Youaa‚¬a„¢ve got mail!

Marian Seitan intends to increase his direct mailing business by about 30 percent this year and hopes that the market conditions will help him to develop it further in the future.

Anca Ionescu

Marian Seitan, general manager and co-owner of Mediapost Hit Mail, built his business from scratch, starting in 1997, since when the company has grown constantly. Initially Mediapost Hit Mail was conceived as a full-service direct marketing agency, but new additional business lines were developed every year. “We posted a constant increase of 50 percent every year,” remembers Seitan. One of the most important moments for his firm came in March 2009 when he sold about 60 percent of the shares to the French Mail. The move had a double benefit, bringing both money and high quality know-how into the company.

The idea to set up the business came as a natural step for Seitan. In 1995 he won a scholarship to study direct marketing in France. “At that time direct marketing was hardly formed in Romania, even though conventional advertising had developed quickly and had gained some traction on the local market,” says the general manager. “I graduated from university in June 1996 and in January 1997, I set up Hit Mail using the money that I had saved while I was working during university.”

Seitan sees a silver lining to the cloud that is the current downturn in Romania. “The crisis was a good opportunity for us to increase the efficiency of our business and to question some less productive expenses,” says the businessman. In his opinion, another benefit is that he saw some of his competitors simply disappeared from the market because they couldn’t cut fixed costs. But there is also a downside. “The bad thing is that some customers also left the market, including some quite large ones, while others cut to a minimum level their communication with their current and potential customers, in the hope that this would help them get through the crisis,” adds Seitan.

The recession posed a wide range of new challenges for Mediapost Hit Mail, from how to replace the axed budgets of some customers and face the purchase managers who were asking aggressively for discounts, to how to approach the price wars launched by hopeless competitors or to reduce the company’s fixed costs in order to compensate for the lower volumes and margins. “But I can already say that we have won,” says the entrepreneur. Asked how the Romanian-Canadian MBA program supported him in his entrepreneurial undertaking, Seitan says that it helped him to understand the importance and the efficiency of soft skills. “From all the tools I acquired during this program, those to do with operations management, HR and the financing of investments had the biggest significance. But I can also say that networking was probably the biggest achievement,” says the general manager. In his experience, a Romanian-Canadian MBA is useful in a specific stage of the development of a company, when it has grown and its entrepreneur is not able to control all the areas of the business. As a result, there is a need to create structures specific to a large company, a process that is neither easy nor pleasant. “Looking back I think that I chose the right moment to do this, using both the know-how and the tools offered by the MBA program,” says Seitan.

As for the most difficult moment his business has faced, the young entrepreneur says it was back in 1999 when his company posted losses for a few months, due to an unfavorable context. “But I always believed that our positioning was right so we managed to get through it.”

If he started another business he would change a lot, mainly because the economic environment has changed, with the competition being stronger today than in the past. He adds that at the moment competition is fiercer on some market segments while on others Mediapost Hit Mail benefits from the added know-how of its French business partner. “At the end of 2010 we had an average market share of about 30 percent, but we have a 50 to 60 percent market share on some sub-segments,” says Seitan. And his company is likely to benefit from the potential of the local market, as according to the young entrepreneur, the weight of direct marketing in the total costs of communication and marketing will exceed 10 percent this year. As for future plans, Seitan intends to post an increase of more than 30 percent both for the existing and adjacent business lines. “We think that the local market will help us this year, with Romania being closer to the recovery of its economy,” concludes the general manager.

editorial@business-review.ro