Title: "Let's Make A Deal"
Date: 10/4/02
Author: Richard Block, Voice Staff Reporter
Source: Business Section - The Goleta Valley Voice



As a black-bellied cargo plane passes overhead just before touching down at Santa Barbara Municipal Airport, the new administrative headquarters of Bargain Network, Inc. fill with a low rumble.

"If one of those planes goes down, I’m a cooked goose…It’s all over for me," said a smiling Christian Hunter, CEO of Bargain Network.

The new building is just west of the airport, in the old Ericsson building behind Kmart, placing it in the flight path of landing aircraft. Bargain Network’s telemarketing center remains in the old Hollister Avenue facility—in fact, in addition to the new offices, the company plans to expand the Hollister call center into the space next door.

At 18, Hunter got a job as a telemarketer at a "very poorly-run" telemarketing firm. He climbed the managerial ladder there. In 1995, when Hunter was 21, he and a few friends started Bargain Network.

Then, Bargain Network was a telemarketing enterprise, funded by credit cards, in a Figueroa Street attic. Today, according to Hunter and Dennis Cagan, external vice president of business development, it is one of the largest businesses in the county. It operates Bargain.com, a Web site that 25,000 to 30,000 people visit every day.

"Through our Bargain.com service offering, we assist ordinary consumers in getting discounts on things—big-ticket items like cars and TVs and whatnot," said Hunter. "We administer our service offering through the site through a search engine, and live reps that man the phones twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three-hundred-sixty-five days a year."

The company works like this: Advertisements go out over television and in print media. Around 500 operators answer the resulting telephone calls at the Goleta call center—a paperless office, where all business is done via computer. The operators, or telephone sales representatives (TSRs), sell the company’s services by reading from scripts.

When callers subscribe, they are given a second telephone number. Calls to this number are answered by a second group of operators in the same building—member service representatives, or MSRs—with whom customers deal from that point on.

The company just rolled out a new set of services at its Web site on Tuesday. Now, Bargain.com boasts a new user interface and more sophisticated search system.

"About four years ago…it wasn’t possible to shop a hundred places at a time, for a couple of reasons," said Hunter. "Number one: most inventory of major retailers wasn’t digitized. It didn’t exist in databases. And two: most people really didn’t even have Internet access four, five years ago."

Hunter and his associates started the company at the right moment to capitalize on the explosion of Internet access.

"When we started, the Internet was just abstract, and now, we’re one of the busiest sites on the Net," he said. "We were really just in the right place at the right time. We’d love to say that we strategized and planned it out, but we were just the lucky surfer that got the good wave."

Bargain Network avoided being buried under the rubble of the tumbling dot-com industry—its recent expansion is proof of that.

"I think (we’ve put ourselves in a good position) by not taking that boat where everybody jumped on the bandwagon of building in anticipation of demand," said Hunter. "By training yourself to build in response to demand, you just create this whole different set of capabilities where before you raise a hundred million bucks, you already have a business…We don’t build anything without first testing and recognizing that it’s viable."

This strategy has enabled the company to expand from five employees to 500 in seven years—and Bargain Network culls almost all its employees from Goleta and the rest of the South Coast, UCSB in particular.

"We’re certainly one of the, if not the largest employer of non-professional, non-skilled labor" in the Goleta area, said Hunter.

"We are definitely the largest employer of college students in Santa Barbara County besides UCSB and City College," said Cagan.

"And unlike a lot of these businesses, we don’t till local money," said Hunter. "We don’t take money from local people and then give it to another local. We take our money from outside—roughly $50 million a year—all from the outside, and infuse it here, where payroll is our biggest expense."

With the hire of around 150 new employees in the coming month, Bargain Network will have more payroll expenses to handle.

Hunter embraces the expansion challenge, though. "We respect the potential of anyone to come in and make a significant difference," he said. "I fully believe that any one TSR we hire today or tomorrow could be the CEO of this company in a matter of time."