By JOSEPH QUESNEL
Northern Ontario Business
A successful 18-year-old entrepreneur from New Liskeard maintains he must conceal his age from many of his wealthy international real estate clients in order to grow his online business.
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Christopher Bragg, who recently relocated his business, Ketro, to North Bay, designs and markets an innovative award-winning online site that allows real estate brokers to maintain all of their business information on their own independent Web sites. Bragg only provides ongoing customer support to his clients. The site, he says, automatically updates real estate information, thereby allowing his clients to save on overhead costs.
The 18-year-old estimates that his average client saves about $40 a month by using the site. Real estate brokers, he says, also save money by not having to buy expensive software packages that allow one to edit and update one's own Web pages.
His young age, he says, has caused some potential clients to shy away from him, despite his successful product. Having a progressive company at his age did not even allow him to incorporate his business. Being under 18 when he established his company also prevented him from entering into contracts. As a student, he says he faced, and still continues to face today, numerous financial and regulatory obstacles in setting up and growing his business. Capital, he says, just is not forthcoming for students.
He gained extensive experience in Internet-based applications when he worked at a Sympatico Internet help desk in Haileybury at the age of 16. When Sympatico moved operations to another city, Bragg found work maintaining a Web site for a New Liskeard area real estate company. The site
contained online information on real estate properties.
Bragg, still 16, established his own Web design company called Clismatic Graphic, to handle the site. After Bragg stopped doing the work for the
company, he was given access to the real estate clients from the area. Having to enter all the information by hand, Bragg thought of the idea to develop a completely automated Web site which would eliminate all the unnecessary, repetitive steps of running an individual real estate site.
Emboldened by his idea, Bragg taught himself programming languages in December 2003, and managed to get the site up and running in about four months.
Bragg's opportunity to capitalize on his innovation came when he enrolled in an entrepreneurial studies course in high school. Required to complete a full business plan for his product, Bragg realized its full marketing potential. Bragg also won a contest at his high school for the best business plan.
Around the same time, he learned that the federal government was holding a contest allowing young entrepreneurs to submit a proposal for a summer business. The winner, in turn, would receive full funding for the venture. Acting through a new company he called Ketro, Bragg developed a plan which won him the contest. In 2004, he also went on to win a regional and provincial secondary school business plan competition.
His main market has become the United States, and he now has businesses signing up from Great Britain, Singapore and France, as well as his dominant American market.
Bragg has also entered into several cross-market partnerships with an Internet domain provider. Bragg, who dropped out of high school in Grade 12 to pursue his business, intends to pursue a business degree at Queen's University.
