Since it was first packaged with Microsoft Office in 1990, PowerPoint presentations have been mostly a passive experience. The speaker would churn through his or her charts, graphs and bullet points and the audience would listen, take notes and maybe ask a question or two at the end.
But thanks to Youngstown-based Turning Technologies, the audience finally gets to interact with the presentation, answer questions the speaker poses during the talk and — as any instructor knows — retain a lot more information than if they were just watching.
Turning Technologies' TurningPoint hardware connects to a PC and its software is preconfigured to meld with Microsoft's market-dominate PowerPoint. Up to 1,000 credit card-sized wireless keypads can be distributed to the audience so they can simultaneously interact with the presentation by pointing and clicking.
Although certainly more fun for the audience, the biggest selling point for the presenter or instructor is that he or she will know who's not paying attention because the software instantly records and measures individual responses.
For Turning Technologies, this simple idea has translated into a sales growth of 18,439 percent in 2006 and employment growth of 1,440 percent to more than 120 employees.
"We don't see the growth slowing at all," says Mike Broderick, CEO and co-founder of Turning Technologies. "We're just scratching the surface."
Broderick and partners Mike Crosby and Don Arthurs, all from the Youngstown-Warren area, founded the company shortly after the post-9/11 recession dried up business in their previous company, which relied on corporate travel and off-site training. The team funded the startup using their own money — Broderick even took out a second mortgage on his home and maxed out his credit cards. Today, the company is backed by Talisman Capital Partners, a $100 million Columbus-based private equity firm, and expects to post more than $30 million in sales this year.
"We're still a small company," says Broderick, whose company is divided into four divisions: K-12 Education, Higher Education, Corporate and International. "But we're rapidly moving into the middle market."
Audience-response systems had been around for decades before Turning Technologies launched its first system, but they were often too complicated and expensive for universities and school systems — as much as $40,000 for one classroom unit. Today, a Turning Technologies' system, which requires no technical expertise, costs less than $1,000 for one classroom.
"The vision was that the technology had advanced to the point where we could build something from scratch," Broderick says. "And that we could do it much more affordably for a much larger market."
In the company's early days, with no customers lined up, the founders searched public federal communications records to find the current users of audience-response systems and configured Turning Technologies' software to work with the current hardware on the market.
"We went out to those users and said, ‘We know your software is difficult to use — how would you like to be able to use your current hardware with PowerPoint?'" Broderick says. "We sold 20 percent of the people, who had never seen our product, over the course of a year."
For its hardware, Turning Technologies' turned to offshore manufacturers in South Korea and then Thailand to reduce the labor-intensive costs of electronics production. In just the last three years, the company has built more than 1.5 million systems, with an additional 750,000 produced this year, at the fraction of the cost of making them domestically.
By 2003, Turning Technologies had sold systems to 10 large universities, but the real turning point for the company came at a Pittsburgh trade show in the fall of that year where Broderick met an executive from publisher Thomson Learning (now Cengage Learning), which was looking to expand its product offerings with an audience-response system.
A month later, Turning Technologies landed a partnership agreement with Thomson that had 400 of its sales representatives helping sell the systems nationwide.
Landing that major customer, which controls nearly 25 percent of the higher-education publishing market, opened Turning Technologies up to exponential growth. Locally, its systems are in most public school districts in Northeast Ohio and such regional universities as Case Western Reserve, Cleveland State, Kent State, Akron and Youngstown, in addition to more than 800 higher-education institutions nationwide.
With 50 million elementary and secondary school students in the United States and another 12 million college students, Broderick believes Turning Technologies is just cracking the education market. The company continues to grow its corporate division and last year was certified to bid for federal government contracts, an approval process which took two years.
"Our corporate [division] is growing faster than higher education," Broderick says. "And we see federal, state and local government becoming its own business unit."
Turning Technologies is located in the Youngstown Business Incubator (YBI) and has been there since it launched. The YBI provided Turning Technologies with 28 months of free rent, as well as office furniture and equipment and a deferred fee on its telephone, postage and courier services. All told, the incubator saved Turning Technologies approximately $280,000 for the years until it was able to sign a market-value lease for space and services.
"It was the single best business plan I had seen," says James Cossler, director and self-proclaimed "chief evangelist" of the incubator. "It's proven to be true."
Next year, Turning Technologies will move to the Taft Technology Center, a 30,000-square-foot, $6 million high-tech office complex currently under construction, adjacent to the incubator in downtown Youngstown.
Today, the company's major issue is managing rapid international growth. Turning Technologies' systems are sold in 83 countries, with more countries in South America and Southeast Asia in the works.
"This year, international business is going to be about 20 percent of our sales," Broderick says. "We believe over the next five years we can raise that to more than 50 percent, while increasing our domestic business substantially."