IB graduate profile - Jan-Erik Paul

Graduated from American Community School, UK, in 1991.

"It seems like only a couple of years ago that I woke up one morning and thought to myself "I’m tired of working for someone else." Two weeks later, E-creation was registered with freshly printed business cards, a flashy website and a somewhat dazed MD at the helm. The dot.com boom was in full flow, money did grow on trees and soon everyone would be Internet millionaires.

That was five years ago now and as history has proven, reality has turned out to be very different. Today, E-creation is run from a rather snazzy office in Gerrards Cross, one of the most affluent locations in the UK (apparently Gerrards Cross has more millionaires per square mile than anywhere else in the UK – so we hope that the good fortune will rub off on us). In the boardroom, we are lucky enough to have several business awards including Thames Valley Business of the Year 2000 (the Thames Valley is the equivalent of the US Silicon Valley). From my seat, I can see down the whole of the high street and watch as people go about their business – a fun distraction. It’s all very different from my IB days. The pressures are similar but now the stakes are higher – failure would extend beyond my personal sphere and involves the lives of those around me in a very direct way.

A typical day for me involves getting up rather too late after a night of networking and gulping down a smoothie whilst trying to brush my teeth before throwing myself into a car for a quick five minute journey through countryside to arrive at the office before everyone else. After running E-creation from my home in Gerrards Cross for two years, this separation of work and personal space is a pleasure. I usually spend my first hour responding to emails. I make my email address available to anyone who visits our website and encourage everyone to get in contact. I receive emails from students looking for work, designers looking for feedback on their work, and of course, potential customers wanting to know more about E-creation.

As a policy, we try to respond to any website inquiry within three minutes of receipt and often we are lucky enough to catch the potential customer whilst he/she is still on our site. This means we can personally guide the person through our site over the phone and our rapid, interactive response is regularly quoted as the reason E-creation has been chosen as a supplier.

What strikes me each and every day is how rapidly companies need to be able to shift the direction of their businesses, being able to turn on the top of a wave to find another growing wave. E-creation has been many different things – a web design agency during the dot.com boom, a multimedia company, and up until recently, an e-learning product development company. E-creation is once again shifting direction toward developing its PDA presentations division. As PDAs have become cheaper, faster, and more colourful, their use as a presentation tool appears to have been overlooked. Today, it is possible for a CEO or sales person to carry around a four-ounce computer with full colour screen which can be used to play video-based customer testimonials, product requirements analysis tools, and detailed, interactive 3D models of products.

Within the space of six weeks, E-creation will have taken a fledgling idea through to a branded product concept with a marketing plan and product example (and hopefully a few clients!). It is rumoured that at the moment where one person has a truly innovative idea, a hundred others will have the same idea around the world – so getting to market first is essential to truly win on a global scale.

As with most businesses, doing business face to face is essential. I try to attend at least one networking evening every week. Networking introduces "new blood" into the business pipeline in a way that advertising, telesales, and marketing simply cannot do. As a service-based organisation, our customers are not looking for a product but are looking for "their type of people" who will deliver results. Networking is a rapid way for people to make these connections and having done the IB has undoubtedly influenced the way in which I run my business. E-creation does business internationally and like at school, where I graduated in a class with over 40 nationalities, the ability to understand other cultures is essential. As business becomes more and more global this ability to "empathise" must be conducted across a variety of media – television, the Internet, literature and face to face."

Jan-Erik Paul is CEO of E-creation. E-creation is a ‘digital design agency’ working with the likes of 3Com, BP, Marriott Hotels and Royal Bank of Scotland to deliver CD-ROM, e-marketing and Internet based communications and sales campaigns.

For more, visit www.e-creation.co.uk or visit Jan-Erik’s personal website www.janerikpaul.com where he can be contacted direct.