Dot.cash still available for those with good ideas

January 8, 2001, The Detroit Free Press

By Mike Wendland

AS DOT-COM companies continue to bomb and sales figures slow for personal computers, a Royal Oak company has picked up a new round of venture capital funding that goes against prevailing tech wisdom.

It's no secret that venture capital has all but dried up for anything connected with the Internet and technology.

But Mark Bennett, chief executive officer of the MIG, says his MIG e-marketing firm just raised $2 million from investors, led by Birmingham's M-Group. It's the third wave of funding, bringing the total investment over the past two years to $5.3 million.

"Amidst the apocalypse, we've emerged," says the 37-year-old Bennett. "The secret is in using the Internet for what it is, simply a tool, not an end-all, be-all."

Instead of tapping into the global reach of the World Wide Web, his company has drilled down to the neighborhood level, finding a way for small merchants to develop strong e-mail relationships with local customers.

"Don't call us a dot-com or an Internet company," says Bennett, from the Fourth and Washington headquarters of his 42-employee business. "We're a communications company. It's just that we use the Internet to help retailers communicate."

The company has about 300 customers so far. Most are from southeastern Michigan, though word of the service is spreading and new accounts are coming from across the Midwest.

The service Bennett provides begins with a box that merchants display at their checkout counters. Customers who want to be apprised of specials and merchant activities can fill out a form with their names and e-mail addresses.

Bennett's company keeps the database updated and creates an e-mail with a professional look.

Then, once a month, the company e-mails customers with whatever information the merchant wants sent out. ShopsForMe charges $159 a month for up to 1,000 e-mails, which works out to not quite 16 cents a message.

Customer databases are kept confidential. They are the property of the merchant, Bennett says, and closely guarded. Pizza shops, boutiques, restaurants, video rental stores and even muffler shops are among his clients.

"It's been going very well for us," says Annie Gruber, owner of the Green Bee, a candle and natural-products store in Royal Oak that has amassed an e-mailing list of 400 customers and uses ShopsForMe to communicate with them. "We get people in all the time who say they've received our e-mail and are asking about some special we mentioned."

Bennett said he expects his company to turn a profit by the end of the year.

Bennett is a Detroit-area native, married and the father of two. He used to run a company called Toxicheck, which he sold in the mid-1990s. It today does 70 percent of all the environmental reports ordered by real estate companies nationwide, he says.

After that, he ran a Royal Oak company called the Entrepreneur's Sandbox, which meant to be an incubator for small start-ups. It was while there that he got the idea of using e-mail to build business, using the three Hallmark card shops his family runs around metro Detroit as an experiment.

The idea caught the attention of Josh Mondry, vice president of M-Group, the private investment firm that has led the funding efforts for Bennett's company. "What makes this so unique is it focuses on the local merchants and their customers in a highly personal, cost-effective way," says Mondry.

Contact MIKE WENDLAND at mwendland@freepress.com. You can also hear him on Detroit radio stations WXYT and WWJ.

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