Home-based entrepreneur records success with CDs

Ron Hershey sells compact disk recorders and "burns" CDs - a business he runs out of his home that has pulled in $260,000 in sales so far this year.

His company, rE-source Data Products, Warwick Township, Lancaster County, sells Rimage and other brands of compact disk and digital video disk

Hershey spent seven years as the East Coast sales representative for Duplication Technology, a Boulder, Colo., company that was sold in 1999 to Rimage Corp. of Minneapolis. That change led him to start his own business.

Hershey is embarrassed about firstyear revenues, $85,000 for 11 months in 1999. The next year, RDP pulled in $272,000. He says he'll hire one, maybe two, employees when sales top $750,000.

While CD "burners" can be bought at Circuit City for $129, rE-source Data sells high-production brands, such as Rimage, Primera and Duplication Systems Inc. The better ones automatically load up to 50 CDs and cost $3,500. One high-production model loads 500, records on eight CDs at once and costs $45,000; the top of the line also records on DVDs.

Tony Heath says York County Blind Center bought a printer from rE-source Data Products to paint text and graphics on disktop surfaces. The Blind Center has contracts with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Heath, manager of special projects, says workers assemble the jewel cases, insert the CDs and then shrink-wrap them. They need the printer for the CD labels.

"Ron had the printer delivered here, came in, set it up, installed the software and demonstrated how to use it. He stayed here until we knew how to do that. The place where we got the duplicator, they didn't, so that was a nice thing I liked about what Ron did," he says.

The CD recording business has changed as quickly as other technologies. CDs come in 650 and 700 megabyte formats, playing for 74 minutes and 80 minutes, respectively. A DVD holds 4.7 gigabytes.

A competitor, Russ Diamond, owner of Raintree in Annville, Lebanon County, has burned CDs since the spring of 1997. "The media itself is a lot more stable than it was in the beginning, and the applications and the hardware are more stable and faster," he says.

Raintree bought the earliest Rimage autoloading disk recorder and printer, which ran at twice the speed of the program. Current machines spin 16 times faster. The next generation of recorders will be 24 times faster.

rE-source Data also assembles documents and records disks for clients, Hershey says, and it can sell the brightly colored back cards and front inserts, signs, packages, folders, labels and manuals that give information about the disk or the merchant.

Clients have found unusual uses for disks, Hershey says. The Administrative offices of Pennsylvania Courts in Mechanicsburg, Cumberland County, send CDs with the documents needed to submit a bid on a project. A photodeveloping lab in Reading furnishes CDs to customers who want to print their own photos. A New Jersey bank sends promotional DVDs to 150 branches. The commercials play in kiosks.