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Youth Will Be Paged
As the saying goes, to be alive is great, but to be young is divine.
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Business New Haven
7/3/1995
By: Kevin Wheeler
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The owners of Page Master Paging Products are indeed young, but they are already entrepreneurial veterans. Abel Draper, Isiah Sistrunk, Kris Sistrunk and James Moore, ranging in age from 18 to 21, have been seriously dabbling in money-making deals since they were kids. They started with paper routes, rounded it out with candy sales (refining it until they had distributors at seven schools and Kris alone was making $200 a week as a high school junior) and most recently turned the page by graduating to paging products and services. In the meantime they have also graduated from high school, and Moore has just left to attend college.
Out with the old and in with the new. In came Page Master Paging Products to do serious business while exuding youth, attitude, hip clothes (up-to-the-minute running shoes and loose-fitting jeans) and a modest but functional office with a lived-in feeling. No joke. These guys work night and day, starting in the morning at the orthodox nine or ten and then leaving in the late afternoon to rest up for the less orthodox shift from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. Their workload is so heavy that at times they seem to live at work, to which the Speed Stick deodorant, Monte Carlo cologne and vitamins within arm's reach give testimony.
It all started about three years ago when the group was in high school and pagers were just beginning to take off as a fad; students wanted their own private telephone lines (what could be more embarrassing than having your parents answer your phone?) but they were too expensive for many, about $30 a month, whereas pagers ran only $9.95 a month for 300 or 500 calls and let you be reached anywhere.
According to Kris Sistrunk, “Doctors and lawyers started out using pagers, then drug dealers, then students, and now it's settled down into a communication device.” He says he doubts many of his customers are drug dealers: “Most of our customers can barely pay their bills, and phones are more efficient [to coordinate drug deals].” His customers are businesses, parents buying for their kids, high school and college students and professionals, a/k/a “suits.”
When the fad first took off, Isiah Sistrunk would boast to pager-hungry students that his older brother Kris could get them pagers. So, because entrepreneurism seems to run in the family (Sistrunk pere has always owned and managed his own businesses, including real estate, convenience stores and office-cleaning enterprises), the brothers figured owning their own business was a natural. As Kris says: “We've always had it in us to have our own business. Our dad owned various businesses, and we always went to work with him. We learned by doing.”
So Kris Sistrunk acted on the challenge. He picked up the phone and quickly researched the nuts and bolts of the paging industry, retail, carriers, billing and hookups. Within hours, Kris had found a carrier, Radio Call, that would service his clients without a deposit (typically $500). Carriers transmit the signals to the pagers on individual frequencies.
They quickly learned that there was real money to be made in repairs and programming. A pager is useless until it is put on a carrier's frequency and is given a code to access it. In the terminology of the business, codes are programmed by “repair” companies. Recognizing it would be faster to repair pagers in-house and that they would be one of only three companies in the state to do it, they kept investing all of their money back into the company so that they could buy the necessary equipment. Now they can repair, rehook and fix pagers within 48 hours.
That put Page Master's services in high demand. They bought out another paging company last year, which meant taking on 50 new customers, and have since started doing repairs for other paging companies.
Today they have more work than workers (1,300 customers and seven employees) and are in the approval process for a loan to move to a bigger space on the fourth floor of their downtown New Haven building, make the necessary changes and hire more employees. Last year Page Master generated $65,000 in revenues and, if they continue to play their cards right and handle expansion adroitly, they expect that figure to multiply. In addition to customer growth in Connecticut, Isiah Sistrunk is in Tampa, Fla., the “paging capital of the world,” setting up another paging repair branch to meet the high demands of a market where there are few repair shops to meet demand.
Florida is notorious for its drug traffic, and they may end up with customers who are dealers. This shouldn't be a threat to these entrepreneurs who are well-grounded and remain seriously involved in their faith. They are Jehovah's Witnesses and know one another from Kingdom Hall.
One surprise after another. They defy all the negative myths about young men with no direction, no sense of community, and no ambition. These guys are writing their own ticket because they don't believe in free rides - they believe in free enterprise.
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