SMALL BUSINESS : Pain Proves to Be Her Gain in Video Sales Market : Entrepreneurship: A chance meeting with a back specialist boosted this Sherman Oaks resident’s home-based operation.
Back pains make Cynthyny Lebo feel good. Her small 5-year-old company, New Life Options, has grown steadily, primarily from sales of her videotapes to treat backaches.
Lebo, 40, runs what is primarily a one-person business out of her apartment in Sherman Oaks. She sells a couple dozen self-help books and audio- and videotapes--including some that teach children how to make puppets or memorize multiplication tables. But her best sellers are five videotapes that teach a turn-of-the-century back therapy program developed in Europe called the Mensendieck system.
The tapes do not exhort the Jane Fonda “go for the burn” exercises that she once stressed in videotapes. Instead, Karen Perlroth, the Mensendieck therapist featured in the tapes, argues that the correct position of the spine is crucial to preventing a back injury and relieving pain. The tapes demonstrate stomach exercises and the correct postures for standing, sitting, jogging and even sleeping.
In 1989, Lebo started to distribute the back tapes and she can remember the arduous beginning, sometimes selling just one tape a month. But the back tapes now account for 65% of her business. Lebo ships more than 400 back videotapes a month, and total revenue for her company reached $120,000 last year, she said.
Two years ago, the back exercise tapes took off when Lebo got them listed in an airline catalogue. Mary Anne Bautista, head of direct marketing for SyberVision Systems, a San Francisco company that provides catalogues that are carried on most domestic airlines, said Perlroth’s tapes have been strong sellers.
Lebo also got a distributor to wholesale the back tapes to Longs drugstores. And recently, Lebo persuaded the Barnes & Noble Direct catalogue, operated by the Rockleigh, N.J., book retailer, to carry the back tapes.
“It fits in with our lines of self-help books and videos and I expect it to sell,” said Lea Robinson, product development manager at Barnes & Noble.
Despite her progress, Lebo still runs her operation out of her apartment, relying on two computers, one fax machine, four telephone lines, occasional part-time helpers and a lot of personal energy.
Lebo started her business with the idea that a wealth of interesting books and tapes already produced by small companies was ignored by large publishers and marketers. And she planned to use the know-how she’d acquired from telemarketing jobs selling rock videos in the music business.
Her first products were a handful of audiotapes--one on speed reading and another on how to run a business out of your home. She began selling them to people she’d met in the telemarketing business and to friends. In her first year she did $24,000 in sales.
Then in October, 1988, Lebo met Perlroth at the Frankfurt Bookfair, the publishing world’s foremost event. Perlroth, who studied the Mensendieck treatments in Europe and has a therapy practice in California, had put together a videotape, but it wasn’t selling.
When Lebo discovered Perlroth’s video, she recognized that it had potential. Perlroth, Lebo said, “was not Jane Fonda; she didn’t know the video market, but she had good information. I figured that if I picked something perennial like that, maybe I would not get rich, but I would survive.” Perlroth agreed to let Lebo repackage her first video and to add four more back therapy tapes.
For all its obscurity, the Mensendieck exercise system has developed a steady stream of followers, mainly in the Palo Alto area where Perlroth has her private practice.
Paul Cook, chairman of Raychem Corp., a Menlo Park electronic components firm, remembers how a back operation five years ago left him with two fewer disks in his spine and no therapy prescribed to alleviate the pain. He went to Perlroth for treatment.
“I have continued with the tapes for two years. It’s amazing. The exercises are very simple and do strengthen the back muscles, and the proper posture positions are really not hard to remember,” he said.
Bruce Adornato, a professor of neurology at Stanford University Medical Center, wholeheartedly recommends the Mensendieck tapes to patients who suffer from back pain.
“So much money is spent on chiropractic manipulations and conventional physical therapy that I like to mention the system to patients because it promotes an active strengthening of muscles. It is something the patients can do for themselves.”
While the tapes can be found at most Los Angeles County libraries, Lebo doesn’t sell them through conventional video stores or through physical therapy offices.
“I watch a lot of exercise tapes, but I have never heard of Karen Perlroth,” said physical therapist Bonnie Cardenas, who owns Cardenas & Associates in Studio City. “If they prove valuable, why not contact physical therapists? We would be a great selling tool.”
Lebo recognizes the many possible markets for her tapes. The problem?
“Each of these markets is different and requires money and regular contacts. I don’t have a budget for that. Maybe next year.”
Lebo still works at building up new business, working seven days a week. But looking back at her start, things don’t seem as rough.
Fifteen years ago, she moved to Los Angeles from Northern California to become a songwriter. That didn’t work as planned, and she held an assortment of marketing jobs in the music and publishing business.
Wanting to start her own business, in 1986 she attended USC’s entrepreneurship program offered through a community outreach program to guide new business owners through their first steps.
“I went to evening classes for six weeks and the first few times I didn’t even know what the words meant,” Lebo said.
She kept taking on as many jobs as necessary to finance her business. She was still racing last December, working two days a week as a publicist for a publishing company.
Early in January, Lebo gave up her part-time jobs as sales of the back tapes continued to improve. A new offering is an audiotape on sinus infections, featuring her father, a retired ear, nose and throat doctor.
Jim Porter, part-time faculty member at USC and Lebo’s mentor, thinks that Lebo is making progress. “She is in a position where if she made the right contact, landed the right product, she could catapult into a financially comfortable situation.”
Lebo is still going to USC night school, learning how to set up a five-year business plan. For most small businesses, however, the first five years are the toughest to survive. And Lebo has already gotten past that.
