A Chat With Paal Gisholt, President/CEO, SmartPak Equine

From the IT side, we’ve developed an entire integrated e-commerce engine from soup-to-nuts. You go on our Web site, and it’s built with just the Microsoft tools. We don’t have any kind of e-commerce engine underlying our business; we built it all from scratch. That allows us to do certain things that benefit our customers. For example, when it comes to reshipping orders, the first order goes out the first day, and the next order goes out 21 days later to create a 7 day cushion. Thereafter, orders go out every 28 days. We also have the ability, if you’re adding a horse to your account, to let you decide if you want to keep that cushion or synchronize your horses with each other. That would be an example of something that would be very hard to support with conventional IT structure. Similarly, we have a pharmacy, and we have to validate that every vet is a real vet. We have to validate that we haven’t already filled a prescription — or that a subscription hasn’t expired — and we’ve physically received a copy of the prescription. There are a whole bunch of requirements around the pharmacy — probably 15 of these specific issues — but we were able to create IT that fits our business perfectly, because it’s a custom business. At the same time, it’s been a big burden and a big expense.