Moore School of Business - Moore School - Tim Faber's Latest Entrepreneurial Adventure: www.SkinEnergizer.com

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Faber_Tim For Tim Faber, the fun of being an entrepreneur is "accomplishment. At the end of the day, when I do something and I'm able to step back and see the results, I probably get more pride and excitement from that than anything else."

Faber, a 1983 Carolina graduate who, along with his wife Karen Schmidt Faber (BS '83), helped fund and establish the Faber Center for Entrepreneurship at the Moore School back in 1997, is once again having all the fun he can handle with the couple's latest entrepreneurial venture, a personal skin care products company.

(The couple hit the jackpot with their first start-up venture, a temporary staffing firm called U.S. Personnel, Inc., which they sold in the 1990s for more than $50 million seven years after they started it. Since then, the Fabers have dabbled in real estate and launched and sold several other start-ups; some were successful, some were not.)

In May 2007, Tim Faber, now 50, bought SkinEnergizer.com from a Georgia researcher named Mark T. Macy, who originally developed and sold the natural-based, botanical products from his basement in Loganville, a small town about 35 miles west of Athens.

Faber did more than a year of research before deciding to buy an already-established company instead of starting a new firm, and this latest venture has been a challenge. "When I walked in here, I didn't know anything about hair care and skin care," he says. "The second thing is that I didn't know anything about e-commerce, which is phenomenally complicated, and so my learning curve has been geometric, to say the least."

So why did he decide to purchase this company in this industry? Faber ticks off several reasons:

the company was both a manufacturer and a distributor, offering a number of marketing and sales channel opportunities
the company's emphasis had been primarily e-commerce, which represented good growth possibilities
the company had a "very, very valuable" position in e-commerce rankings [such as Google], but the firm's technology was in great need of re-engineering and upgrading. "At the end of the day," says Faber, "this is a positive."
The company lacked policies, procedures, guidelines, and many of the components of more advanced companies. "But through a lot more work," Faber said, "it offered a chance to build the company and hire the people I wanted, which is a distinct advantage as the company grows."

Now Faber is aiming to grow his new company quickly by adding new products and packaging, improving customer service and branding, and - most importantly - updating the company's Web site for online sales.

"We've been working practically 'round the clock' for the past several months updating the Web site," says Faber. "It isn't yet where we want it to be, but it's presentable." Since the redesigned site (www.skinenergizer.com) made its debut in October, revenues have increased measurably.

Soon after buying the company, Faber had the help of a Moore School International MBA (IMBA) intern for several months, which was a plus for the company, the school, and the student. "It was such an incredible opportunity for our IMBA student," says Dr. Richard Robinson, professor of management and director of the Faber Center for Entrepreneurship. "Tim and Karen's support of entrepreneurship at the Moore School has allowed us to share the stories, expertise, and advice that come from proven entrepreneurs. We arrange numerous individualized internships, field projects, independent studies, and business plan efforts that Moore students pursue, gaining practical exposure by working directly with entrepreneurs like Tim Faber."

Commuting weekly from his and Karen's home near Atlanta, Faber works long hours researching products and learning the secrets of successful online retailing. "The number one reason someone buys - or does not buy – from you online is how comfortable they are with your Web site, and how attractive it is," he says.

The company's target market is Baby Boomer women, though Faber is finding out that "a lot of men are also using our products." (So are college girls, among whom the firm's products are said to be gaining a cult following.) Anti-aging and anti-wrinkle creams are the company's best sellers, along with various products that are targeted to eliminate or ameliorate specific problems, such as spider veins or scars or stretch marks.

Faber is learning that the skin care and anti-aging products market "is becoming very crowded" as elder Boomers seek ways to look younger. So he is seeking to distinguish his company by focusing on better marketing (emphasizing that the products are "natural-based"), snazzier and recyclable packaging, more cutting-edge product research, and the most up-to-date Web technology. Faber has also begun selling his wares to wholesalers, to private label retailers, and to "big boxes" (such as Macy's) and "small boxes" (such as Walgreens and CVS).

Another priority for Faber is keeping the company's high rankings on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other primary search engines. "It's very complicated," he says, "and it takes years of work to get those rankings."

He tries out some of the company’s products on himself and his family. "Did you know," he asks, "that licorice extract is one of the No. 1 ingredients for reducing dark circles under the eyes and eliminating spider veins? I tried it on my spider veins and darned if they didn't go away."

This energetic entrepreneur doesn't work all the time. He and Karen have three children, the youngest of whom they adopted last year from Guatemala. And for several years, Tim played electronic bass guitar in a 6-man rock cover band in Atlanta called Group Therapy. "I was certainly the old guy on the shift." Faber says. "But we treated it just like a business. We had a Web site and we had marketing materials, and we got busier and busier and busier." At one point, the band played 62 shows in one year, and "it just got too time-consuming. But it was a lot of fun."

Getting back to business, Faber doesn't disagree with being called a "serial entrepreneur." Still, being an entrepreneur "isn't always fun," he says. "We don't always hit a home run. We've made plenty of mistakes. We've lost plenty of money, and we've made plenty of money."

If his and Karen's entrepreneurial careers were a baseball team, Tim muses, "I'd probably argue that we've gone to the playoffs two or three times, we've gotten to the World Series a couple of times, and we won a couple of times. But just like the Atlanta Braves, we've had a couple of bad seasons."

Still, Tim Faber is jumping into his latest venture with both feet, as usual. "I just like being an entrepreneur," he says. "I’ve done it for so long now, I don't know if I could do anything else."

Jan Collins
November 2007