November 27, 2000
Special Report - Breakaway: Focus on Small Business

Erasing Barriers
On the Web, customers see products -- not physical disabilities

By BETH CROWLEY

With one client lined up, and little else to go on but an entrepreneurial dream, John Harris rolled his wheelchair into his boss's office at Cincinnati advertising firm Hensley, Segal & Renesehler and gave notice.

He had been nursing an idea for years: getting out of traditional advertising and pursuing Web design. After quitting, he figured he was well on his way -- but an hour later, his client called. A big project had fallen through, and they weren't going to be able to pursue the project with Mr. Harris. He had no business and only a spare bedroom in his parents' house for an office. He began to wonder if he had done the right thing.

Now, nearly four years later, Mr. Harris's company, ViewSource Media -- which has since moved into 2,500-square-foot offices and taken on 14 employees -- may reach $2 million in revenue.

One secret to that success was Mr. Harris's resilience. He says he first developed the "ability to respond positively to different types of circumstances" growing up with a brittle bone disorder called orthogenesis imperfecta. The disease, which causes his bones to break easily -- sometimes even from a sneeze -- has kept Mr. Harris in a motorized wheelchair for most of his 35 years.

"Without knowing it, really, it prepared me for adverse situations in the cycle of business," he says. "For instance, growing up, everything is going along fine, and you break a bone, and you're immobile for three weeks and you have to change the whole way you operate. In business, you have changing market conditions, you lose a big client, you land a big client, and you have to change the way you think at a moment's notice. You have to adapt very quickly."

Net Resources
Another big boon has been the Internet itself. For one thing, there's ease of use. Mr. Harris, for instance, likes the convenience of computer and Web-page design, which requires less physical exertion than traditional cut-and-paste design.

More broadly, advocates for the disabled say that online ventures give the disabled a chance to launch entrepreneurial dreams. "For one thing, the disability is not visible," says Speed Davis, public-affairs specialist and co-director of the small-business programs at the President's Committee on the Employment of People with Disabilities.

Often, it is as hard, or even harder, for disabled people to work around people's perceptions of them as incapable or deficient as it is to overcome an actual disability. The Internet blindfolds business partners to physical appearance. By the time the e-partners meet, the physical disability is irrelevant.

"When you communicate with people over the Internet, all they see is the ability to communicate," adds Marian Vessels of the Americans with Disabilities Act information center.

"To a population that is often physically as well as socially isolated, [computer technology and the Internet] can offer access to information, social interaction, cultural activities, employment opportunities, and consumer goods," adds H. Stephen Kaye, writing in an article for the U.S. Department of Education's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research in July 2000.

Mr. Harris doesn't work to mask his disability. "It's part of me," he says. Pictures of President Roosevelt hiding his wheelchair make Mr. Harris "sad," he says. "That was a part of him, and it didn't diminish him or his abilities as a leader."

While Mr. Harris says his disability gets him noticed, it's not a major factor to employees and clients of ViewSource. "I might be the only one in the room in a wheelchair, and 3 feet tall and 40 pounds," he says. "But it's my job to make sure that I am projecting not 'disability,' but rather 'ability,' effectiveness, leadership and professionalism."

John Bookser Feister, ViewSource's first client, says Mr. Harris has high standards for design. According to Mr. Feister, 1,500 Catholic churches use the Saint of the Day and Minute Meditation icons that Mr. Harris designed. "John had the nerve to say, 'It needs to be beautiful,'" says Mr. Feister, editor of AmericanCatholic.org, an online venture by a Cincinnati-based Catholic publishing house. "You'll see a lot of really boring, dreadful stuff [online], and then a really beautiful Saint of the Day Logo or Minute Meditation. John did those."

WGUC, a classical-music public radio station in Cincinnati, hired ViewSource in the spring of last year. During the membership drive a month later, the station raised $10,000 online through its new Web site, which also offers features such as "What's Playing," to help listeners identify the song being broadcast.

'Why Not Learn to Live?'
These days, Mr. Harris has the regret of many an entrepreneur -- more of his time is spent on the demands of managing his business of 14 employees, rather than the design work that drew him to the field. "It's funny," he says. "The reasons I started the business and the passion I had for what I did is not what I spend most of my time doing. I love the Internet business, design, marketing, e-commerce and e-business."

But Mr. Harris has overcome more daunting obstacles in his quest to design. For his entrepreneurial can-do attitude, he credits his mother, who once told him, "John, you're never going to play football, but that doesn't mean you can't own the team." Nancy Harris wanted her son engaged with the world, even when others tried to protect and isolate him. "She said I'm going to get hurt anyway, so why not interact with people, because that's what life's all about. Why not learn to live? And that shaped me."

When Mr. Harris, who has never been able to walk, was old enough for school, he was     designated to attend a special school for children with disabilities. But Mrs. Harris wanted John at the local school, which was not wheelchair-accessible. So she drove him to school every day, volunteered in the office while he was in class, and carried him from room to room when classes changed.

Mr. Harris enjoyed art in high school, but he didn't think he could make a living at it. Then a college recruiter came to his high school to talk about a graphic-design curriculum, and Mr. Harris "fell in love... the persuading aspect of it was fascinating to me."

Mr. Harris went to two art schools, where he came to love the whole process of design -- creating the image, developing the concept, producing it and engaging the audience. But some of the physical  requirements of graphic design made it difficult for Mr. Harris, and he seriously considered switching careers and going into accounting.

"Back then, graphic design was very manual," he says. Such tasks as pasting up photos or using a knife to cut galleys proved difficult.

Still, his love of the work won out. After school, he landed several design jobs -- and then began to realize that everything he was doing would be needed on the Internet, too.

It seemed a perfect fit. "I had always had an interest in both design and technology," he says. "I can get excited over technology solutions and I can get excited over design solutions, and blending those is what I love."

At the start, Mr. Harris got some more help from mom. She helped answer phones when ViewSource was a start-up in 1997 -- and now she keeps the books and sometimes drives Mr. Harris to work. "I don't know how I can ever repay her for that," he says. "It makes the national debt look like nothing."

Now Mr. Harris looks at the world through the eyes of an entrepreneur. Upon hearing that Johnson & Johnson is testing a new motorized wheelchair that may be able to climb stairs, Mr. Harris sees an opportunity. "I not only would like to use" the chair, he says, but he'd "also like to have it as a ViewSource client."

--Ms. Crowley is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's Washington, D.C., bureau.
Write to Beth Crowley at beth.crowley@wsj.com 5