TicketGold: Kendal Harazny
Kendal Harazny, 22, owns a condo, drives a Hummer H3 and spoils himself with snowboarding trips to Fernie. By the end of the year, his online ticket brokerage will break $1 million in sales. His accomplishments earned the Edmontonian the Advancing Canadian Entrepreneurship 2007 National Student Entrepreneur of the Year award. He deconstructs the whirlwind.
01. The Nickelback Moment
In 2003 I won Nickelback tickets on the radio while living in Regina. I had no money and wanted to go snowboarding, so I flipped them on eBay for $350 a pair. That got me thinking: hawking tickets might be a good way to make money. I was only 18 at the time and didn’t even have a credit card, so I asked my cousin if I could borrow his. It had a $4,000 limit. He was skeptical, of course, but I sold him on the idea, saying, “Think about all the Air Miles you’ll collect.”
02. Reinvest Your Profits
At first I bought and sold tickets through different online classified sites like eBay. It was just a way to make some cash on the side while I was in university, but things kept growing. The first year I did around $60,000 to $80,000 in sales, the second year I hit $225,000, and the following year I raked in a cool $750,000. Aside from the odd – OK, frequent – snowboard trip, I didn’t really blow much money starting out. I kept reinvesting all my profits. I wanted more.
03. Know Thy Industry
By selling tickets online, I got to see a lot of ticket broker websites and started to understand how things worked. Eventually, I stumbled upon TicketTransaction. It’s one of the leading sites in the U.S. For a fee of $5,000 to $20,000, they’ll build you a website, manage the traffic and hook you up to a network that links to some big-time brokerage sites. I joined them little over a year ago.
That was the official start of my company, and helped me circumvent a lot of headaches. If you look on my website there’s over $700 million worth of inventory on it. That’s all through the network. There are 1,400 websites that connect to TicketGold and my tickets are advertised through all of them. Advertising is expensive, but I don’t have to search for people to buy my tickets. They look for me.
Also, having access to a network where I can use other brokers’ inventory is a huge perk. I tap into it all the time. When I find and sell a ticket through another broker I get 8% to 12% of the sale price. If I sell one that comes from my own inventory I get anywhere from 1% to 1,000%. It’s a straight-up supply-and-demand business that works on a very basic principle: the more sites I’m hooked up to, the more opportunities I have to make money.
04. Cash In, Or Out
I’d like to become the go-to ticket company in Canada and then be acquired by a huge one in the U.S. TicketGold will never set me for life. It does well, but I’m looking for the next big thing. Ka-ching! U
Category: Entrepreneurship, Profiles, Work
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