Passion. Profits. Purpose. These three words dominated David Kalt’s speech at Tuesday night's Technori Pitch. Kalt gave an amusing rundown of his work history while sharing important advice about selling your business, such as “always have a prenuptial agreement before you sell your business—it is a requirement.” This prenup let him walk away from his first business with enough money to focus on a new passion that was brewing inside him.
This passion was trading options and drove Kalt to start optionsXpress, a company recently sold to Charles Schwab for a billion dollars. Focusing on education, execution and customer experience, optionsXpress was able to grow quickly and sustain better profit margins then their competitors. optionsXpress was a smaller company but “it’s not always about scale. Sometimes you can make money with a relatively small volume. We stuck to bootstrapped techniques and kept a lean operation,” Kalt said.
Kalt then said goodbye to the world of tech finance and profits to focus on his original passion: music. He took the business skills he had learned and bought a brick-and-mortar store called the Chicago Music Exchange. He expanded the stores worldwide customer base and increased sales by capitalizing on the 10,000 foot showroom, expanding e-commerce and making an important realization: he was not really in the guitar business—he was in the content business.
“If I could entertain and inspire musicians with great content I knew we could win over customers and expand this business,” Kalt said. After achieving 3 million views from one video, prompting thousands of transactions, Kalt doubled his stores sales and created a profitable business.
Kalt is currently leveraging this knowledge to start a new venture called Reverb.com, a marketplace for musicians. Described as eBay for used instruments, the listing and auctions site has a built in pricing guide for listed products. Kalt is currently working with the team at Doejo to develop the site in preparation for a launch in fall.
