They say if you want to get the fruit, you have to go out on a limb. But, isn’t that where the nuts are, too?
After more than seven years working with RV Trade Digest, I have opted to pursue a new opportunity. This one essentially came out of the blue and through an interesting twist of circumstances. It is fraught with uncertainty which should help me relate much better to the business owners who will be reading the publications.
RV Trade Digest was a great magazine staffed by great people. It was truly a pleasure to work for that publication for so many years. But, RV Trade Digest is just one magazine in a stable of nearly 70 publications owned by Cygnus Business Media. For many years, Cygnus was a great company for which to work. What separated Cygnus from other publishing companies was the fact its sales and editorial staff were intimately familiar with the magazine’s readers and the markets they served. The former president of the Cygnus publishing division once commented that he would see an editor in the hallway and ask how things were going in a particular industry and the editor would respond, “Well, the dealers I talked to last week said….” That is the mark of a great publishing company – direct involvement with the industry in which it serves.
But, Cygnus is owned by another firm which is operated not much differently than a neighborhood payday loan center. For them, it’s all about the money. The corporate executives in Boston could care less what the critical issues are affecting the RV industry or any of the markets their publications serve. People are an expense, not a resource. Travel is an expense, not an opportunity to meet with clients or readers and learn more about the market and their businesses.
We would often develop some exceptional editorial content for the magazine that would include important market information or provide great ideas for improving business management. But because corporate templates dictated a specific advertising-to-editorial ratio, the material never saw the light of day – and our readers lost as a result.
At the end of the year, the discussion often centered not on what opportunities we could take advantage of or create in going forward, or how to best serve our readers and advertisers. Rather, the discussion centered on how much money can be extracted from an industry without making any corresponding investments.
In another blog, I once wrote about the the New Corporate America in which achieving 110 percent of a goal is failure. That’s the type of company that owns Cygnus. They would dump people who had loyally worked for the company for years simply because they weren’t making enough fast enough. In fact, although the company had grown to keep pace with the market in 2007, because Cygnus had not outperformed the market, every employee was handed a 7.5 percent pay reduction in September. It’s no secret. You can read about it at Paul Conley’s blogs here and here. It’s hard to remain motivated in that type of environment.
Then, in a downsizing move in July, Cygnus opted to eliminate one of our sister publications, Scenic Route which wasn’t making as much money as they thought it should. Since the publication was actually owned by Route 66 dealers, the network was forced to look elsewhere to get their magazine published. By tapping into their network of RV industry resources, Route 66 eventually found Milo Media, a young publishing company also located in Fort Atkinson, Wis., and staffed almost exclusively by Cygnus refugees.
In the weeks that followed, Milo not only agreed to publish Scenic Route, they also opted to create a custom publication division to handle the project. You’ve got to love a small business that seizes upon a single opportunity and uses it as a springboard for bigger and better things. Once Milo secured the Scenic Route publication, they started shopping for an editor.
Ironically, I had approached two of Milo’s employees about an idea I had for creating a network of websites and print publications called the RVinfonet. I had pitched a few of the ideas to Cygnus several months and years earlier, but all had been rejected. Word got around to Mike Domke, the president of Milo Media, that I was shopping an idea at the time they were shopping for an editor. They put one and one together and saw an opportunity.
Unbeknown to me, my boss at RV Trade Digest, Wolfgang Neuwirth, was also pitching an idea to Milo on developing several other publications in the RV and outdoor industries. He had pitched them to the powers that be at Cygnus, who summarily rejected them as “not profitable enough.” But the folks at Milo realized that if they were going to build a division in the outdoor industry, they needed a team of creative people willing to take risks.
As Jerry Seinfeld would say, “One thing lead to another and yada-yada-yada, here we are.” Wolfgang and I both left Cygnus November 23rd. We’ll be at the National RV Show representing Milo Media pitching our ideas for Scenic Route, a new business-to-business publication called RV Industry News, and a few other projects.
It’s refreshing to be involved with a company that is small enough to respond quickly to opportunities as they are presented – and hungry enough to make them work.
Stay tuned, folks, this could get very interesting very quickly.
