Vinturella and Associates

My vision, at 63 years old, is guided somewhat by life stage. My inclination is to build something on the Internet, since that seems to be where I spend much of my time anyway. The jbv domain has been around for a long time in support of my academic activities, focused on entrepreneurship and small business, but it is evolving toward being a more commercial site.

My drivers are professional stimulation, and earning enough to pay the bills.

On a more operational level, I am gearing up to, hopefully, become a major player in the Internet marketing world, and in the blogosphere. The muddledconcept (mud) site is the center of my marketing efforts, selling some original product and lots of affiliate products.

The blogs are just to keep plugged in. NOBulletin, on politics, represents my major non-business interest. SecondFortune is a collection of examples of the excesses of Internet marketing, where all they sell is “their secrets,” which range from the obvious to the hackneyed. Semi-retirement is still in formation, and may displace jbv.com as a vehicle of self-expression.

What you sell / services you offer (brief description of your company):

The jbv site is academic in nature, but does make a pitch for the two books I have published. It also hosts my vita. It is drifting toward being largely a gateway page for “mud,” and I am not sure that I am happy with that. Mud is the platform for selling “knowledge” products.

Have you always wanted to run your own business? What were some of your previous jobs / companies?

You caught me in a period of transition. I was founder and owner/president for 20 years of Tammany Supply, Inc. (TSI), a distribution business. It was a great run, broken once and temporarily by a personal bankruptcy. Concurrently I was dabbling in a few other ventures, but none really amounted to anything but tax losses.

I sold TSI about seven years ago, and have retained my salary in a non-compete agreement with the buyer that runs for three more years.

So one would think my transition would have been a little after selling the business. Strangely enough, with a little consulting, some teaching and some learning, and a determination not to have employees or put a significant amount of money at risk, these seven years have flown by.

Have you got any qualifications? Please tell us about yourself academically?

At 25 years old I earned a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering (Tulane U., 1968). I have never worked in the field; having manipulated my dissertation topic into a computer programming project, my first real job was with IBM. This was followed by a period of being a Computer Science professor until the field got a little too sophisticated to still employ me.

Since then I have picked up two Master’s degrees. The first was in Communication Research at Boston University in 1974. After starting my business a few years later, I began teaching Entrepreneurship, another field in which I have been rendered obsolete. Two years ago, I decided I needed an MBA, because I wanted to teach in a business school.

I am just finishing the MBA program (University of New Orleans, 2005), which is why I am somewhat in turmoil as we speak.

How / when did the idea of your website / company come about?

The Internet has had a strange hold on me since its early days, when I was teaching part-time at Tulane. The liberating effect of selling my business led me back to my addiction, but a couple of poorly conceived ventures convinced me that I could never make a living on the Internet.

The effect of finally “completing” my education has been to cause me to re-think my relationship with the Web. As you can probably see, I am still trying to figure out the nature of that relationship.

If you could give readers of this book one piece of advice when starting up a business, what would it be?

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