My One And Only Successful Foray Into Business: How It Began

It Was A Dark And Stormy Night...

It was in November of 1997 that with the help of a small loan from a neighbor I purchased what at the time was a monthly advertiser with a community calendar. All I received in the transaction was the right to publish under the name. There was no equipment, no computer files, no paper files, and no property.

Books and developed photographs from my newspapering days. Each book contains a year's worth of newspapers.

That meant starting from scratch. It also meant locating a place to set up shop and doing a lot of preliminary work in order to get my very own publication out the door. My intent was to take this advertiser and revert it to a weekly newspaper, like it was several years prior to that. Never mind that the paper had fallen on hard times, had changed hands and then ran at no profit as a community service since.

I was going to make something out of it!

The Workload

I gave it my best shot. For the entire first two years, I did everything. I was publisher, editor, bookkeeper, reporter, layout person, ad salesman and designer, IT guy, receptionist, paper boy and chief bottle washer. In those days, Adobe had a product called PageMaker. It was a pretty good program, but limited compared to what the larger publications used. All I needed was something I could import images and text into so I could layout the newspaper. Then, after printing out sections of each page onto printer paper, I used a grid paper and a light table to piece things together.

In those days, I was easily pulling 80 hour weeks. The internet was dial up. The printer, a place 10 miles away in a neighboring town, didn't have a way to receive it digitally anyway, so I put the files on disk and drove it to the press. I had such a small press run, under 1,000 copies, I didn't have a set press time. They would run it whenever I showed up in between other runs they had. That might mean a wait. Sometimes this happened at 10 pm or midnight. There's a couple of nights I don't know how I got home unharmed since I'm sure I slept during parts of the drive for minutes at a time.

The Brink Of Failure

I'd like to say all of that hard work and determination paid off. The fact of the matter is, even though I had some display advertising, classifieds, subscriptions, and insert sales here and there, the size of my market area, a zip code with around 2,000 addresses and a town off the beaten path with a small but happening business district, just wasn't big enough.

By April of 2000, my grand experiment, my long awaited foray into entrepreneurship, was in jeopardy. I was making enough money to keep the business afloat, but without taking hardly any money out. For a while, my wife went to work at a grocery store part-time to make ends meet. She was hired on as a bagger and to round up the grocery carts and ended up by the time she quit six months later as the assistant to the produce manager, doing most of the work, which meant hauling around 50 lbs-plus boxes and crates of vegetables and fruits. My wife is 4'9" and generally weighs in the neighborhood of 135 lbs.

Needless to say, things weren't looking very good.

A Light And Rebirth

It was sometime in April that I tried one more time to convince a friend of mine, and a former employer, to take me on as a partner, and fold my newspaper in with his under one company. I had taken a run at it twice before, but each time, I was told very nicely no. I don't know why, nor do I know what finally changed, but after taking him to lunch (that might be it) and making my pitch, then following up on the meeting, my friend finally said yes.

It didn't take long after that for life to change completely.

Over the next 18 months, we would hire someone to pick up the papers and distribute them (he had previously hired an office manager who ran the office, answered the phones and did the bookwork), and then went about putting other people in place. At the height of the operation, we had (not counting ourselves) four full-time and two part-time employees, plus four contracted reporters spread across three weekly newspapers and were in the process of buying a fourth.

It was the best year and a half of my adult working life up to that point. I was making more money than I ever had, with the prospect of making more, my friend and I were having fun running the business and relying on others to do their jobs, and for a time, we seemed unstoppable.

And then it all started to unravel.

Newspapers originally published from the 1920s through the 1980s.

Round Two

While going through the books of the fourth paper and doing other due diligence we kept coming up against roadblocks. The paper looked good, the community seemed to welcome it, and most importantly, it was in the largest county we'd operated in to date. That meant the potential of a revenue bonanza through publishing legal notices that would dwarf what we were doing with the other three newspapers. The problem was, the business was in debt, advertisers were deadbeats, and the staff wasn't getting paid. Plus, there was a competing newspaper (which was mainly window dressing and shared news) from a larger newspaper publisher.

In my mind, I thought we could make it work. We could leverage the revenue of the other three newspapers to stop the hemorrhaging of the fourth, while we worked on getting the legal notices. Once that happened, the problems would all be solved.

You see, the secret of our growth and success, and what played at least a roll in my final sales pitch, were the legal notices that our papers published. We were established as papers of general circulation in our counties, which made us eligible to print all kinds of notices for which we were well paid. We grew the number of notices because of low prices and the best customer service available. We intended to follow the model in this fourth newspaper and take over the legal notices in that county.

My friend and partner, though, was not as bullish on the idea as I was. Or at least that's how I remember it. In hindsight, there was much more that could go wrong that might go right, and I don't blame him at all for not feeling comfortable with the acquisition. If anyone, I was to blame for ignoring the warning signs and believing we could overcome any obstacle.

To this day, I think we could have. The one obstacle that we couldn't overcome, though, was a dissolution of the partnership.

The Twilight Zone

It was in October of 2002 that my friend was wanting out. He'd mentioned to me a couple of times about dividing up the papers and going our separate ways. I talked to him about it and thought I had convinced him that we could make this work. His reason for the dissolution was because he felt like his life was to topsy turvy to make business decisions in a more deliberate and analytical way and he was afraid that it would somehow impact my personal situation adversely. To me, splitting up was the only negative.

Finally, around Halloween, he told me it was over. He couldn't do it anymore. After wanting to take the two closest newspapers to where we lived (they served the town we lived in and the next one over), he decided he would take the two that were farthest away, our third and fourth papers (they were easily an hour's drive in either direction). I would keep the building we'd bought together, most of the staff for the two newspapers (he was taking his brother-in-law, the ad salesman with him) and I would continue to pay him what I owed from the merger of our newspapers (his was valued way more than the one I brought in).

Dickens Had It Right

In that short period of time, I went from the worst of times, to the best of times, and then fell again. Granted, it wasn't as far down, but it was the end of any future growth (I couldn't bring on more papers by myself), the end of what I felt was a very dynamic and successful partnership (we really did complement each other well), and the beginning of the end of, to that time, the best friendship I'd ever had.

To this day, I'm convinced I still don't know the entire story. Perhaps I never will. When he finally made up his mind and told me it was over, it was like the wind had been knocked out of me. I'd never experienced that type of emotional reaction before. The only reason I have something to compare it to is because as a young man I fell off my bike and couldn't breathe or speak for what felt like minutes.

These frames contain a copy of the first newspaper printed of the ones I owned—published January 18, 1890.

It all felt a little surreal, all the way through the signing of papers and him saying his goodbyes. We will still see each other at church (up until he and his family moved away) for a while more, and we would still do some things together, but things would never be the same again.

Pick Yourself Up, Dust Yourself Off...

Unfortunately, as far as work and running a business was concerned, I didn't have any time to wallow in self-pity or whatever the emotions I had lingering. There were newspapers to get out, and they weren't going to publish themselves.

TO BE CONTINUED

About This Post

This is the first post of two chronicling my experiences owning my own business. The idea comes from a few discussions @mazzle and I have had regarding his own business, and business in general. All images courtesy of Glen Anthony Albrethsen