Join Trade Organizations

We found our national trade organization soon after we published our first issue. At the annual conference, we met people like us, who didn’t mind that we jumped in with questions before we said hello. We subscribed to several trade publications that proved helpful; they gave us ideas and showed us what things other publications were doing that worked (sometimes we followed up with a phone call to the publisher who’d been written about). The library reference desk is a good place to start looking for trade organizations and publications.

Agree on How to Disagree

Many entrepreneurs start off with more than an idea; they have a partner or two. At the urging of our accountant, we drafted a simple agreement about when to call a halt if things didn’t work out and how to divide the assets or the debts. When my partner’s job responsibilities grew and she had to bow out after three years, the split was amicable.

Homegrown Business
The magazine has grown slowly; it only moved off my dining room table and into an office after three years. Another lesson learned: If you work at home, your business needs its own room. Otherwise, your life and your business will spill over into each other. For most of the time it’s been a labor of love — or a headache that won’t go away — depending on the day. But this year I will finally be able to take out a nice salary and even consider starting a second publication.

Lunch a Bunch

For the price of lunch, we hired many private consultants. For example, over soup and salad with an ad agency media buyer we set our rates for ads. During lunch with the owner of a business weekly we learned how to hire and pay advertising salesmen. (Note: We generally treated our consultants to restaurants with white tablecloths.)

Write a Marketing Plan

After we published our first issue, we put together a marketing plan. For demographics, we called schools for enrollment figures, got birthrate statistics from the state health department and census figures from the regional economic-development agency. A survey in the magazine generated a profile of our typical reader.

We worried about putting it all down in the proper format, but we found that the most important thing is to get it on paper — unless, of course, you are presenting it to a bank or other lender. (Although we never actually did it, the exercise of writing a business plan would have helped us clarify our ideas, pinpoint our weaknesses and generally would have saved us time.)

Define the Business

Shock set in when we realized that those enthusiastic readers were not the first market we needed to tap. Prototype in hand, we found ourselves in the business of selling advertising. That’s when we discovered that both of us loved producing the product and neither of us knew anything about sales or liked doing it. Lesson learned: If you’ve got a partner, make sure at least one of you knows how to bring in the money month after month.