By Casting on the Net, Firm Gets More Bites
Growing up in Los Alamitos, Robert Lienau III earned the nickname “Big Fish” because of his love for ocean fishing. He first worked in the industry at age 12 as a deckhand on a sportfishing boat. In 1994, he bought a Seal Beach bait shop and christened it with his name. In 1997, he expanded into a sportfishing operation at the end of the Seal Beach Pier. But it wasn’t until 1998 that Lienau realized he could go much further than that--and took his business global via the Internet. Establishing an online community for his customers and carrying a comprehensive product line have been keys to the success of his Web business. Lienau was interviewed by freelance writer Karen E. Klein.
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My store was profitable, even though we had fierce competition from eight or 10 similar stores. But we knew we had maxed out the moneymaking ability of the store and we were looking for additional avenues that would bring in revenue. That’s why we decided to start the Web site.
At that time, there were not a lot of people online selling fishing tackle, other than the large sporting-goods catalog companies. We hired an outside firm to build the Web site for about $20,000. That got us a home page, about 100 catalog pages of saltwater fishing tackle and shopping-cart technology. We decided to ride it out for six months and see what happened.
The Web-design firm got me hooked up with HyperMart, a hosting service that provides space on the Web and marketing tools aimed at small businesses. We used their tips for marketing inexpensively, concentrating on search engine placement and soliciting links from related sites. We also went to e-zines and newsgroups, chat rooms, any place geared toward fishermen so we could let them know about our Web site.
The phones started lighting up. We established an online fishing tackle superstore, offering far greater product variety than we could in our storefront. We started with saltwater fishing, which is what I was familiar with. After about six months we had so much customer demand that we moved into freshwater fishing tackle. We brought on a bass-fishing pro to consult with us on products and merchandise. Now we’re finishing up our fly-fishing department, which will complete our superstore with gear for all three major types of fishing.
Having an established retail store was very important in getting our Web business running. As recently as one year ago, our distributors were not very receptive to the Internet or to shipping small orders, which we pay them a premium to do. Because we had established relationships with them, some of them agreed to work with us. It took about eight months for all of them to get on board with the idea, and that was only after they saw the phenomenal growth we had. We established the Web site in January 1999, and started doing business in February. Between February and December, we had 1,640% order growth on the site. Now, we have nine key distributors throughout the U.S. About 20% of our customer base is international.
By May 1999, the Web business started to get so big that we spun it off into a separate firm so we could share ownership with some of the employees we wanted to bring on board. I hired Michael Hodgdon as my marketing director, and brought in an orchestrated team of developers, service people, accountants and managers. We work out of an office about a block-and-a-half from the store. By the time my team was assembled, we had a list of 28 things that our customers were requesting that we add to the site.
Right from the start, I wanted to create a community online for anglers--free of charge--so they could come to our site and not buy anything but still get something out of it. After all, an angler can only buy so much. I wanted to have other things for them to do on the Web site. So we’ve got fishing reports contributed by customers from all over the world, articles written by professional fishermen, tips, weekly raffles of fishing tackle, a place where you can identify various species of fish and learn how to catch them, message boards, chats with manufacturers when they want to introduce new products, and contests. The bulk of the content has been visitor-suggested.
We have a Wall of Fame, where we get pictures of phenomenal fish caught all over the world and we pick the three best every month. We recently did the best fish of the year and our servers were inundated with traffic and pictures. People were calling their friends and telling them to come to our site and vote for them.
Three weeks ago we started a virtual fishing tournament every Tuesday night, using a game called “Trophy Bass 3-D.” We’re maxed out with 150 people fishing and many more who come to watch the contest and chat. We’re already planning to add more nights. Before too long I’m sure we’ll be offering it seven days a week.
What we’re really doing here is creating an avenue for our customers to talk about fishing, plan fishing trips and just be around other fishermen, even if the weather is bad and it’s late and they’re stuck in the house. Our home page now gets about 5,000 unique visitors a day. Once they get involved in our community, they are very loyal to us. This is the closest they can get to fishing without actually getting in the water.
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AT A GLANCE
* Companies: Big Fish Bait & Tackle and Bigfishtackle.com
* Owner: Robert Lienau III
* Nature of business: Storefront and online sales of fishing gear
* Location: 1780 Pacific Coast Hwy., Seal Beach 90740
* Year founded: Storefront, late 1960s; online, 1998
* Web site: https://www.bigfishtackle.com
* E-mail: bobby@bigfishtackle.com
* Employees: 19
* Annual revenue: $1.3 million
