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Arthur Rosenfield & BizWiz 
BizWiz has become a lifeline for many businesspeople because it provides the kind of content that the Wall Street Journal and other big trade magazines just donīt cover. He conceives of BizWiz as a "lazy Susan" for the business world, where companies and individuals take the information and services they need, and contribute their own in return. Not only can a business find the specialized information it needs through BizWizīs rules-based content, but also it provides an arena for direct contact between business with a service to provide and those with a need to be fulfilled.
I had an opportunity to talk with Arthur about the development of BizWiz and about the climate of business in the information age. This interview is the first in a series of two articles. In the next installment, weīll be discussing some very important questions with Arthur: What do business owners want? How will they get it now and in the future? How will we be doing business in 2010? How can we get ready? Look for it in January 2004. Arthur, when you founded BizWiz, were you trying then to create a vehicle to help people take advantage of that growing circle of information? What was in your mind at the time? At the time, my clients were trade magazine publishers, and I was working for a large media company that had created a new joint venture with Prodigy, which, at that time, was the leading Internet Service Provider. I looked at the kind of information flow and interactivity that was available through this service, and I thought that if these things that were available to the general public through services like Prodigy and America Online were available to businesses and business people, then that would be an amazing service. I approached trade magazines, some of whom were my clients, and suggested that if they pooled their content into a single database source, we could parse that information out to specific cities and make a very rich service that could be sold to an online service. This was long before the Internet became the powerful resource that is today. At the time, I called the company Access Business Online, and its mission was to bring together content and directories and create applications that could be accessed in an online environment driven by the expertise of the trade magazines. Unfortunately, although it was a sound concept, it didnīt last long because once the Internet began to pick up speed, the publishers of the trade magazines decided they could do the same thing themselves. So I built BizWiz, which ultimately took me in a very different direction. What role did the trade magazines play in your conceptualization of BizWiz? Trade magazine publishers hire talented writers and editors to gather information from the market. They only have so much paper they can print on, so they digest everything down and put it between two covers and distribute it. The concept is that these expert editors are getting the right information and putting it into the publications. But with print, thereīs always a time delay between when the information gathered and when the issue is printed. As BizWiz grew, the idea that the BizWiz participant could communicate with another member or BizWiz directly developed. A participant of BizWiz could give me a request for something, and I could make it happen ...And there would be no lag time between when the information was found and when it was published. In this day and age, time is definitely of the essence, since information is only truly viable for a limited period. But where does that information come from? Where does BizWiz find its content? A person participating in that market has submitted everything that appears in BizWiz. Whether itīs news coming in as a product posting or a traditional news release, a request for a proposal, or an independent correspondent submitting an article it is not filtered by an editor, itīs world-wide grass roots. BizWiz started as a directory. While everyone else was just focusing on getting their websites listed on a search engine, BizWiz was saying `you donīt have to be limited to just registering your site with a search engine, you can be submitting something thatīs important to your business that someone else will find is important to their business, too, and that can be anything from press releases to RFPs to articles. BizWiz is, simply put, an information machine. The concept is like a lazy Susan. Youīre sitting around a table with other people in business. Sometimes youīll have a reason to connect with them and sometimes you wonīt, but everyone is putting something on the lazy Susan in the middle and someone else is taking it off. You need capital and someone else has capital; you need a source for bearings and someone else is a wholesaler of bearings. But the lazy Susan is constantly spinning, and people are constantly putting things on and taking things off. The success of that system is dependent on having a critical mass, and fortunately we started early enough to generate that critical mass. But thatīs not the only reason BizWiz is succeeding. BizWiz is succeeding because we had sufficient enough background and experience in the information, communication and transaction field through my twenty years of experience in trade publishing. We had enough knowledge to very finely segment industries and markets and create specialized services which would attract the kind of people you would want sitting on the other side of that lazy Susan! I have to look at my own core competencies in this business. Our core competency here is to create services that are attractive to participants who are willing to provide or receive information that is critical to their business. Weīre constantly trying to refine the process of identifying the frustrations of business people who think they canīt get on the Internet, and how we provide that as a source, because if one person needs it, thousands of people need it, and if we can find the solution for one person, it will be applicable to thousands of other people. One of the reasons people are so interested in using the Internet for business is to save money by operating more efficiently. By using this lazy Susan approach, a businessperson should be able to source things more efficiently, thereby reducing the cost of goods, raw materials, services and so forth. Yes. If you want to be successful in business, you need to have a successful sales organization, not just a successful purchasing organization. The question is, how are your sales people using the Internet to improve the managing of their territories? How are they using it to improve the prospecting of their accounts? How are they using it to improve customer relationships or the ability to define customer needs? And another question: Have they used the Internet to learn more about their customerīs customers? The more knowledge you have about the customerīs customer, the more successful you will be with the customer himself. One of the things that the Internet has done has been to create a path between you and anyone else in the world. That means that you and your customerīs customers can now have an exchange of information, or you can reach out directly for more information on just who your customer is serving. Itīs not only smart purchasing that reduces your costs and improves your revenue, itīs how and how often every department and every person in your company is using the Internet for research and for gaining a better understanding the business, your customers, and the market. In this day and age, this is a core competency; are you managing that core competency? You should be able to provide your staff with information sources to help them increase their knowledge and effectiveness. So how do you see your role, and BizWizīs role, in helping people increase their knowledge and effectiveness? My job is to help you and every one of your people in every one of your departments to accomplish their daily tasks in an easier way, a more cost-effective way, a more productive way, and we have a rules-based content and matching engine where we make all this work for you - on demand. By being a member of BizWiz, you are participating in this on-demand interactivity around the lazy Susan we talked about. Thatīs what makes this a very targeted service. When you say rules-based, I think of that in the common vernacular, that the information I want is out there, in the system, until I request it, at which point it is delivered to me. Is that correct? More precisely, we attach and apply rules to every piece of information whether or not youīve requested it. I think the most comprehensive explanation of how your rules-based content works is found right the site:
BizWiz compiles all of the content that members and participants submit to us. Each item is "TAGGED" based on 186 industries and 500 cities worldwide. Content from key areas of our service; such as RFP-Direct, Corporate NewsNet, Trade Announcements, International Buyer/Seller Connection, and Capitalist-Direct is then packaged in 1stBusinessDay or City.BizWiz based on its relevancy to the industry or the geographic location. So the rules-based system means that weīre looking at every piece of information that comes into our information pool, our pool of content, and our pool of data. That pool includes contacts, it includes data, self-published articles, it includes news, it includes RFPs, it includes all kinds of things. Another form of rules-based is the matching system we use. You could come in and say "Iīm interested in this," and that will get matched. You can receive an email. Maybe youīll receive emails for sixty days. You can elect to reside on our system for a year, and your requirement is matched every time thereīs an interaction on our machinery, and if thereīs a match, then youīre alerted. BizWiz also operates a service you call Ask The Agent. Ask The Agent permits you to set up automatic, specific requests for Proposals and Information that remain alive on the BizWiz service. It contacts companies, businesses, and professional people that may match your needs. That seems like an excellent resource for businesspeople. I asked myself, `Why is all of this other stuff happening on the Internet? Why canīt I just go somewhere and type in one sentence, have it reside somewhere, and give me what I want, when I want it?ī And tomorrow, the next day, a month from now, that information will come to you. Or maybe itīll come to you today. Exactly. There are so many good things going on here, and it frustrates me to think that so many people are just putting these little text ads up in Google (and hoping for something to happen) when there are so many ways to use the Internet to get what you want, and to do what you want, and to accomplish your businessīs objectives. On the BizWiz side, it comes back to this: If Iīm doing a good job of thinking about ways of making it easy for you, it should take you less time if you understand all the potential ways of using the system that could make it easier for you and your business. And thatīs my challenge. My task is to make it easier, less expensive, and more productive for you.
Arthur Rosenfield can be reached at http://www.bizwiz.com. Profiles of business owners respected in their industry appear in our newsletter and are available on our web site. We encourage association executives to tell us about their members who are leveraging their inherent advantages (trusted brand, excellent service, etc.) by embracing a "doing it right" attitude into their strategy for growth 
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