And, now, the winner in the 'cyber savvy' category. ... The envelope, please. ... And, the Academy Award goes to Insight Interactive Group's Lee Mikles, Karen Warth and Michael Russell for succeeding when almost everyone else failed."

If Lee Mikles, EG '90, actually were to receive such an award for the success of his e-business, Insight Interactive Group (IIG), the first thank you on his list would be to the College of Business and Economics, where he is pursuing a master's degree.

IIG, a web design and hosting company, survived and even flourished during the time that other e-commerce businesses were imploding--all because, Mikles says, he did what he was being told by his professors in the graduate business courses he was taking at UD.

"In all of my MBA classes, they were telling us the bottom line is important; it's the only thing that matters. So, I looked at the financials and decided, even though everyone else was doing it, we shouldn't go ahead with a quick-start company," he says.

As a result, according to Mikles, his web-based company quadrupled in size, while thousands were going out of business. All through the industry-wide debacle, he says, his business stayed on an even keel because he stuck to the "fundamentals" he was learning in his MBA courses.

"We decided we were going to make decisions based on the numbers. A company stays in business if cash flow is positive. So, from day one, we focused on that objective," he says.

Mikles and his partners, Russell and Warth, did not go to venture capitalists for start-up money; they went to a bank and got a conventional business loan. They agreed not to take on more opportunities than they could handle and to determine what those opportunities were by how much money was coming in. It was, Mikles says, a tried-and-true concept completely discarded by many new, web-based companies rushing to corner the market in whatever product or service they were offering, issue stock that would skyrocket and allow the owners to retire in five years.

With its solid approach to business, IIG, an interactive marketing company, at [http://www.insight-interactive.com/], went from eight employees to 30 while others were laying people off or filing for bankruptcy.

Mikles' background was not rooted in the business world. He earned his undergraduate degree from UD in electrical engineering and went to work for the international instrument company Leeds & Northrup as a sales engineer, before moving to a technology company as a product management consultant.

After he and his wife, Kathy, had their first child, Heather, in 1996, Mikles says he decided it was time to stop traveling, so he went to work for GDA Communications, a health-care advertising company in Wilmington, Del. "They brought me in to make the digital group self-sufficient, and that really helped us when GDA got caught up " in the AstraZeneca merger" and lost its mainstay client, Zeneca Pharmaceuticals, Mikles says. The only thing that remained intact was his group, the digital division of the company.

During the time GDA was having problems, doctors came to the conclusion that Mikles' daughter, who had been born with a kidney disorder, needed a kidney transplant. Since his wife's blood type was different from Heather's, it was Mikles who became the donor.

He gave his daughter one of his kidneys in August 1999 and opened Insight Interactive in October. He had little choice in either instance since he learned, in October, that GDA was close to going out of business.

Heather recovered nicely, and Mikles and his partners did, too. IIG, now 2 years old, has been a big hit.

The web design company's clients include DuPont, Johnson and Johnson, AIG and Comedy Central. "We stayed with the 'blue chip' clients, the clients that have a name to uphold," Mikles says. "Branding is important to them, so they saw the value in our approach to interactive branding."

He says the company doesn't so much design web sites as "provide solutions" to its clients' marketing problems. If a company is having trouble marketing its product, IIG finds a way to use the web to turn that around. Of course, "Building a strategy means doing more than designing a web site or placing banner ads," Mikles says. "It means coming up with creative ways to get that brand to the public, such as using web kiosks in buildings and CD-ROMs."

Part of IIG's success comes from the philosophy that underlies the way the partners do business.

Before coming up with a concept, they research the company's customers, competitors and image. "Know your audience and appeal to them on their level, in the way they most like to receive information," Mikles says. That applies both to IIG's customers and to their customers' customers.

Mikles says the company's philosophy is based on six principals: engage, respect, target, communicate, synchronize and quantify. He explains that engaging an audience is recognizing that the medium is truly interactive--two-way--and playing to that; respect means respecting a customer's time, so that each web site is user friendly; targeting is devising a site that can speak to each segment of the client's target audience; communication, as IIG defines it, is using the medium your target audience responds to best, whether that's text, video, photos or animation. The company synchronizes its web sites to match the client's public image, so that the cyber image looks the same as its public, print, TV and magazine image.

"Quantify" is probably the most important of the six commandments, Mikles says. It means IIG researches how well the site is being received. "The Internet is the most accountable medium out there. We can track each click stream, where the customer went initially, where they went once they got to the site and how long they stayed on each page," he says.

Mikles says he developed his formula for success by going to class and then turning the lessons he was learning into everyday reality. "Today, things are going better than planned because our decisions have been based on sound fundamentals," he says. *

And, now, the winner in the 'cyber savvy' category. ... The envelope, please. ... And, the Academy Award goes to Insight Interactive Group's Lee Mikles, Karen Warth and Michael Russell for succeeding when almost everyone else failed."

If Lee Mikles, EG '90, actually were to receive such an award for the success of his e-business, Insight Interactive Group (IIG), the first thank you on his list would be to the College of Business and Economics, where he is pursuing a master's degree.

IIG, a web design and hosting company, survived and even flourished during the time that other e-commerce businesses were imploding--all because, Mikles says, he did what he was being told by his professors in the graduate business courses he was taking at UD.

"In all of my MBA classes, they were telling us the bottom line is important; it's the only thing that matters. So, I looked at the financials and decided, even though everyone else was doing it, we shouldn't go ahead with a quick-start company," he says.

As a result, according to Mikles, his web-based company quadrupled in size, while thousands were going out of business. All through the industry-wide debacle, he says, his business stayed on an even keel because he stuck to the "fundamentals" he was learning in his MBA courses.

"We decided we were going to make decisions based on the numbers. A company stays in business if cash flow is positive. So, from day one, we focused on that objective," he says.

Mikles and his partners, Russell and Warth, did not go to venture capitalists for start-up money; they went to a bank and got a conventional business loan. They agreed not to take on more opportunities than they could handle and to determine what those opportunities were by how much money was coming in. It was, Mikles says, a tried-and-true concept completely discarded by many new, web-based companies rushing to corner the market in whatever product or service they were offering, issue stock that would skyrocket and allow the owners to retire in five years.

With its solid approach to business, IIG, an interactive marketing company, at [http://www.insight-interactive.com/], went from eight employees to 30 while others were laying people off or filing for bankruptcy.

Mikles' background was not rooted in the business world. He earned his undergraduate degree from UD in electrical engineering and went to work for the international instrument company Leeds & Northrup as a sales engineer, before moving to a technology company as a product management consultant.

After he and his wife, Kathy, had their first child, Heather, in 1996, Mikles says he decided it was time to stop traveling, so he went to work for GDA Communications, a health-care advertising company in Wilmington, Del. "They brought me in to make the digital group self-sufficient, and that really helped us when GDA got caught up in the AstraZeneca merger" and lost its mainstay client, Zeneca Pharmaceuticals, Mikles says. The only thing that remained intact was his group, the digital division of the company.

During the time GDA was having problems, doctors came to the conclusion that Mikles' daughter, who had been born with a kidney disorder, needed a kidney transplant. Since his wife's blood type was different from Heather's, it was Mikles who became the donor.

He gave his daughter one of his kidneys in August 1999 and opened Insight Interactive in October. He had little choice in either instance since he learned, in October, that GDA was close to going out of business.

Heather recovered nicely, and Mikles and his partners did, too. IIG, now 2 years old, has been a big hit.

The web design company's clients include DuPont, Johnson and Johnson, AIG and Comedy Central. "We stayed with the 'blue chip' clients, the clients that have a name to uphold," Mikles says. "Branding is important to them, so they saw the value in our approach to interactive branding."

He says the company doesn't so much design web sites as "provide solutions" to its clients' marketing problems. If a company is having trouble marketing its product, IIG finds a way to use the web to turn that around. Of course, "Building a strategy means doing more than designing a web site or placing banner ads," Mikles says. "It means coming up with creative ways to get that brand to the public, such as using web kiosks in buildings and CD-ROMs."

Part of IIG's success comes from the philosophy that underlies the way the partners do business.

Before coming up with a concept, they research the company's customers, competitors and image. "Know your audience and appeal to them on their level, in the way they most like to receive information," Mikles says. That applies both to IIG's customers and to their customers' customers.

Mikles says the company's philosophy is based on six principals: engage, respect, target, communicate, synchronize and quantify. He explains that engaging an audience is recognizing that the medium is truly interactive--two-way--and playing to that; respect means respecting a customer's time, so that each web site is user friendly; targeting is devising a site that can speak to each segment of the client's target audience; communication, as IIG defines it, is using the medium your target audience responds to best, whether that's text, video, photos or animation. The company synchronizes its web sites to match the client's public image, so that the cyber image looks the same as its public, print, TV and magazine image.

"Quantify" is probably the most important of the six commandments, Mikles says. It means IIG researches how well the site is being received. "The Internet is the most accountable medium out there. We can track each click stream, where the customer went initially, where they went once they got to the site and how long they stayed on each page," he says.

Mikles says he developed his formula for success by going to class and then turning the lessons he was learning into everyday reality. "Today, things are going better than planned because our decisions have been based on sound fundamentals," he says.