A Chat with August’s Profile, Chris Harris, director, direct response marketing, Becker Group Direct

CS: Getting back to your personal experience of the company you founded, what was the company name?
CH: It was Graham Harris Trading Company.
As an international business, what I did after the company, I went back to business school. Because one thing also that I learned was that as a cataloger and a direct marketer and a business owner, I had very good instincts and was good at what I did. But there were real holes in my skill sets, primarily because I hadn’t been formally trained. So I had gone through the school of hard knocks, if you will, and had learned a lot, a tremendous amount, through trial and error. But I felt as if I could take a whole another leap forward in my career and my ability to do a great job if I went back to business school.
So I went to an international business school called Thunderbird out in Arizona, and it’s the number one international management program in the country, and probably like top five in the world. So I went back and had an incredible experience, I mean a really incredible experience. The population of the student body at that time, and it probably still is, was 60 percent, 70 percent foreign. It was an intense amount of work to do, but I did it and really excelled and had an incredible experience. In fact, I was able to live and study overseas for a while. Also, while I was at Thunderbird, my colleagues from overseas kind of kept giving me a tough time, joking around with me, saying that we Americans think of ourselves as being very advanced. But in one respect we’re not. And that’s from the most cutting edge or the latest direct marketing or direct response marketing channel — the mobile space.
So I started researching that and what that means is through the text messaging platform on your cell phone, there’s this whole new medium that’s developed. So I started looking for an opportunity to work in mobile marketing coming out of school and was able to hook on with an Austrian-based global applications firm that had designed and built over 500 mobile applications in Europe. They were launching the North American operations for it and I happened to be appealing to them because of not only my direct marketing background but also my business school background. So they hired me to help launch the North American operations. In fact, I was kind of the No. 2 guy, well, I think we were kind of 1 and 1a or whatever, but there was an American who was in Austria who then came back to the U.S. to help launch this.
For about two or three years we had some pretty good success, but we also had some challenges because the mobile space has not, or had not at that point, really we were very cutting edge, almost ahead of our time. It wasn’t until the end of 2002 where the carriers allowed for intercarrier text messaging. So if you were Sprint and I was Verizon or AT&T, we wouldn’t necessarily be able to text message each other. That’s got its flaws. But we were right there at the right time and we were trying to take a European business model and bring it to the U.S. And we did some pretty cool things, like helping to introduce being able to pay for your metered parking on the street through your mobile phone, being able to pay for vending, your sodas or whatever out of vending machines, with your mobile phone, came up with sweepstakes and weather reports and traffic reports. Some of the coolest stuff. Whatever you can dream up, we were able to do because this knowledge is transferable over from Austria. I’m very proud to say we were working on something called mobile coupons, which is really something that will take effect and will have a dramatic impact on the direct marketing space in the future.
But we were living up in the New York area, my wife and I, and while the business was going well, I got an offer with Becker Group down here in Baltimore. My wife’s family is originally from this area, and we have a daughter, and it was just a good match and a good opportunity because they wanted me. Becker Group wanted me to come in and take this kind of replenishment division and take it a whole different level, turn it into a direct marketing division. And the quality of life and cost of living is so much better, in my opinion, in this area than necessarily up in New York. New York is wonderful, but it’s also very expensive. So we wanted to offer our daughter, and if we’re blessed with more children, the best opportunity for a great future. So we took this opportunity and it’s been a great experience and I feel very proud about what we’ve been doing.