The Secret to Success for This Md. Event Tech Company? Going Slow and Steady

Turning CadmiumCD into a full-time business was not what Michelle Wyatt intended when she started the event technology company.

See, at the time, it was something her and her husband, Peter, did in their spare time. They would digitize the conference binders for larger organizations. The duo were chemical engineers — pivoting into their side time hustle wasn't really on the plate.

Until Wyatt's full-time job changed. Her employer wanted to restructure it so her position would be traveling 80 percent of the time. But with two young children at home, that wasn't an option. That's when Wyatt took the leap into entrepreneurship full-time.

Flash forward 17 years and Wyatt is still running the show at CadmiumCD alongside her husband. The company, based in Forest Hill, Md., 40 miles north of Baltimore, has 51 employees.

"What you would expect a technology startup to go through and our experience is completely different," Wyatt said. "A lot of that is due to the amount of information available to the general public on how to raise capital and all that good stuff — 17 years ago, that information was not as widely available, and we did it the old-fashioned way."

Since launch, the company has moved from the Wyatt family's spare bedroom in a town home, to a basement and now they're in an office space in Hartford County, Maryland. In 2009, they had seven employees — now they have 51. This is the company's second year on the Inc. 5000 list.

CadmiumCD offers 12 different products for vendors to choose from, including a range of products that helps organize a speaker's information and materials and disseminate it to attendees. Most of their clients are dental, medical and veterinary professional associations.

And in the nearly two decades of running the business, at no point did the company decide to bring in outside investors.

That was probably the biggest challenge they've faced. When bootstrapping a company, hiring depends fully on how much revenue the company is bringing in, Wyatt notes. The model is especially trying when any one client represents more than five percent of the whole company's sales.

When they were building up Cadmium, Wyatt relied on the advice of her local small business development center for advice and resources.

"They were a huge source of free or inexpensive education or insight into how to work or into developing processes or on how to focus or build upon your business," Wyatt said. "It really provided a lot of training and support, and I don't think a lot of entrepreneurs know they're a resource for them."

Wyatt notes that calling herself an entrepreneur was never a problem — instead she has a problem with the chief executive officer title. When Wyatt was in chemical sales, she met one client who had two sets of business cards: one said "President" and one said "Chief Executive Officer."

"If you suggest you're a CEO of a company, everyone expects you to have an answer as soon as they ask the question, and for you to have an immediate knee-jerk reaction," Wyatt said. "As soon as you identify yourself as a C-suite, people have a different expectation for your knowledge."

Of course, building a business from the ground-up wasn't easy, and Wyatt has a lot of advice to share with others.

"What's challenging with the popular news today is people think that they can start a business with just an interesting idea and not necessarily understand where the money is going to come from," Wyatt said. "Yes, there are ideas that are worth supporting without a prototype, but usually those ideas are new and revolutionary ideas — like the Tesla cars."

"Most business ideas are not completely new and revolutionary, and in order to be successful, you need to know where the money is going to come from."