More info on ByTheOwner.com and Canada’s Top 100 can be Found at Yahoo Finance
This is the link to the article that accompanied the Profit 100 Fastest Growing Companies.
Here is the section about ByTheOwner.com…
“…Another success story, Charny, Que.-based DuProprio.com/ByTheOwner.com (No. 90), offers a different lesson in responding to opportunity: decide fast, then get on with it. The for-sale-by-owner real estate website, with five-year revenue growth of 656%, to $2.3 million in 2006, says it is No. 1 in Canada in its market segment for traffic and sales. Yet Nicolas Bouchard, the firm’s CEO, says his family didn’t even craft a business plan when the firm saw the opportunity in 1997: “We did no research on the market—none at all.” Even last year, when it considered expanding beyond its flourishing Quebec and Ontario base into B.C., it didn’t conduct a thorough analysis. Instead, Bouchard met with his brother and sister over a family dinner, at which they decided to plunge in.
Yet the conclusion here isn’t just that you should move fast before someone else does. You also need to have the right stuff. DuProprio.com’s daring was rooted in a deep knowledge of the real estate industry. Although Bouchard was just 21 when the firm launched, he and his siblings had grown up in the business (their father was a long-time agent), and he had started buying houses when he was 15. Like most fast-growth companies, DuProprio.com succeeded not by inventing something new but by refining an existing offering. Bouchard knew that for-sale-by-owner websites were taking off stateside, so he didn’t see the need for hard proof that they could succeed in Canada.
By the time of the family dinner, DuProprio.com had nine years under its belt of learning by doing what worked on the Web, plus a crack in-house team of graphic designers and programmers delivering continuous improvements to its site. Unlike in Alberta, where DuProprio.com figured it was too late to overtake the two established players, the B.C. market was still up for grabs. So, right after the dinner, Bouchard and his sister Mary, the Quebec sales manager, flew to B.C. to spend a month knocking on the doors of people running for-sale-by-owner ads in newspapers or online classifieds. Their pitch was compelling: for about $400 you could list on a site whose polished, user-friendly design drew 150,000 unique visitors per week. You could tap into a network of services such as real estate law, appraisals and inspections. And you could test it for a limited time for free—but only if you signed up today. Thanks to this energetic sales push and a partnership with a local for-sale-by-owner service, DuProprio.com is closing in fast on becoming No. 1 in B.C….”
