BusinessReport.com

He’s only 21, but Frank Zondlo has scraped bottom more than once in his pursuit of wealth and influence. The absolute low point might have been spending the night on the floor at a Salvation Army in a sketchy neighborhood of Mobile, Ala., trying to get a little sleep while hoping not to get rolled for that last $300 hidden in his shoe. Zondlo’s a confident guy, but dropping out of high school to strike out on his own couldn’t have felt like such a great decision at that moment.

“There’s always that doubt,” he says. “You can’t get rid of that doubt.”

Zondlo is the founder of BasixCo, a Web design, development and consulting firm in Baton Rouge, and a creator of WAKI TV—or Watch and Know It TV—a YouTube-like online database of educational films. The Destin, Fla., native dropped out of high school when he turned 18, feeling that formal education wasn’t getting him any closer to his goal of being the next Richard Branson or Bill Gates. Zondlo was a senior and on track to graduate, but he was also rebellious and impatient to prove himself.

“In retrospect, it doesn’t seem like the brightest thing in the world,” he admits, but says limiting his options may have helped his motivation. “If you want to achieve greatness and really realize your dreams, then you have to put it all on the line.”

Zondlo had little money and no transportation except his mom’s pink bicycle, which got him to and from his job busing tables at O’Charley’s. He scraped together $100 for a 1984 or 1988 [he’s not sure which] Dodge Shadow. It came without a key, had over a million miles on it according to the seller, was missing about 80% of its paint, and had a driver’s side door that wouldn’t latch closed [he fixed that problem with duct tape].

Zondlo has always been good with computers. The car was supposed to get him to Houston, where he had a lead on an IT job. He knew he’d need a roommate and found a friend willing to go as far as Baton Rouge. The plan was to save up money for a few months before moving on.

A few days after Zondlo got here, he drove home to drop off a cousin and pick up some money from his mother; on the way back, he got sandwiched in a seven-car pileup on the Interstate 10 causeway just east of Mobile. It happened to be Mardi Gras, and all the hotels had jacked up their rates, necessitating the overnight stay at the Salvation Army. On the bus ride home, he decided he was stuck in Baton Rouge for the foreseeable future.

Zondlo worked a few low-paying jobs before catching on as an IT consultant and later an assistant administrator at Interventional Pain Management Center on Bluebonnet Boulevard. He worked there about a year and spent his nights and weekends honing his Web design skills. About a year and a half ago, it was time to start his own company, although he didn’t have nearly enough credit history for a bank loan. Luckily, a few credit card companies weren’t so picky; Zondlo was able to get three cards, which he promptly maxed out to the tune of $20,000 or so. After about six months, he hired his first employees.

He currently employs two people, including Andy Huynh, 21, who Zondlo says will eventually be a partner in the business. Huynh was working a job he hated and trying to get a photography business going when Zondlo offered him a job. Huynh’s response was, basically, “Why not?”

“He’s one of the smartest individuals I’ve ever met in my lifetime, so I figured he knew what he was doing,” Huynh says. He says business has more than doubled since he started about six months or so ago. They’ve since moved from Zondlo’s apartment to a sparsely furnished office suite near Sherwood Forest Boulevard, and their clients range from a home-based knitting shop to a steel fabricator.

Zondlo says they come up with blueprints of every main page for a potential Web site before they start building it, which he says costs a bit more up front but generally ends up saving the clients money and helps ensure they get what they want.

Zondlo’s father is a doctor, and his mother is a speech pathologist, so it’s fair to say they have a healthy respect for formal education. His mother, Luz Zondlo, was “extremely worried” when her son dropped out of school, but knowing him like she did, she realized she wasn’t going to talk him out of it.

“He wanted to prove to himself and to us that he could do it in a different way,” she says. “He worked very hard, and was willing to start from nothing.”

Zondlo says he expects Baton Rouge will host his company’s home office as they expand to other Louisiana cities, and, eventually, nationwide. He doesn’t just want to be obscenely wealthy, he wants to change the world. WAKI TV, which he says received 10,000 original visitors last month, is part of that effort; he sees it as a way to provide free education to a world that doesn’t read very much.

His next goal is expanding into software, particularly medical software. Whoever sets the standard in that arena will be the next Gates, he reckons. Zondlo admires Gates’ philanthropy, and says he’d like to be a force for political change, although he wouldn’t get into specifics.

“If you really want to change things in today’s world,” he says, “you just really need the money.”