Maddux Report - Tampa Bay's Business, Finance and Development Magazine

Tales From a Video Storyteller
by David J. Wilson

Tampa's BVP Inc. applies technology
to the ancient art of corporate
communications.


Mark Wiskup, president at Tampa-based BVP Inc., has taken the slow, but sure approach to creating the region's largest multimedia communications firm. Photo:Alex McKnight

Sitting cramped in an old ore bucket as it creaked its way down to a gold mine 945 feet below the surface of the Rocky Mountains, Mark Wiskup was largely on the listening end of a conversation that changed his life. In the bucket with him was the owner of the Idaho Springs mine, who "had plenty of time to talk, since he wasn't scared, and I was," Wiskup recalls.

The mine owner wanted a video tape of the story that Wiskup, a business reporter for a Denver television station, was doing on the mine. Wiskup guessed at the cost, but declined an offer to do the work, explaining that as a working journalist, he couldn't freelance for someone who was the subject of a story.

"But that planted a seed in my mind," Wiskup says. "I started to do some homework and [doing] as much research as we could do in pre-Internet days. I just decided to quit one day."

He could do video productions, Wiskup decided, starting on a long path that began with the creation of Business Video Productions in Denver in 1985. "I was in TV for eight years, broadcasting for 11. I was working with entrepreneurs on a weekly basis and I liked their jobs better than mine - and I had a great job. I loved being a reporter, and I loved telling stories with pictures. I wanted to do that for businesses and corporations."

Sixteen years later, Wiskup relishes his role as president of BVP (www.bvponline.com), Tampa's largest video production company, a multimedia communications firm that reached $3.7 million in sales last year. The 18-person firm is reaching toward $4.5 million in revenue this year. "We just had our best first quarter in the history of the company," he says, "and the second quarter is looking very good." Wiskup is nevertheless somewhat philosophical about the bottom line.

"You want to say, 'I've got 50 employees and I'm doing $10 million in sales.' But I'd rather have my clients say they're happy with what I do, and my employees say they like to work here." The urge to boast about gross sales and employee numbers as they get into double digits is natural for an entrepreneur, Wiskup says, "but I've worked hard at not feeling that that was important."

He also remembers some earlier lessons that helped shape his attitudes. Not long after he resigned from the TV station, his wife announced her first pregnancy, providing an unexpected incentive to hustle. With business going well, a former television news colleague joined him. The company was pulling in about $300,000 then, and Wiskup was subcontracting most of the editing and filming work. (The partner split off in 1996 to run his own business in Denver, which "is doing very well," Wiskup says. "We talk regularly.")

But everything still wasn't right. "I wanted to live in a warmer climate. I grew up in Los Angeles, and Tampa seemed to be perfect for me, a city that was very livable, had a good business base, and one with a reputation of being good for newcomers. I looked at Dallas, Atlanta, Orlando. Then, like many entrepreneurs do, I said, 'OK, enough examination. I'm just going to go.'"

And so he did, working out of a 700-square-foot office on North Dale Mabry Highway with no common area air conditioning. "I drove around town with a VCR on one arm and a bag of tapes on the other. I knocked on doors, saying, 'I can produce a great video that will help your company. Will you give me a chance?'"

Enough did that he felt comfortable meeting a second challenge from his wife. "Within three months of moving here, my wife said, 'Guess what, honey?' So my 12-year-old is a reminder of how long I've been in Tampa," just as his 16-year-old dates the company.

"Slowly, methodically, I started hiring people. In 1990 we moved into this place [the BVP offices in Westshore] and there were 1,600 square feet, two full-timers and an intern." BVP has grown steadily, but not spectacularly over its history. Wiskup wouldn't have it any other way. "Small businesses have a tough issue. There's tremendous pressure from everyone, your friends, your cohorts, your banker to grow, grow, grow. And many small businesses equate sales growth with quality. And I've tried hard not to [do that]. Quality is quality, regardless of sales growth."

Wiskup wants BVP to be known as a company you can count on. "We want clients who are going to deliver good products or services to their customers on time, and expect us to do the same thing and be compensated for it fairly." It's a deliberate sort of business model that came under tough questioning during the last two years of high-tech rage.

In an atmosphere of daily news stories about dot-com millionaires, "I had to look everyone in the eye here and say, 'We're going to have some growth next year and the year after. But all of you, if you perform well, will have good jobs and good benefits, and a great place to work.' At times I feel like the boring, standby boyfriend. I'm not the great athlete, not the rock singer. I just do a good job and I'm comfortable with that as I'm getting older.

"My goal is that everyone has a good experience at BVP. That means my employees, my customers, my suppliers, and right now, my bank. Over the past few years, advice has been coming fast. 'You should do this, you should do that, you should affiliate with this, with that'... we thought about a lot of stuff, but in the end, we said, 'we will be who we are.'"

BVP has made its mark as a creator of customized, high-impact presentations to help clients increase sales, train and motivate their own employees, and in general improve all aspects of corporate communications. That includes all the high-end video, graphic, animation and Web site technology currently available. Specialties include product launches, sales meetings, award banquets and the company's "video wall," is a 10-foot-by-14-foot "wall" which, if you look closely, is made up of 16 flatscreen computer-controlled monitors. It can be one large image or 16 separate images.

The client list that shows the diversity that Wiskup credits for keeping the company moving forward even in an economic slowdown includes PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Ernst & Young, Grant-Thornton, IBM-Tampa, AAA Auto Club South, Nokia, Time Warner Communications and Melting Pot Restaurants Inc. (Maddux Report, April 2001).

The company's work is spread around the country, especially up and down the east coast. "We can do everything that's needed with two face-to-face meetings," Wiskup says. Recently that included a CD-ROM for a Boston firm, and a large New York City project for Arthur Andersen that required more than 10 BVP employees in New York along with three equipment trucks.

A long, winding trail
Wiskup's trek along the entrepreneurial path has been "an education," he says, "but every time you make a transition in life, you're going to be in for some rough sledding ... Your first week at college ... your first job. Yes, going from being 100 percent on your own, writing your own checks, delivering your own tapes, keeping the editing equipment, as I used to do, in the basement of my house and the sound down low while the baby slept - that was the model I was used to."

As the company grew, "I realized that to grow, I needed to professionally go to college, take on new challenges, bear some of the pain that was unpleasant. The first time you write the insurance check for you and your employee ... it's a strange feeling. I would say to anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur: Get over it. You have to invest in your business if you want to achieve your goals. My job is different than it was 16 years ago. I'm not an artisan any more. Now I'm in a class with a lot of people smarter than I am. Better at multimedia, better at video production, and I get to be their coach.

"If I hadn't gone through the pain of learning how to read a balance sheet, a profit-and-loss statement, learning the difference between gross margin and profit, then I would not be able to be the coach I am today."

Part of that function is keeping up with technology. "I would argue that we are the same company that we were 16 years ago, that we tell stories with words and pictures. The delivery media have changed, and now there are more ways for us to tell stories, so the changes in technology have done nothing but help .... CD-ROMS are part of every computer drive, and DVD is now, so we are starting to deliver on DVD. My advisors are constantly concerned [that we are] going to be outmoded by technology. I say, let's have at it. The technology makes it easier, but someone has to sit down and say, 'What's the story?' Let us help make the story, a skill we're good at."

BVP's five-year plan includes remaining at the leading edge of technological developments, which may mean the merging of existing technologies through the Internet. "We're going to [have] one technology at some point in time," Wiskup says. "You'll be able to sit at your computer anywhere in the world and see what's going on at a live meeting that BVP produces, see graphics and video that BVP did. And there'll be a separate Web site about the meeting that BVP will have created, that will be stored, sent out, repackaged and reaccessed."

Revenue growth should bring BVP, in five years, to "between $9 and $10 million. That's not a growth model for New Economy companies. It's almost Victorian. Why do you want growth like that? Well, because I like being in business."

Reflecting on his responsibilities as an entrepreneur, Wiskup notices that "people think an entrepreneur's life is easy because you can do what you want. That's true. The flip side is that you have more heartache and more stress. Once you learn how to manage that, you also have tremendous satisfaction and peace." It is similar, he suggests, to being in your third year of college. "You've got it down. You're getting good grades, and going to class is enjoyable.

"Coming into work is enjoyable for me, every single day. It hasn't always been that way, but I'm getting more out of my career now than I ever have."