Knowland Group became one of the fastest-growing companies by taking photos of signs

One of the best things about writing Value Added is that I discover niche businesses that astonish me.

Take the Knowland Group.

The McLean-based company has 400 researchers - I'll call them spies - walking into hotels around the world and taking photos of the lobby signs that tell the hotel visitors which meetings are taking place that day and what meeting rooms they are located in.

You've seen those signs. They're called "readerboards."

Readerboards are flat-screen displays or signs that post things like "American Academy of Pediatricians, Grand Central Room, 10 a.m. to noon."

Armed with digital cameras, Knowland's army captures the data and uploads thousands of photos a day to the company's squad of techies. From a situation room in India, those techies collect as many as 10,000 photographs and plug them into the Knowland Web site, where 2,700 hotel clients - Marriotts and Hyatts, Hiltons and Holiday Inns - can see who is meeting where and perhaps recruit the groups to their hotel next year.

"We have 400 guys walking into lobbies of 3,500 hotels and looking at the readerboard," said Knowland co-founder and chief executive Michael McKean. Each researcher is a part-time contractor who visits between five and 25 hotels a day. "They are running from Anchorage to San Juan, from Nova Scotia to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico."

The average hotel pays $350 or $400 a month to get Knowland's readerboard service. But the company also has expanded, adding other options including a service that finds the meeting planner, association executive or decision maker who has the say on where a given association will hold its next meeting. Knowland even has a sales force that will call that decision maker and woo the person for a hotel.

Knowland, with 68 full-timers, is growing like crazy. For the second year in a row, it has made Inc. magazine's list of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the United States. Knowland expects more than $9 million in revenue this year, on which it says it will earn a profit of about 20 percent - or somewhere around $2 million.

McKean's story of how he invented Knowland is right out of the self-starter's playbook.

The 40-year-old Arlington native studied economics and political science at the University of Colorado, but he was bartending at the Fish Market in Old Town Alexandria in the mid-1990s because he couldn't find a better job.

"Me and a roommate were sitting on a couch, and I looked at the Washington Post help wanted section and there were 34 pages of classified ads for software code writers," McKean said. So he began reading computer books and found that he had a talent for writing software code. He enrolled in a master's program in information systems at George Mason University, but he quit to go work on his own.