Sun., July 19, 1998

Young wheeler-dealer spins own web in business world

Edward J. Crowder

NORTH HAVEN - Seventeen-year-old Kevin Colleran bristles at the inevitable "Bill Gates Jr." comparison.

The Hopkins High School senior and budding Internet marketing tycoon may have an instinctive knack for making a buck, but any similarity ends there.

His athletic 6-foot-plus stature and blonde-red hair put plenty of physical distance between Colleran and Microsoft's Nerd King.

"I'm not a computer geek," insists Colleran, who has been an avowed entrepreneur since he opened his first lemonade stand at age 5.

"The only reason I got into computers at all is that it was a medium to go into business."

Still a year shy of a high school diploma, Colleran runs his own Internet consulting and marketing company.

He also holds positions at a handful of other firms and works a day each week at the New York Stock Exchange, where he is one of the youngest faces on the trading floor.

"My mind is set on selling, marketing and dealing with people," said Colleran, enjoying a day off recently in the sunporch at his parents' North Haven home.

Set selling, marketing and dealing aside and Colleran seems like a pretty typical teen-ager.

He plays varsity soccer and enjoys spending weekends - during which he doesn't work - with his friends.

"I work the same hours as most people my age. I just spend them very differently," he said.

And how. Colleran reluctantly estimates during the summer he's raking in $1,000 a week and building a pretty impressive resume, to boot.

The center of his mini-empire is Cyber Marketing Solutions International, the firm Colleran founded in 1994 (at age 13) to sell baseball cards over the Internet.

When Colleran realized the powerful marketing tool he'd plugged into, he widened his scope.

In its current incarnation, CMS is the equivalent of a building contractor for companies that want to establish a marketing presence on-line.

Colleran doesn't do the nitty-gritty computer work himself.

Rather, he pulls together a team of subcontractors - Web designers, marketers and others - to set up Web pages and establish links with other sites. He's paid for the entire job, distributes the money to his subcontractors, and takes whatever is left over.

For Colleran, though, CMS is just the tip of the iceberg.

"I'm always the one who wants to be where the action is happening. That's why I like the Internet," he said.

This summer, he's getting a taste of some real action - Wall Street- style.

During a class trip to the New York Stock Exchange last year, he struck up a friendship with an executive at the New York-based Rob Peck McCooey Specialist firm, which helps companies orchestrate public stock offerings.

After some negotiation, they struck a deal: Colleran would offer his Internet consulting services in return for an internship on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Just about every Thursday this summer, he hops aboard the 6:30 a.m. train to New York and spends his day in the hub of American capitalism.

He's unsure if he's the youngest person there, but he's got to be close. No one younger than 16 - under any circumstances - is allowed on the trading floor, including those on tours.

His third major commitment - his two-page resume lists a half-dozen lesser ones - is his job at Neato LLC, an East Haven-based firm that sells kits that can apply customized labels on compact disks.

Neato was seeking a marketing executive, and owner Peter Tracy placed a help-wanted advertisement in a local newspaper. It caught Kevin's eye.

As Tracy remembers it:

"He answered the ad, and I said, ‘Excuse me. Aren't you still in high school?' He came back and said, ‘Oh, yeah, but I'm the best in the world.' "

Impressed with his skill and confidence, Tracy ended up hiring Colleran, not for the marketing position, but as director of special projects - a position he created specifically for his young protege.

The position is sort of a catchall. Tracy thought Colleran would be the right person to generate new contracts with small recording studios and record labels. That's a largely untapped market for Neato, which mostly sells to software programmers.

Colleran also assists with on-line marketing, represents the company at trade shows and helps out in other capacities, too. Tracy quickly learned not to underestimate the 17-year-old's inborn knack for wheeling and dealing.

"He's a very talented kid. The second day he was in here, I put him on the phone to make a deal with a software company. He spent the day negotiating back and forth," he said.

By the end of the day, he had clinched, Tracy said.

Colleran admits he's had help along the way.

In one of his early attempts at entrepreneurship, back when he was 11 years old, he opened a sports card shop in a New Haven building owned by his father, an attorney.

It seemed like a good deal. Colleran estimates he pulled in $400 that year from his business - small potatoes, but pretty good for a kid.

What he didn't realize was that his father was tapping his own wallet to pay taxes, fees and other expenses that his son had no idea existed.

"He ended up spending so much time and money digging me out of a company that had no assets," a wiser Colleran recalled.

In spite of his prodigal entry into the business world, Colleran insists he's not so different from other kids.

"Everyone's saying, ‘Have a childhood! Have a childhood!' It's not like that. I enjoy it," he said.

Still, his agility in maneuvering in a world so completely dominated by his seniors leaves others bewildered.

Colleran said his mother approached him recently and asked how he had learned to run a business, to negotiate and to make things happen as if by pure instinct.

"I guess it just comes naturally to me," he said.

In spite of tempting offers for jobs right out of high school, Colleran said he plans to continue on to college, where he'll shoot for a degree either in business or liberal arts.

Cyber Marketing Solutions can be found on the World Wide Web at www.cmsinternet.com