Playing to Strengths |
Ken Bautista’s focus on creativity and collaboration has Hotrocket on an upward trajectory
by Michael Hingston
Ken Bautista thinks it’s important to stay connected. His email signature lists five different ways to contact him. On his website, that number jumps to nine, from business networking sites to his personal Flickr page. He’s also got three different business cards, which he hands over with a self-deprecating chuckle and casual mention of an upcoming meeting with the Smithsonian Institution to discuss sponsorship of his online secret agent game for kids, The Central Institute for Exploration (CIE). As a result, Bautista keeps a schedule that could modestly be called busy, and has ever since his days as an education undergrad at the University of Alberta in the late 1990s, when he developed his first educational computer programs. He still looks forward to the weekend, mind you, but not because he stops working – that’s just when the phones don’t ring quite so much.
And yet the 31-year-old web entrepreneur couldn’t look less stressed, sitting in the boardroom of Red the Agency, the marketing group for which he works part-time managing digital media projects. His demeanour is partly due to the comfortable decor – Red’s Edmonton branch operates out of a sleek, converted downtown manor, with offices in ex-bedrooms and topped-up candy dishes sitting next to rows of industry awards. But, mostly, his calmness owes to his insistence on only pursuing projects he’s passionate about – a business philosophy that recently landed him on the grand prize podium at this year’s TEC Edmonton VenturePrize competition.
That focus is something the self-taught businessman learned the hard way. Hotrocket, the entertainment-based digital media company responsible for CIE and which Bautista, its CEO and creative director, founded in 2001, had an early string of successes, winning national awards and graduating from St. Albert’s Northern Alberta Business Incubator. Before he knew it, his company had ballooned to 13 employees. It moved into a big office that looked impressive but sent costs soaring. As a result, Bautista ended up having to shelve a lot of the educational projects Hotrocket was built for in favour of big budget marketing jobs that would keep the lights on.
“That was the first time we started deviating from what the core was,” he says. “Being a startup company, for us to take on that kind of overhead was a tough thing. It put a lot of additional pressure on this brand-new team to keep pumping out enough work to keep things going.”
It was then that Bautista made the decision that would inform much of his business outlook in the coming years. He didn’t want Hotrocket to be big, necessarily; he wanted it to be great. Instead of trying to manage marketing projects from start to finish, his company would focus its efforts only on the strategy and creativity, and contract out the actual design work later on. So along with his then-new project manager, Jason Suriano, Bautista bought out their remaining business partner in 2005 and scaled the company back to just the two of them. The risk paid off: the personal touch became Hotrocket’s competitive edge in the web and interactive design field.
But another key component of Bautista’s success is represented by all those points of contact, and the social networks they link into. Creating community is a concept that turns up repeatedly in his work. Why does he recommend startup businesses join incubators like the one in St. Albert? Because you’ll get to know other companies that are in a similar position. What was the appeal of working in St. Albert versus Edmonton, its much larger neighbour?
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