Successful Publishers: Developing Your Business

Posted on April 27, 2017

Launching a new magazine is unquestionably the most challenging part of a publisher’s climb to success. Once you’ve conquered that peak, you’ll focus on production, advertisers, and marketing. But what happens once you have reached that plateau? For the most industrious, the next horizon is developing your business. But where to start?

Taking the Delegation Leap

In this five part series, we’ll offer you several highly effective and proven methods for expanding and growing your new publishing business. Let’s start with that dirty “D” word, delegation. Or, to be more specific-hiring help.

Doubling Your Profits

Once the income starts flowing in (and sometimes before), it’s wise to seek outside sales people or even administrative assistance. I know, the idea of spending more of your hard-earned dollars might sound less than appealing, but consider the long-game.

You’re the best judge of exactly what type of help you need, or will benefit your profits the most. For instance, hiring someone to help you cover your sales territory might cost you a small percentage of your income, but it could also conceivably more than double your profits. How many more sales meetings, contacts, and word-of-mouth could be generated? There are many capable, dynamic and motivated people out there happy to work on commission.

Accounting For Weaknesses

On the other hand, if you’re not ready to let go of that aspect of your business, maybe hiring someone to handle some of your administrative tasks might be the answer. Think of the additional time you could devote to networking, meetings, and other sales opportunities. Best of all, in most major cities, you can probably coordinate with a local university to offer an internship and get this help for free or next to nothing.

For the true entrepreneur, both of these suggestions are the answer to breaking into the next level.

Onward and Upward

The point is, you are one person with a finite number of hours every day. By adding additional bodies (and by the way brains with possibly good ideas) to your “staff” you will do what every thriving new business does, GROW!

Within our own organization we have several publishers who have already discovered this secret and are consistently logging in record sales.
Divide and conquer is a tried and true method of achieving virtually any goal, and building a publishing business is certainly one of them.

Next time, we’ll talk about Annual and Special Issues.