Story & Lesson Highlights with Foster D. Coburn III

We’re looking forward to introducing you to Foster D. Coburn III. Check out our conversation below.

Hi Foster D., thank you so much for joining us today. We’re thrilled to learn more about your journey, values and what you are currently working on. Let’s start with an ice breaker: What do the first 90 minutes of your day look like?
I spend the first few minutes of the day checking email that has come in overnight. Typically, there are one or two messages that are important enough to act on them right away. The rest can wait for a little bit later.

Once the important emails are handled, I go on a walk of at least two miles. Initially the walk was for my dog, but I still do it for myself even though I’m currently without a dog. Yes, I’ll probably get another dog before the end of the year. I take in all that nature offers and often stop and talk to neighbors and to pet their dogs. While walking I think about what’s on my day’s agenda and the best ways to get everything accomplished.

I’ve learned over the years that this walk not only is good for my physical health, but it is equally good for my mental health. It has brought me new ideas (good and bad), solutions to problems or just a way to reset after something upsetting. On days where the weather doesn’t cooperate or something else interferes, I really miss my morning walk and try to find a way to make it happen later in the day.

Once I return each morning from the walk, I make myself a cup of coffee and sit down at the keyboard to truly start my workday.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
The company, Unleashed Productions Inc, was born in 1993 when my first book, CorelDRAW 4 Unleashed was released. I’m really glad we kept the name somewhat generic as we’ve branded niches with the Unleashed name.

I first got into Web design in 1995 when I built a site for my own company and I’ve continually worked on that site and several more of my own for 30 years and counting. In that time, I’ve learned what works and what doesn’t work. That part of the business is promoted under the Web Design Solutions Unleashed (https://web-design-solutions-unleashed.com) and the Divi Unleashed (https://diviunleashed.com) brands and Web sites.

Small businesses can’t afford to spend their time trying to figure out how to build and maintain a great site. Rather than learning all the ins and outs of building a site, they should focus their efforts on their area of expertise and what brings revenue to their business. Those companies also don’t have the budget to have a full-time Web pro on staff. That’s the perfect situation for that business to add me to their team.

We’ll discuss their goals and put a plan in action to achieve those goals. Should they need a way to sell products online, we can plan ways to display the products, sell them, collect payment and how to fulfill the orders. A different business may be providing services. They may need to collect information, book appointments, have events on a calendar, etc. A restaurant would want to have a menu on display, a way to make reservations and possibly a need to sell food to-go.

Those are just a few of the ways that we can help businesses. If needed, we can help them to secure a good domain name, supply high-end hosting for their site, build their Web site and provide regular maintenance to keep it secure and functional.

Some businesses prefer to do some of the content updates themselves and others prefer that I make the updates for them. We’re happy to provide the solution that is best for them. All of this is a reasonable investment in our expertise so the business can focus on what they do best.

Thanks for sharing that. Would love to go back in time and hear about how your past might have impacted who you are today. What breaks the bonds between people—and what restores them?
Whether it is a personal relationship or a business relationship, trust is the key. If trust is broken, it can be difficult to gain it back. It is certainly important that there is trust between myself and my clients, but it is also important to have it with all the vendors I use.

One of the services I offer to clients is providing them with hosting for their sites. Often there is not a lot of profit in this for me, but by having all my clients hosted with trusted vendors it makes it easier for me to deliver the best service. I purchase hosting in bulk from those trusted vendors to use for my own sites as well as my clients. Should there be an issue, my clients may reach out to me and I need to know the vendors will work with me to resolve the issue. In most cases, I know of an issue before my clients and work quickly with vendors to resolve it.

Therefore, when I purchase my bulk hosting from vendors, I need to trust that they will deliver a great product and timely support to me. And when I then put clients on that hosting, they are trusting me to provide them a reliable platform. I’ve lost trust with vendors in the past and moved hosting to a new vendor. This is a major undertaking for me so I do lots of research before selecting a new vendor.

This example only discusses hosting, but there are many other pieces involved in having a Web site that delivers results. Those can include the WordPress CMS, a quality theme, various plugins to extend functionality and more.

My clients are trusting me to give them the best online presence possible within their budget. For the best results, my clients have a part to play, I have a part to play and a variety of vendors have parts to play. When everyone does their part, the results can be amazing. Should trust break down between any of the parties, problems can arise. Ideally, the problem can be resolved and trust can be maintained.

Was there ever a time you almost gave up?
I’m not sure there has ever been a time I was truly ready to give up, but there have been times when there didn’t seem to be a clear path out of a troublesome situation. I can think of two times when I needed to take the business in a new direction to survive.

The first ten years of the Unleashed Productions were focused on CorelDRAW books I had written with publishers and seminars produced to provide in-person CorelDRAW training. After six books with publishers, there wasn’t enough of a financial incentive to continue. And the demand for live training had diminished greatly. I obviously had the skillset to create content for books and training videos. In addition, I had experience in design of books and the associated graphics. Therefore, I decided to self-publish my own books as I would earn far more from each book sold. This worked well as I self-published seven more books that integrated written content with video tutorials. Each of those books was delivered on CD-ROM, DVD-ROM or later as downloads.

Self-publishing those books worked well for the next ten years, but the demand for CorelDRAW training continued to decline to the point where the books didn’t bring enough sales to justify the work involved. I knew I needed to change directions again and I wasn’t sure what would come next other than it was time to move away from CorelDRAW. I had already built my own Web sites and a handful for others. So, it was a fairly easy decision to move into Web design full-time. Some of my early clients were connections I had from my days of CorelDRAW training and I’ve continued to build my client list from there.

Sure, so let’s go deeper into your values and how you think. What are the biggest lies your industry tells itself?
This question immediately brings to mind an IBM commercial that aired several years ago. Two women had started a company making sunglasses. Almost immediately after launching a Web site, they had an enormous number of sales and were rolling in the money. I felt the commercial implied “if you build it, they will come” while leaving out all of the other work needed for success.

Yes, a quality Web site is very important for promoting your business and it can definitely include the ability to sell products. The real key is getting customers to come to the site and there are numerous ways to do that. Ideally good search engine optimization will put a site at the top of the search results and bring in customers ready to buy. But if we use the sunglasses example from the commercial, how many hundreds or thousands of companies also make and sell sunglasses? All those other companies also want to rank well in search and have much bigger advertising budgets than a startup. The reality is that sales won’t just skyrocket right away for the vast majority of businesses.

I’ve built sites for companies with a small number of very niche products. Because they are niche products, they only appeal to a very small percentage of people. This can help them rank higher in search engines, but even ranking well may not lead to big sales numbers simply because there are so few potential buyers. It is important for those businesses to find ways to reach their target audience to get them to visit the site.

Other clients have both a physical storefront as well as sites selling similar products to a large number of other companies. That means they have to do a lot of promotion to make their online store thrive. They let customers in their stores know that they can buy online, they have active social media accounts promoting their products and they send regular email promotions about their products and sales. So even though they face fairly heavy competition, they do very well thanks to the execution of their overall marketing plan.

Okay, so let’s keep going with one more question that means a lot to us: When have you had to bet the company?
I don’t know if this really was betting the company, but it was a critical moment where I put a lot of thought into a decision. In the months preceding the “bet,” I had two big failures that put a serious financial strain on the company. A vendor I knew in Germany invited me to meet him at a trade show halfway across the country to discuss adding his products to my Web site. The travel costs were something I didn’t really need at that time and I was really unsure if his products would sell very well.

After a lot of thought, I decided to go and talked to him briefly on the trade show floor. Then we met for dinner at the iconic St. Elmo Steak House to discuss everything in more detail. A deal was struck and I added the products to our site soon after I returned to the office. They initially sold well enough to justify my decision.

A few years later I built a dedicated Web site just for those products. The products transformed from something shipped on CD-ROMs to download only. Ten years later that site has grown to have thousands of pages and is a reliable source of revenue for my company. So, the decision to fly to that trade show has really paid off and we feel the Vehicle Templates Unleashed (https://vehicle-templates-unleashed.com) site we built will continue to grow in the future.

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