(PRWEB) November 15, 2000
Press Release
Tampa, FL
Another dot com opened this week.
ThatÂs not news. But to three Tampa women, itÂs the only news that counts.
Nine months of nonstop learning of what it takes to build an e-business have resulted in Care 2 Learn.com, an online education center for 11 healthcare professions, including nurses and therapists. The Internet buzzed with e-mails from the trio with ÂOOOoo000ooOOo000oOOO bubbles, the cyberspace equivalent of ÂOoh and ÂAhÂ. It’s time now to break out the real bubbles and toast the website opening.
The story behind this website is not the usual multimillion-dollar dot com deal. Three Tampa Bay area women – Jeanne Christian, Edie Deane, and Laura More – decided to “Â make the call or get out of the booth”, according to More. “We’d all been laid off at least once – I was a Regional Vice President of a national therapy company when laid off – and we were tired of not being in control of our work lives. We had talked for years of starting our own company. We decided it was Nike time – just do it”.
The business idea came from two of the three partners independently. The original idea was for seminars, consultation, and online education. “Then we ran the numbers”, says Deane. “22 financial pro formas. All different. We refined our business plan as our vision of the company took shape”.
The financial projections clearly showed that consultation and seminars should take a back seat: online education would be the Company’s focus. Talking to peers in the healthcare field affirmed the decision. ÂFocus groups with therapists and Nursing Home Administrators told us that Medicare had forced drastic reductions in benefits for Continuing EducationÂ, Christian says. ÂHealthcare professionals were looking for a way to not only get the Continuing Education required for their license renewal, but to keep up with advances in their field. They were looking for a practical, affordable, flexible solution. Online learning is that solution.Â
“Then came the name challenge”, laughs More. “I had worked up this great name, online HealthNow. Unfortunately, the name didnÂt say anything about us”. Focus groups were confused by the name. It was too long to type into Internet browsers and e-mail. Spell check hated the small case Âo in ÂonlineÂ.
Enter ExitNow.
The partners had fired their first Web company for poor performance. Then they interviewed ExitNow, out of Redington Beach, FL. “They listened to us”, says Christian. “With no health-care background, they caught on to our idea and understood what we needed”. The day after the interview Brian Mintz of ExitNow sent an e-mail: “Why not call your company Care 2 Learn? The name says what you do”.
He was right. The partners now own 30 domain names  Care 2 Learn, Care to Learn, Care Two Learn Âand a host of others. All of the names Âpoint to the main website.
Here’s where the partners share a sly grin – one of their core values is, after all, “Fun” – and talk about the Vertical Learning Curve. “Ask me last January about pointing to sites, or ListServ, or JPEGs -I would have been clueless”, More laughs. “Now here we are glibly talking about FTP and download times. I’ve even learned some basic HTML coding. It’s amazing. Care To Learn applies to us, too. We’re learning something new everyday”.
Working without salaries, paying expenses themselves, the partners are grateful to those who have helped make it happen — angel investors, colleagues, family and friends. But no one is under the illusion that the hard work, or the learning, has ended. “Tomorrow we teleconference with ExitNow to learn encryption systems for security” states Christian. “We really are still on a learning curve, and won’t stop, because the more we learn, the more our customers learn. And that’s the whole idea”.
Contact:
Laura More
813 -672 -6050
laura@care2learn.com