Business

Published Monday, December 17, 2001

Blast from the past

A look at last year's winners

BY JOHN DORSCHNER

jdorschner@herald.com

Win a few, lose a few -- that could be the motto of last year's

winners of The Herald's Business Plan Challenge.

Last year's No. 3 is still chugging along. Paul McKain, a

Sunrise firefighter, keeps plugging away with Play Safe

Systems, which senses pressure flowing through pool

pumps. If there is a major change -- such as a child blocking

the drain -- the device shuts the pump off. That could save

lives, such as that of a 12-year-old Kendall boy who became

stuck to a drain in a Bahamian pool and drowned two years

ago.

McKain knew he had a good concept, but he didn't have the

business experience to promote it. Since the contest last

year, he says, he has found investors ``who really know how

to develop this thing. . . . They have the expertise I don't,''

says McKain.

Maria Perez, speaking for the investors, say they don't want

to identify themselves at the moment or say how much

they've invested. The ``new, improved'' product had a ``great

rollout'' at a trade show in Phoenix last month, Perez says,

and now has its own website, www.playsafesystems.com.

Last year's No. 2 and No. 5 winners -- a husband and wife

team who run ImagExpress in West Dade -- report mixed

results with their ideas.

Richard O'Brien's PDF Law was intended to help the legal

profession move from paper to digital. His second-place

finish, he says, was ``an affirmation of good writing skills,

but it generated practically zero interest.''

Since O'Brien came up with his idea a year ago, Adobe

Acrobat, leaders in PDF (portable document format), have

been moving actively into the legal field, offering features that

promote direct e-filing from law office to courthouse, although

Adobe doesn't yet provide the ``seamless integration'' of

exhibits and other documents that O'Brien envisioned.

His wife, Barbara B. Thomas, reports better luck with a

version of her idea for BusinessCardCD.com.

Her original idea was to sell miniature compact discs that

would be stuffed with information, graphics and charts and

written documents, that salesmen and executives could give

out as high-tech business cards.

Caught in the tech implosion last year, Thomas wasn't able

to generate any venture capital. Still, she has gone ahead,

finding there was more interest in the full-sized CDs for a

variety of uses.

She has been using in-house duplicating equipment to make

copies of CDs for customers and has gotten into the

business of silk-screening CDs. One use: Putting a

company's logo on CD-Rs, so that later, when the company

makes a CD to send out to customers with visuals or

documents recorded on it, the logo is already on the surface

of the disk.

This summer, her multimedia production department did a

test project for Dole Fresh Flowers, producing a CD with an

eight-minute video and an interactive presentation about the

company.

Altogether, says Thomas, the CD business has accounted

for about $100,000 in sales.

Not so fortunate, apparently, were last year's winners -- Tony and Alex Muñoz-Suárez, who were developing FlowerGarage.com, intending to link flower growers around the world with retailers.

They had a lot going for them. Alex had been a Latin

American financial expert with J.P. Morgan. Brother Tony

knew all about flowers as owner of Heaven Scent in

Miami-Dade.

After they entered the contest (but before they won), venture

capitalists committed $1.4 million -- a huge sum last fall

considering that many dot.coms were already collapsing.

Marketing experts told them FlowerGarage was a crummy

name. They changed it to Seedra and vowed to manage their

money carefully.

It didn't work out. Seedra.com isn't a functioning site. Nor is

FlowerGarage. The brothers' New York and Miami phone

numbers have been disconnected. A woman at Heaven

Scent says the brothers sold the business and she has no

idea what happened to them.

Much better off is a concept that some of our judges liked,

with reservations. Wind and Rain, Andy Parrish's idea for

constructing affordable housing in poor areas, finished sixth

in the judges' eyes.

It fared much better at the Harvard Business School.

Working with a new partner, Andy Louis-Charles, Wind and

Rain came in first among 300 entries in the school's African

American Student Union Entrepreneurial Ventures

Competition.

Wind and Rain walked away with the $10,000 grand prize --

and is now working with the Knight Foundation and others to

expand their reach in South Florida.