Dealflicks

When Wycliffe was 21, he was flying high. The company he and his brother were running was doing really well, they bought a million-dollar house, and he was ripping around LA in a shiny new Ferrari.

But when their main client went bankrupt, Wycliffe found himself at an impasse. He went back to UC Berkley to finish his degree — he had dropped out two years earlier when the company took off — and learned valuable lessons in humility and the budgeting.

When Wycliffe started Dealflicks, he knew the company would have to be efficient if it was to be successful, but co-founder and head of sales Kevin Hong took bootstrapping to the max when he traded his Acura TSX for his father’s Toyota Sienna, and turned it into the ultimate sales vehicle: the Dealflicks ManVan.

Hong spends most of his time criss-crossing the country in the ManVan, meeting with theater owners and signing up clients ever since. He also sleeps in it, on a full-sized mattress that he shares with a fellow sales rep, to save money.

“Sometimes we get a lot of flack,” Hong says — but it’s worth it. “Our sales guys work really hard, and sleeping in a van in a Wal-Mart parking lot is not always glamorous.”

Still, it makes for a good story — and one that has paid off, big time.

Hong solidified Dealflicks’ first sale by driving to Gardena Cinema in Los Angeles, meeting with the owners face-to-face, and at one point surprising them with his mother’s homemade scallion pancakes. Since then, more than 500 other theatres locations have also signed up — the vast majority resulting from similar face-to-face interaction, but not all involving Hong’s mother’s now somewhat famous pancakes.