Company: Stroll, Philadelphia, PA
Company Description: Stroll is a next-generation marketing analytics and advanced internet marketing platform committed to driving triple-digit growth for the products we own or license.
Nomination Category: Company / Organization Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Fastest-Growing Company of the Year - Up to 2,500 Employees

Nomination Title: Stroll

Tell the story about what this nominated organization achieved since January 1 2012 (up to 525 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes. Begin this section with the following two lines: Year over year revenue growth (%): Year over year employee growth (%):

Year over year revenue growth (%): 143.
Year over year employee growth (%):3.

Stroll is a next-generation e-commerce platform company which uses proprietary analytical marketing methods to sell educational products to consumers. Revenue grew from $35.1 million in 2011, to $84.9 million in 2012. By 2020, Stroll aims to exceed $1 billion in revenue through organic and inorganic growth.

Stroll is a professionally managed organization with 126 employees.

The company has taken an all-but-forgotten, yet highly effective language learning tool, The Pimsleur Approach, and transformed it into the second best selling product in its category. In the midst of the dot-com bust, in 2000,  founder Dan Roitman bootstrapped start-up with $70,000 of credit card financing. The 34-year old has created one of America’s fastest growing companies by winning significant market share from a publicly traded, well-funded, and well-known competitor, Rosetta Stone.  

Stroll’s financials goals are focused on contribution margin. In that sense, the entire company is focused on profit-maximizing activities, not just revenue. As a result of this focus, Stroll grew 143% in 2012, while profit grew approximately 230%. One month of growth for Stroll is akin to one year of growth for most other companies. The management team develops quarterly operating plans and generally re-forecasts and re-budgets every two months by using a sophisticated financial model that has been refined over the past six years to manage cash on a dynamic basis. That provides the management with tremendous visibility into the business and allows them to react quickly to new opportunities.

The greatest challenge Stroll faced was during the recession when its bank became impaired and withdrew its commitment to double Stroll’s line of credit. Even when profitable, Stroll’s rate of growth requires capital. Roitman spent over a year finding a new bank to provide the capital needed to fund Stroll’s aggressive growth and expansion.  When the banks developed issues, Stroll’s marketing simply couldn’t be funded at the historic trajectory, so growth was only 2% between 2009 and 2010.  Stroll talked to more than 170 financial institutions during that period and finally secured the money needed to jumpstart growth in 2011. In essence, the company lost a year as a result. On a positive note, it lined up the working capital needed for the foreseeable future and developed new capital relationships which will support future needs.

The company has a fundamental commitment to constant optimization, or the ability to continually make small incremental improvements that compound over time to deliver triple-digit growth.  The tremendous growth in 2012 has allowed the management team to focus, this year, on both rapidly expanding its language learning line, and cultivating expansion opportunities into other educational verticals.

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Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader of this nominated organization:

Daniel M. Roitman, Founder and CEO, is responsible for the broad corporate vision, the Company’s commitment to analytics and web optimization, and overall execution. Roitman founded Stroll in 2000 while a senior in college and has led the firm from startup to its present status as of one of the leading internet retailers of lifestyle information products. In 2012, Roitman was named Ernst & Young Entreprenuer of the Year in the Philadelphia region. Stroll has been named one of the fastest-growing companies in America by Inc. Magazine and has been recognized for five years in a row on its Inc 5000 list. Stroll has also received honors such as: Future 50, Deloitte Fast 500, Philadlephia 100 (5 years in a row), and numerous other awards.

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