Eric Crown

Eric J. Crown (born 1962 in Rome, New York), is the co-founder and current Chairman Emeritus of the Tempe, Arizona based Insight Enterprises.

Eric Crown was born in New York and studied at the Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business. He received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems in 1984. In his senior year, he was given a project in Entrepreneurship class in which he had to develop a business plan for a potential business. His business plan was for a company that would later become the precursor to Insight.

In 1986, Eric Crown and his brother Tim Crown obtained a $2,000 advance on a credit card, enabling them to place a single advertisement in Computer Shopper, a computer parts magazine. The brothers wrote an advertisement and sent it to Computer Shopper for them to publish in their next magazine issue. At the time that the brothers wrote the advertisement, they were advertising a hard drive for a sales price that was less than the cost of purchasing the hard drive from a supplier. They were gambling that, in the 20 days it would take to publish the magazine issue, the cost of a hard drive from a supplier would decrease so that it would be less than the selling price that they wrote in the advertisement. The gamble succeeded, as prices fell below the advertised price, and Hard Drives International became well known for having the lowest prices on hard drives.

Given the success of the Hard Drives International model, the brothers repeated the strategy and altered the business by changing the name of the company to Insight Direct, Inc..

Originally, Insight attracted customers through advertising and the use of inbound toll-free telephone lines. In 1993, the company expanded its marketing mix to include catalogs and added outbound telephone account executives to focus on establishing a larger customer base. The company eventually became a large catalog company that mailed tens of millions of product booklets annually. In 1995, Insight debuted on the World Wide Web.

In 1995, the company went public and became a whole-owned subsidiary of Insight Enterprises, Inc. Upon becoming a public company, Insight Enterprises, Inc.'s annual revenue was approximately 200 million.

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