Teddy Garcia has been an entrepreneur and expert marketer most of his life.
At age 15 he took his love for performing acrobatics on bicycles, known today as BMX Freestyle, and formed a bicycle stunt team which did paid performances and bicycle safety clinics at area schools, city events, fairs, and for local businesses such as McDonald’s.
During his senior year of high school, he was a finalist in a national Entrepreneurship competition held in California, by the Distributive Education Club of America (DECA) which required him to write a formal business plan. He wrote a plan to acquire the bicycle store he was working at during that time. In college, he started a mobile bicycle repair service. When that business began growing rapidly, Mr. Garcia used the revenues to execute the business plan he wrote in high school and purchased his hometown bicycle store. He grew the business from $150K/yr to just under $1 million/yr in sales before selling it to pursue his other passion… Computers.
Mr. Garcia has been involved with computers since he was 6 years old. His father was the head of the Audio/Visual Department at a large university and would often take his son to work with him during the summer months. Mr. Garcia spent those summer days playing on IBM Mainframes, TRS-80s, TI-99s, Commodore 64s and Apple IIe’s. He learned to program these machines at an early age and kept up with the rapid evolution in technology that was to come. He had his 1st Compuserve email account in early 1992 and was an active member of the early online bulletin boards. In college, he took several advanced computer science programming courses even though his major was Business Marketing.
When he wanted a website for the bicycle store he owned, he leveraged his years of programming knowledge and quickly taught himself HTML and Javascript and built his first e-commerce website in 1996. When he suddenly started receiving orders for bicycle parts from people nationwide, he realized the potential of the Internet and decided to sell the bicycle business and focus on building websites for other small businesses.
In 1998, Mr. Garcia relocated to Raleigh, NC to leverage the wealth of smart entrepreneurs, talented programmers, and abundance of startup companies and venture capital in the Research Triangle Park area. He formed Cybermedia Marketing and quickly built several hundred websites in his first 2 years.
When one of his clients offered him an opportunity to build an e-commerce platform which would provide radio stations with private labeled CD/DVD stores, Mr. Garcia signed on as the Director of e-Commerce Development and Marketing for nSyndicate Inc. Mr. Garcia quickly led the company in building a successful platform offering over 30,000 titles that was being used by over 300 radio stations nationwide in just under 2 years. The company was quickly acquired by Mediaspan Group and later merged with First Media Works, the leading website development firm to the radio station industry.
Mediaspan also owned an e-commerce platform for small businesses known as Point and Shop. Mr. Garcia and his long time friend and business partner at nSyndicate.com, Eric Garrison, structured a deal to acquire Point and Shop from Mediaspan in 2003. Together they grew the company and the business of their 300+ merchants over 50% per year from 2003 to present. Mr. Garcia is still a trusted advisor and major shareholder in Pointshop Inc.
For 2008, Mr. Garcia is returning to his Internet marketing background and is launching a new company geared to help small business owners grow their businesses and improve their profitability by leveraging local search engine marketing to capture the thousands of consumers actively looking for specific local businesses.
Mr. Garcia is also embarking on a national speaking tour aimed at teaching local small business owners how to leverage the Internet in order to acquire new customers, maintain a relationship with their existing customers, and automate their marketing efforts in order to grow their business considerably. He has recently spoken at several events in the Raleigh, NC area and has several dates planned in other parts of the country for later this year. He also hosts a monthly Internet Marketing Mastermind group which meets monthly in Raleigh, NC.
“I've worked with Teddy on a number of projects through the years. His unique ability to analyze the needs of the client and develop BOTH a comprehensive Internet marketing strategy that generates leads AND a custom website application that's designed from scratch to maximize conversions and automate tedious business processes is truly remarkable. He's an intelligent, honest, and fair business individual that I would always recommend working with.”
Greg Angelillo, Business Owner, GetIMarketing.com
“There are those that get it and those that do not. Teddy simply gets it. Having known him for nearly 20 years now, he's my "go to" guy. When I have an idea, he's the first one that I "bounce" it off of, and he'll consistently offer great feedback, often times things that I hadn't thought of. As a marketer, he's second to none and always my first choice. Highly talented and skilled, a strategic thinker who doesn't stop until the job is done. I'm proud to work with him and also call him a good friend. Obviously, I recommend working with him and look forward to the next time I do.”
Jon Weiner, Creative Director, designfluency
“I highly recommend Teddy Garcia. He is extremely talented, cooperative and a strong person to assist and support any business venture or supply internet marketing services.”
Gregg Nolan Chairman of Millennium Capital Quest Corp.
“Cathgro Industries has called upon Teddy Garcia to provide his Internet expertise on numerous occasions. In every case he has shown that he immediately understands the key issue and is able to use his creative and technical knowledge to quickly resolve any problem. From my experience with him I can vouch for his expertise not only in the Internet portion of our business, but he is also well versed in accounting processes and business system automation. Highest recommendation!”
Jim Depreta President of Cathgro Industries