Ryan Bukevicz will not be spending his Spring Break on the beach.

Instead, the Syracuse University senior finance and entrepreneurship and emerging enterprises major is headed to California to try and line up investors for his company, BeVo Media LLC, which tracks and measures Internet advertising revenue. The goal of the trip is to raise $1 million, he said.

BeVo Media LLC is one of six student-run companies currently involved with Couri Hatchery, a student business incubator in SU’s Martin J. Whitman School of Management. The program, currently in its fifth year, gives students the physical space and resources to operate a business without paying for an office. It also offers access to faculty members and mentors as well as the opportunity to network with other entrepreneurs to progress toward launching a successful business.

The incubator has helped businesses from restaurants like Funk ‘n Waffles to focused web-based applications and web designers, said Larry Bennett, professor of practice and advisor of the Hatchery.

Bennett said that there are resources to help students facilitate their businesses at SU that they will not necessarily have when they leave. He said it’s not a guarantee for success, but learning to fail is part of every entrepreneur’s life.

‘It’s a great time (to be an entrepreneur) and I think college can be a great place to do it, but it’s risky,’ Bennett said. ‘It’s like going to a casino, you can be a great card counter, but sometimes, card counting fails you. You have to be prepared to lose your money that you’ve got to bet with.’

For Bukevicz, Bennett has been one of the greatest assets of the incubator.

‘If there is anything we need or if we need any guidance, he can point us in the right direction,’ Bukevicz said. ‘A lot of times there are people in the university that can help us out. Like I needed lawyers and they hooked me up with a whole bunch of lawyers and a lot of them were willing to do work for free because I’m a student and a part of this program. So it saved me a lot of money.’

Although BeVo Media has been under Bennett’s care, Bukevicz said the idea behind it came entirely from him and his partner, a senior at the University of Maryland.

BeVo Media consolidates information on Internet ad revenue into a single interface so users can more easily track their online income and Web traffic, Bukevicz said.

‘We’re basically consolidating every aspect of Internet marketing – Web traffic, revenue stream, classrooms and a bunch of different resources. It’s new technology,’ he said.

Bukevicz said the company is unlike anything else out there because of the input from a bunch of different companies.

‘What we’re doing is combining a whole bunch of different companies, who collectively have been funded for $50 million plus, and we’re consolidating all their company ideas into our main project,’ Bukevicz said

Currently, company finances are one of BeVo Media’s biggest challenges, Bukevicz said. Without the money needed to hire programmers to create the technology needed to complete his vision, the company outsourced a lot of its projects to foreign countries to save money.

‘We were spending a lot of money,’ he said. ‘We spend probably like $50,000 making what our main project is. We have 26 different programmers working on this so it’s kind of a big project and it costs a lot of money.’

Reliability became an issue, but Bukevicz said he’s lucky to now have core programmers from the United States and is working to expand the company’s revenue.

‘Right now, I’m making enough to support myself pretty easily. It’s not anything compared to what I would have been making – $50,000 to $60,000 working at JP Morgan or something like that,’ he said. ‘The way I’m working right now, I can make up that salary and be building the asset of my company at the same time. It’s the best of both worlds.’

Bukevicz said he and his partner plan to move the company to Palo Alto, Calif., this summer, after they graduate.

Other participants in the Hatchery have had more experience when it comes to running and owning a business.

RJ Sherman, a senior information management and technology, entrepreneurship and finance major, started his first business when he was 16 years old and is currently working with the Hatchery on his latest venture, Brand-Yourself.com.

The company, now a year old, works with customers to create an online image for potential employers who use search engines to look for them. He said he has used the Hatchery more for the knowledge and access to resources than for the space.

Owning a business ‘gives you more experience than a school can give you,’ Sherman said. ‘I get presented with business problems that truly you see in the business world. A lot of what my schooling has been based on is taking what I learned in class and directly applying it to what I’m doing in my business.’

kmimamur@syr.edu

Published on March 4, 2009 at 12:00 pm