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Superachievingstudent.com
SMG sophomore juggles
books and biz
By Brian Fitzgerald
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Ben Cathers (SMG'06) Photo by Kalman Zabarsky | |
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Ben Cathers was the CEO of a dot-com when he was 12 years old. At 17,
he hosted a popular teen radio show. Recently, at the ripe old age of 19,
he wrote a book about teen entrepreneurs.
Is this guy the Doogie
Howser of broadcasting, publishing, and the Web — or what?
Cathers
(SMG'06), a business administration major, is minoring in psychology. He
is also a consultant to start-up companies, a teaching assistant for the
School of Management's freshman business class, and a volunteer at Marsh
Chapel. But first and foremost, Cathers is a busy college student, and he
knows that he may be juggling too many activities, and with final exams in
sight, he's got to buckle down and focus on his 18-credit course
load.
Nonetheless, he is still bursting with ideas. “I loved
working on my book, and I already have an idea for another one: an
autobiography on how I got my business empire started,” he says. “But
right now I'm concentrating on my studies. I'm hoping that during the
holiday break I'll have time to start writing down my ideas and an outline
for my second book.” Have another quadruple-espresso, Ben.
A born
leader, the highly motivated Long Island native is always looking for a
new challenge. Before he was a teenager, he had taught himself HTML,
learned how to design and market Web pages, and started phatgames.com, a
multiplayer gaming site that features backgammon, chess, and role-playing
games. He charged $12 for each advertisement, and the checks started
rolling in.
“Back then, everybody thought I was crazy,” he says.
“When I was 12, to most people the Internet was just something for geeks.
But eventually my family and friends became interested in what I was
doing, especially after I received my first check. At the time,
phatgames.com was one of only a handful of sites offering online games for
free. Most Web sites charged for online games, but I made money by selling
advertising. Today the concept of free online gaming is wildly popular,
and thousands of sites offer it.”
Burst bubble
Two years later, investors enabled
phatgames.com to expand and become phatstart.com, a company that designs
teen-oriented Web sites and media products. When the dot-com bubble burst
in 2000, however, Cathers' advertisers went out of business, and he says
that now phatstart.com is a “shell corporation. It still exists, but
nobody is running it because I had a split with my partner during the
dot-com crash.” Unfortunately, he says, when many dot-coms worldwide went
belly-up three years ago, a domino effect took down most of the
industry.
“A lot of companies had advertising business models,” he
explains. “Basically, they sold advertising on their Web sites to other
Web sites and businesses. A lot of the companies that bought advertising
were dot-coms. When one of the dot-coms died, then it couldn't pay its
advertising fees to the other sites, which had to cut marketing expenses
because they were getting less and less money. In a nasty chain reaction,
dot-coms had fewer dot-com clients. As a company died, it hurt on average
40 companies, because each had numerous service
providers.”
Undeterred, his next venture was a radio show in 2001
called Teen America, which dealt with — you guessed it — all things
adolescent. The program was on the verge of getting a midmorning slot at
CBS Detroit when a major investor died in an automobile accident and it
lost its funding. “Raising capital is one of the most daunting challenges
for teenage entrepreneurs,” says Cathers. But he learned something
researching his next project, a book on companies that weathered the
dot-com crash. “Of all the teenage entrepreneurs I interviewed, none of
them raised capital,” he says. These frugal, savvy kids bootstrapped their
businesses — started their companies without outside help — and today they
are thriving.
Indeed, Cathers followed this model to finance his book
Conversations with Teen Entrepreneurs: Success Secrets of the Younger
Generation (iUniverse, 2003), doing his best to hold down costs. He
“hired” an editor who was willing to work for free — his mother. “My
father added a lot to the book as well,” he says. Then he found an
independent publisher. Now he can add another item to his résumé: author.
“Writing has always been a passion of mine,” he says, although he never
intended to write a book until this year.
He acknowledges that he
is a type-A personality, and it's apparent as soon he speaks. He talks a
mile a minute, and says he types almost as fast. “My mind is always
rushing from place to place,” he says.
So where does this
entrepreneur-consultant-author-student-teacher see himself in 10 years? “I
honestly can't tell you,” he says. “If you told me when I was running my
Internet companies that I would own and host a radio show, I never would
have believed you. Same with writing a book. But hopefully I'll be in the
field of venture capital, or maybe a high-powered consultant or executive
in the media business.”
Right now, however, he is concentrating on
schoolwork. “My parents are always telling me to put as much effort in
school as in my businesses,” he says with a laugh. “They always remind me
of my main occupation: student.”
12 December 2003
Boston
University
Office of University
Relations