Start-up Priceless Legacy aims to preserve personal histories

by Mike Orren

DALLAS — Peter Gudmundsson, CEO of Dallas-based collectibles powerhouse Beckett Media, left his post last month to start a new company devoted to a different kind of memories: those of ordinary people. Priceless Legacy " helps individuals, families and organizations preserve and celebrate their life legacies for the benefit of future generations."

Gudmundsson says that he'd been studying the marketplace for more than a year after learning about the burgeoning "personal history" industry from someone who was interviewing for a job. Intrigued, he joined the Association of Personal Historians and started thinking about a business that could serve this large and scattered market.

"The company is dedicated to helping people, mostly older men and women, preserve their life stories in book and audio form," Gudmundsson says. "Our products are beautiful full color custom published books and DVD sets that we call a 'LifeStory Package.' The products are sold and serviced in the field by part-time independent representatives called Legacy Consultants. These LCs meet with clients and subjects to interview them and organize and scan photos. We collect those materials at the corporate level via the Internet to create beautiful books that the subject’s family members (many not yet born) will cherish forever. The LCs do not have to have professional writing skills. The text is simple first person narrative."

The company has four employees and financial backing from Hunt Ventures and some angel investors. They have a dozen Legacy Consultants in their beta test and are looking for more. They say they're seeking "women and men who are looking to make good incremental income doing something they really love."

Although the company product is in beta, Gudmundsson says that he's gotten feedback from personal historians already active in the market that they'd seen a need for someone to create a more branded, scalable and high-quality mechanism for their work. "We will take advantage of scale to offer a better product at a much lower price," Gudmundsson says. "And the direct sales force will evangelize the concept of life story capture in such a way that will benefit the existing historians too."

Gudmundsson is unfazed by the prospect of starting up in the current cruddy economy. On the company's blog, he writes that "Priceless Legacy and the capture of LifeStories is a company and a cause that cannot wait. It is a sad fact that our elders grow old and someday die. The timing of their passing is not regulated by Wall Street and the economy but by forces far beyond our terrestrial understanding."

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