Sistonia Corp. doesn’t act like a high-tech company.
Directors in the Orange-based firm say,quite proudly,that they have no intention of ever going public and routinely spurn offers from venture capitalists. Its client list consists primarily of decades-old industrial businesses. And when its founders were deciding on where to settle, Orange County’s weather, not the area’s booming tech economy, played the biggest role.
But in an industry that considers hype almost as valuable as revenue, this web design, Internet application and multimedia programming operation doesn’t mind being a little more demure than most.
“Our parents were engineers, so it’s probably genetic,” said Candice Sherman, 32, who co-founded the company with her 27-year-old sister, Tonya Pope, six years ago in a small Michigan town about an hour north of Detroit. “It’s just an extension of who we are.”
But the contrarian approach seems to be paying off for the company, which is beefing up its OC presence with plans to double its 15-person workforce and this week created a division just to handle contract work from other companies.
Avoiding Pitfalls
Of course, being a non-traditional new-economy firm has helped Sistonia avoid some of the industry’s perils, including breakneck turnover. The company has yet to lose an employee, despite generous job offers from other firms.
Gina Maybee, a 17-year-old working for the company from New York through a cooperative education program, recently rejected a $115,000 offer from IBM.
“She said we’d been good to her ever since she was in 11th grade,” Sherman recounted.
The against-the-grain approach hasn’t stopped the tiny firm from taking on some big-name clients and winning industry awards against far larger rivals, either.
Sistonia has garnered recognition from the CyberLion-Cannes Advertising Festival, London International Advertising Association, the Addys and even Yahoo!, which recognized two Sistonia-designed sites by bestowing its coveted “cool” rating on them.
The company,whose moniker was formed by blending the founders’ nicknames “Sissy” and “Toni”,recently hired a chief operating officer and is signing up some of its first dot-com clients. And despite Sherman’s aversion to fast growth, she expects her company to double its workforce this year.
Much of the company’s revenue comes from other Internet service providers and advertising agencies, which need specific custom applications or designs for individual projects. Sistonia this week created a division that will handle outside contract work, expected to grow to $3 million this year. The company expects to generate about $10 million in total revenue this year.
More than a dozen clients have signed on to Sistonia’s approach since the company moved here in February, including Churm Publishing, Boca Raton Hospital and iGolfShops.com.
“They choose to work with Sistonia because we do it right the first time,” said the company’s spokesman, Matthew Cunningham.
Freelance Roots
Sherman founded the company with almost no money as she took on individual computer projects on a freelance basis. She persuaded her sister, who at the time did engineering work for the soon-to-be-launched International Space Station, to join her.
The company got its start in a decidedly low-tech area by taking on customers in Michigan’s industrial hub,clients such as The Dow Chemical Co., DaimlerChrysler and General Motors. Despite the area’s old-economy reputation, Sherman said, Michigan is one of the country’s biggest hotspots for multimedia work.
But, lured by Southern California’s sunny skies and moderate temperatures, the sisters moved to OC earlier this year and have worked with some of the best-known advertising and PR firms here, including Bozell Worldwide and French & Rogers.
Sherman, the company’s president, focuses more on the design aspects of the pair’s work, while her sister is the company’s hard-core programmer and its chief technology officer.
The dream of working for themselves and doing their favorite things is precisely what makes the pair so averse to taking on outside funding or going the IPO route that has become a dot-com paradigm. Sherman said she gets an offer every six to eight weeks.
“What would be the point of starting your own company, the company you’ve always wanted to work for, and selling it to someone else?” she said. n
