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Green Room Productions Essay In November 1995, Trip Davis, Dartmouthalums, Greg Waldbaum and Eric Butz gathered for a meeting in the conference room of their Charlottesville, Virginia, office. The business partners had reached a crucial point in their startup business. Five months prior they combined their talents to provide professional and technology services in the travel industry by starting Green Room Productions, but the firm had been unable to find sufficient human resources to staff its technology projects. , the partners considered two options: close the business down or move to another city for the second time in five months. Both options that the partners were considering would have huge impacts of the professional careers and personal lives. Closing down would mean that they would have to seek employment with other companies, which could result in them having to relocate their families to another city. The other option, to relocate the company to a location where they could find qualified human resources would guarantee moving their families and still have the uncertainty of success. In the early and mid 90’s the Internet and . Com based companies were booming. In the Travel Industry, people who normally used Travel Agencies to make reservations for airline flights, hotels and auto rentals were now turning to internet based companies such as Prodigy and Pctravel.com, which connected users through ATC’s computer to the Apollo Computer Reservation Systems (CRS), by translating complex codes and commands into a simpler interface. Although many .Com travel companies began to open, many sites lacked the proper interfaces necessary to link existing computer reservation systems to the Internet and did not offer on-line reservations that could be booked threw their website and usually provided advertisement and included a telephone number to call to complete the reservation process. In 1994 Trip Davis accepted a position as an analyst at Landmark Communications, which owned The Travel Channel. With 15 million individual subscribers, it was operating at a loss and needed to increase its subscriber base to 30 million to become profitable. Davis was given the task to find ways to increase the channels subscriber base and move towards profitability. Davis noticed the opportunities that the internet could provide. Landmark also owned the contents of The Weather Channel, and saw an opportunity to develop Weather.com to expand its audience base. But Landmark did not own the contents of The Travel Channel so Davis began investigating ways to expand the channels audience and looked at the travel industry and the internet. Davis met with Internet Service Providers AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe who provided limited travel information on the Web sites and participated in conferences with companies such as Hilton, Delta, Marriott and Disney. These companies expressed the need for nationwide reach that currently were not being met. In 1995, Davis and Greg Waldbaum, who went to college together, ran into each other at a travel conference. Both had always had an interest in starting their own business and began discussing the opportunities of the travel industry and the Internet and decided to start a business together which would focus of two ideas: Provide technology services to help travel companies develop their Internet presence and develop original on-line content such as sightseeing guides to resorts and travel destinations. Davis, Waldbaum and another friend Butz started Green Room Productions. Pitching their â€Å"three S† sales pitch. Site: Set up and create Web site infrastructure; Systems: Create applications connected to the clients existing information infruastrure with systems that enabled customs to make reservations, book tickets, or transact other business on the clients Web site; Strategy: Assist clients with Internet strategy and maintain a focus on their brand. Clients such as The Travel Channel, Mountain Travel, Sobek, Disney and ITT Sheraton provided major projects for Green Room Productions ranging from half million to $1.o million and smaller HTML projects brought gross revenues of $10,000 to $100,000. Green Room Case Study Bibliography Carpenter, mason Andrew Strategic management: a dynamic perspective concepts/ Mason A. Carpenter, Wm. Gerard Sanders- 2nd ed. p. cm. P773 – 781 Green Room Production, LLC/ Fairchild, Gregory B.; Kelly, Dorothy C.; Singer, Susan 7/13/2006