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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Ben Cathers was the CEO of a dot-com when he was 12 years old. At 17, he hosted a popular teen radio show. Recently, at the ripe old age of 19, he wrote a book about teen entrepreneurs.
Is this guy the Doogie Howser of broadcasting, publishing, and the Web — or what?
Cathers (SMG'06), a business administration major, is minoring in psychology. He is also a consultant to start-up companies, a teaching assistant for the School of Management's freshman business class, and a volunteer at Marsh Chapel. But first and foremost, Cathers is a busy college student, and he knows that he may be juggling too many activities, and with final exams in sight, he's got to buckle down and focus on his 18-credit course load.
Nonetheless, he is still bursting with ideas. “I loved working on my book, and I already have an idea for another one: an autobiography on how I got my business empire started,” he says. “But right now I'm concentrating on my studies. I'm hoping that during the holiday break I'll have time to start writing down my ideas and an outline for my second book.” Have another quadruple-espresso, Ben.
A born leader, the highly motivated Long Island native is always looking for a new challenge. Before he was a teenager, he had taught himself HTML, learned how to design and market Web pages, and started phatgames.com, a multiplayer gaming site that features backgammon, chess, and role-playing games. He charged $12 for each advertisement, and the checks started rolling in.
“Back then, everybody thought I was crazy,” he says. “When I was 12, to most people the Internet was just something for geeks. But eventually my family and friends became interested in what I was doing, especially after I received my first check. At the time, phatgames.com was one of only a handful of sites offering online games for free. Most Web sites charged for online games, but I made money by selling advertising. Today the concept of free online gaming is wildly popular, and thousands of sites offer it.”
Burst bubble
Two years later, investors enabled phatgames.com to expand and become phatstart.com, a company that designs teen-oriented Web sites and media products. When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, however, Cathers' advertisers went out of business, and he says that now phatstart.com is a “shell corporation. It still exists, but nobody is running it because I had a split with my partner during the dot-com crash.” Unfortunately, he says, when many dot-coms worldwide went belly-up three years ago, a domino effect took down most of the industry.
“A lot of companies had advertising business models,” he explains. “Basically, they sold advertising on their Web sites to other Web sites and businesses. A lot of the companies that bought advertising were dot-coms. When one of the dot-coms died, then it couldn't pay its advertising fees to the other sites, which had to cut marketing expenses because they were getting less and less money. In a nasty chain reaction, dot-coms had fewer dot-com clients. As a company died, it hurt on average 40 companies, because each had numerous service providers.”
Undeterred, his next venture was a radio show in 2001 called Teen America, which dealt with — you guessed it — all things adolescent. The program was on the verge of getting a midmorning slot at CBS Detroit when a major investor died in an automobile accident and it lost its funding. “Raising capital is one of the most daunting challenges for teenage entrepreneurs,” says Cathers. But he learned something researching his next project, a book on companies that weathered the dot-com crash. “Of all the teenage entrepreneurs I interviewed, none of them raised capital,” he says. These frugal, savvy kids bootstrapped their businesses — started their companies without outside help — and today they are thriving.
Indeed, Cathers followed this model to finance his book Conversations with Teen Entrepreneurs: Success Secrets of the Younger Generation (iUniverse, 2003), doing his best to hold down costs. He “hired” an editor who was willing to work for free — his mother. “My father added a lot to the book as well,” he says. Then he found an independent publisher. Now he can add another item to his résumé: author. “Writing has always been a passion of mine,” he says, although he never intended to write a book until this year.
He acknowledges that he is a type-A personality, and it's apparent as soon he speaks. He talks a mile a minute, and says he types almost as fast. “My mind is always rushing from place to place,” he says.
So where does this entrepreneur-consultant-author-student-teacher see himself in 10 years? “I honestly can't tell you,” he says. “If you told me when I was running my Internet companies that I would own and host a radio show, I never would have believed you. Same with writing a book. But hopefully I'll be in the field of venture capital, or maybe a high-powered consultant or executive in the media business.”
Right now, however, he is concentrating on schoolwork. “My parents are always telling me to put as much effort in school as in my businesses,” he says with a laugh. “They always remind me of my main occupation: student.”
12
December 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations