Andy Benoit never really set out to start his own business. It grew out of other interests.“I think everybody is an accidental entrepreneur in some way — if you’re doing what you want to do,” said the 25-year-old Boise native, majority owner of the website NFLTouchdown.com.
He’s got five TVs in his living room to help him with his work: analyzing NFL football teams and players. In addition to his website, he writes for CBSSports.com and The New York Times’ “Fifth Down Blog.”[0x0b]
Watching football is work and pleasure, and it’s a solitary pursuit for Benoit.
“I don’t watch with anybody, even the playoff games,” says Benoit, who records audio notes of what he finds notable during live games. “I’m the only one in the room ... I need to dial in and focus.”
Benoit studied business at the College of Idaho because he’d done a lot of extracurricular writing as a kid and wanted something to round out his education.
He was 10 or 11 when he started writing seriously. His chosen topic: pro football.
“He’s been talking about football from the time he could first talk,” says his mother, Janet Benoit. His family has video of him doing a football broadcast at age 5›.
The writing was born of necessity.
“We were on a family trip. I couldn’t sleep at night, and I couldn’t hold still in the car,” he recalls.
His parents encouraged him to write down his thoughts about NFL players and teams. His mother later typed up his notes and created a season-preview book.
The next summer, he wrote another preview and published it from the family computer. Benoit gave copies to family and friends. The feedback kept him going, year after year. At one point, he sent one to Hall of Fame coach and legendary football commentator John Madden.
The hobby was time-consuming. Just when he was feeling burned out and ready to give up, he got a nice response from Madden.
“He was saying, ‘Keep at it,’ and all these nice praises,” Benoit says.
So he did. And the quality improved, both in content and presentation. One year, his parents printed 750 color copies of his preview books at a cost of just under $10 each, says his father, Gary Benoit. They sold fewer than 200.
Gary Benoit, by the way, is a lifelong entrepreneur: 10 years in restaurants, 20 years in furniture sales and 18 years in commercial real estate.
He and his wife, a mother of two and real estate broker, were impressed with their son’s resourcefulness in distributing the hundreds of extra books that he’d published. The boy made lists of pro coaches, assistant coaches, commissioners, sportscasters and more — and then mailed the books to all of them.
The mailing alone required an investment, since it cost $2 per book. But his parents also recognized it as a brilliant marketing tool.
One day, during Andy Benoit’s senior year of high school, he got a call on his cellphone.
“Andy came home from school and said, ‘I got a call today from a company ... Have you ever heard of Random House?’ ” Gary Benoit recalled.
Random House offered to pay the teen $45,000 for producing three NFL books geared toward hard-core football fans. His dream had come true: He would get paid to do what he loved.
He produced all the copy for “Touchdown 2005,” which was 220 pages long, with 30 special feature articles and 190 pages of team previews.
“The book had to be done 100 percent by midsummer. May was a fun time. I’d spend 12 to 13 hours a day on it,” Benoit says. He was still in school that spring. The same thing happened the next year, when he was a freshman in college.
“I did nothing but write every day all day for three weeks,” he says.
Benoit says Random House sold about 7,000 copies each year from bookstore shelves, but the book couldn’t compete with all the other preview books and magazines on the market (which were on magazine racks). The publisher decided against a third season preview book, though Benoit is still on the hook to produce a book on a different topic.
His Random House editor suggested that he continue his NFL preview writing online. That’s how his first business was born.
“It was a no-brainer to go online,” Benoit says.
What wasn’t as easy was figuring out how to do it.
He and his parents hired a local company to build the website, investing tens of thousands of dollars for all sorts of bells and whistles they realized later they didn’t need.
“We didn’t do our research,” he says. “We didn’t ask enough questions.”
“We had one year that was very expensive,” Gary Benoit says. “We should have done more research, got a second opinion.”
In 2008, they decided to start over.
“It was a great learning experience. I probably interviewed 25 different companies,” Andy Benoit says.
He found a friend, mentor and, eventually, business partner in Jeff Coruccini, who built www.FantasyFootballStarters.com.
Benoit built a simpler, cleaner website and changed the name of it from BenoitMedia.com to something that might grab the attention of new and old football fans, as well as former Random House season preview readers: NFLTouchdown.com.
He brought on 32 writers to help produce the content — one for each NFL team. He selected hard-core fans he found online to write for him. The constant flow of new content helps keep his site near the top of Google search results.
“Google doesn’t care how good you write. It cares about how often,” Benoit says. “More writers gets us to the top of the Google page.”
Before going after significant advertisers, he plans to build a five-year readership base. He says the site consistently gets tens of thousands of readers each month, though the NFL lockout isn’t helping.
A few months ago, he hired a managing editor for the website: Dean Holden, who lives in Michigan.
“He reads all the copy from the contributing writers,” Benoit says. “He just keeps up and keeps in touch with it.”
Benoit doesn’t write exclusively for his own site. He’s also building his reputation by writing for national media outlets.
In 2009, he was invited to write for the Times’ “Fifth Down Blog.” He’s not under contract, but when he produces a column, he gets paid. Even better, he says, is the link from the NYT blog to his site.
CBS Sports created an NFL blog last year, and Benoit signed a contract to write for it.
“It’s full-time work with them,” he says. “I’m now moving to an analyst role with them, more game preview stuff.”
He feels headed in the right direction.
“I’m still climbing here,” he says. “I don’t know what I’m climbing to.”
