Angela Charles: An Atypical 'Dot-Commer'

by Mark Bednar
Kent State Magazine

Angela Spreitzer Charles, managing director of the Web site Polysort, hasn't always started her mornings firing up a computer on her desk.

"When I started my career, I was writing stories on an electric typewriter," Charles said. In fact, it gets worse.

"The other reporter and I shared a typewriter."

But today, she doesn't use a typewriter much in her line of work. Instead, Charles has carved a niche for herself and the company she works for in the technology field with Polysort, a Web site focusing on the plastics and rubber industries.

"I don't even know why I have a desk with drawers, because I don't even look at the files that are in there," Charles said. "Everything I need is on top (in the computer), because things change so quickly, by the time you go back to it, that information's obsolete."

But Charles is quick to point out that the technology is not what Polysort chooses to emphasize.

"The value is not in the technology itself. The value is in what it delivers, and that's what we try to focus on," she said.

Charles, '86, began her career at Crain Communications, a publishing company specializing in trade publications. She didn't foresee a lengthy residence in the journalism field when she landed the job at Crain's Tire Business publication in Akron as a reporter. But after nearly three years at Tire Business, Charles joined a new publication that was being launched at Crain, Plastics News. She became assistant managing editor of the weekly news magazine, and later jumped into the role of managing editor of Waste News when it was launched in 1995.

But she wouldn't be at that publication long. And most people would view her next career jump as a flying leap out of an airplane.

Her former managing editor at Plastics News called her to join him in a new Web site venture called Polysort. The company today is known as a group purchasing organization, which uses the Internet to pool buying power of plastics processors in order to gain cost savings usually only afforded to companies with larger orders.

But Polysort did not begin its life in that role. In fact, Charles joined what was simply an online directory of plastics and rubber companies in Northeast Ohio eight months into its life in September 1995.

Polysort began as a project of the marketing department of Dellagnese Co., a real estate business that owns buildings in West Akron, and Bath, Ohio--buildings that often house polymer businesses. But Charles was brought into Polysort during a time of change.

The directory was being recast as an online daily trade publication, and Charles' work at Crain gave her the experience required to succeed in her role as editor. And it all started with a phone call from her former managing editor.

"He essentially called me and offered me the job. And I didn't have any idea what Internet was," she said. "My exposure to it had been through America Online."

Charles' jump to an upstart Web company may sound like a familiar story at this point in history. But in 1995, a year when Windows 95 was just starting to revolutionize home computing and the only Amazon most people knew was the river in South America, most would be apprehensive about a jump to a dot-com company. But Charles isn't like most people.

"When this opportunity presented itself to me it was an opportunity to go out and learn some new skills, get into a different industry, get into one that clearly was going to grow. And the way I kind of see it was that if ? worst case scenario ? Polysort ever folded, I would have this whole new set of skills behind me along with my background in trade publishing, that I would be considerably more marketable at that point than if I'd stayed with Crain. So to me, there was minimal risk," she said.

One of Charles' journalism professors at Kent State, Joseph Harper, is not surprised about her success.

"I never had any doubt that she would be successful in whatever career path she took," he said. "Angie was always a leader, both in class and outside of class."

Charles doesn't see her move to a dot-com as anything revelatory.

"I don't think I had a crystal ball about the Internet. It was really more just a way for me to broaden my skill base," she said.

When Polysort launched itself as an online trade publication, it was a trailblazer.

"There were no print publications with Web sites at that time. It was nonexistent," she said. "We were one of maybe three Web sites dedicated to an industry at that time."

And Charles squarely aimed to carve a unique home for Polysort not just on the Internet, but in the plastics and rubber industries.

"One thing that was very important to me: I wanted to be able to put together services that distinguished us from trade publications. I didn't want to mimic them. That wasn't my goal," Charles said.

In 1996, Polysort began to change its focus from being strictly a trade publication to encompass being a direct news source. Polysort struck a deal with LexisNexis, an online service that brings together news, information and background data from more than 5,000 sources worldwide.

"We ended up being the third site in a brand new program that they had where they enabled Web sites to license their content for redistribution on the Web. Prior to that, you had to have a single-use license to look up information for your own consumption," she said. "The other two (licensees of the LexisNexis program) were CNN's All Politics site and Politics USA, which were both at that time using LexisNexis for their political coverage for the election that year."

But even at that, Polysort and Charles were not content to rest on past successes.

The company soon became a Web services agency, helping companies create an online presence. Then it morphed again into a Web portal, where it became a window to the plastics and rubber world, and finally to its present post as a group purchasing organization.

"Everything that we've done is built on the strength of what we developed before," Charles said. "We always built on what we already had.

"We essentially are the ad agency, we are the press release writers, we are the editors that guarantee that it gets online, and we provide the means of distribution."

And Charles doesn't plan to let Polysort set its controls to cruise now any more than she has in the past.

"Things have moved so fast here, so much continues to change. The interest level in our business is incredible. The opportunities that we have are endless. If there's anything that's really scary to me, it's what are we missing," she said. "What is there that's out there that we haven't figured out?"

As the future of dot-com businesses gets sketchier, however, some may wonder about their staying power. Polysort thus far has weathered the storm because of its already-thrifty spending habits and its size compared to other dot-com companies.

"I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we were small when the recession started. We didn't have thousands of employees, we didn't have venture capital. We've run on a shoestring budget from day one," she said.

She added that Polysort lost a few employees recently through natural attrition and has chosen not to replace them to save money, but no employee positions have been eliminated.

It's no surprise that Charles' views on the future of dot-com businesses are just as pioneering as her career path decisions.

"I think that we are repeating the history of the automotive industry. That does not mean that in the future we will all be buying cheap Internet sites from Japan," she said with a laugh. "But what I mean by it is that if you look at the history of the automotive industry, there were a lot of different carmakers out there. You have the Edsels of the world when the automotive industry was very young, and over time, those were winnowed out, and you got to the point where you have the big three. You can't really look at what we're doing and say there are going to be three companies, but I do think that because of resources and the way that information is shared that in order for it to be the most useful, at some point you have to winnow out some of the players."

Her other prediction for the future of dot-coms deals with the term itself.

"I think you're going to hear the term 'dot-com' go away," she said. "The Internet's a tool. It's not the end-all, and I think that as we continue to move forward, companies are going to get a lot smarter about how to use it, and it'll become less about technology and more about the value to the customer."

Not surprisingly, Charles is already putting this philosophy into action.

"We might use the Internet to achieve certain efficiencies, to make us move faster than another traditional business might be able to, but the business model itself isn't fully dependent on the Internet. It's a tool we use, just like we use the fax machine," she said.

And despite the already fast pace of Internet advances, Charles only sees more of that in the future.

"We really don't know the size of the box. It seems like in any other job I've had, you kind of know what size the box is, and you know when you're going to hit the wall. This thing, we haven't even seen how big that box is. So we'll be thinking inside the box a long time, although we like to say we think outside the box," Charles said.

Charles isn't the only Kent State graduate working at Polysort. In fact, more than a third of the company's employees are alumni. And it is a testament to Charles' affection for her alma mater that this is the case. While she graduated long before students were issued an e-mail address with their residence hall assignment, she credits something she learned at Kent State for her success, and something she looks for not only in Polysort's employees but also in everyone with whom she comes into contact.

"One of the things is--and I honestly believe this, regardless of the industry that you are in or the job that you take--there is nothing more important than learning how to write a sentence. And that is something that we do here every single day, and we take very seriously," she said. "There's a discipline to the written word that I learned in part at Kent State."

In addition to having sharp writing skills, Charles offers a few other bits of advice for those who want to succeed in the fast-paced dot-com world.

"Don't be afraid of doing something different," she said. This was a message she conveyed to all of her employees during interviews for their positions, she said.

Charles' other piece of advice, though, shines even more light on her personality.

"Get a Far Side calendar," she said, adding that in the dot-com world, you can't take yourself too seriously.

This advice has served Charles and Polysort well, even in the dot-com's short life span. Charles believes that after six years in existence, Polysort is operating smoothly.

"Maybe this is a big puzzle and we're just putting it together piece by piece. Part of it is talent, part of it is technology, a lot of it is energy, and it's really all starting to come together."