2008: From Clueless to 10x Revenue in Six Weeks

PS: Turning a small project into a big opportunity through shared vision

John was an axe man, he cut deadwood, liquidated expensive assets, consolidated teams, and fired people as a profit generating strategy.  

He was a mercenary not a missionary, all business, no relationship.

His role as Publisher of the newspaper meant he owned the P&L and profitability was the name of the game.

I was a tool he needed to use to get a job done.

Out of nowhere, John appeared in my office one day.

“Editorial is almost done; I need you to sell a thousand of these” John said while tossing a binding of 11x17 pages with pictures and red ink scribbles and notes on it. 

“What is it?” I said in surprise and confusion, not really sure what to make of the papers in front of me. When I looked up for a response, he was already walking out and clearly wasn’t there to talk.

“A book” he said over his shoulder as he walked away.

“I don’t know anything about selling a book” I spurted out with a bit of desperation.

“Not my problem”… is all I heard as he disappeared around the corner.

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Happy Sunday Friends,

This is a PS. A personal story linked to GSD.

I tell these personal stories in hopes to inspire you to overcome challenges and get stuff done!

2008 was the year Kung Fu Panda hit the big screen.

It’s the same year Christopher Nolan’s batman movie, The Dark Knight, blew us away with Heath Ledger’s rendition of the Joker.

For me, and thousands of other people, 2008 was the year of Hurricane Ike which hit the community I lived in.

At this time I was working for Hearst Newspapers in one of their markets as the Director of Marketing primarily responsible for their online strategy and alternative revenue sources.  Which is to say, I was not responsible for selling ads in the newspaper or classifieds. But I was responsible for generating digital ad revenue and all other revenue not in the daily newspaper. 

It was a way for me to flex my strengths in digital and technology while exploring how traditional media worked to create leverage for businesses to grow and scale.

In 2005, I exited my e-commerce business and from 2005 to 2008 I brought technology competence and strategy into traditional media, advertising agencies, radio, outdoor, and newspaper.

I was fascinated by this mature industry and my responsibility as marketing director allowed me to do all kinds of interesting projects. 

I had integrated an automotive platform to expand auto ad offerings online, implemented Yahoo’s ad platform for banner ads on the main newspaper website, launched a glossy quarterly society magazine, and worked in partnership with a local radio station to launch the communities first Spanish language weekly paper.

Fish out of water.

The day John dropped the book spreads on my desk and told me we needed to sell a thousand books was the day I felt most exposed. 

Everything else made sense to me. I was enabling sales teams or business owners with a new audience to leverage. I was in the business of bringing value to business owners who could see their business growing because of our products and audience. I understood this.

But a book?

A book, well that was a consumer product - something you got at a bookstore like Barnes and Noble.  It didn’t mean anything to an advertiser or a business owner. 

And for me personally, instead of relying on my sales reps and their relationships with local business owners, I needed to go upstairs and work with writers in the newsroom. I needed to talk to them about their book which editorialized and provided photojournalistic accounts of Hurricane Ike. A massive tragedy we were still recovering from as a community.

This book was for newspaper readers not advertisers.

To make matters worse, Editorial and newsroom people are not fans of the advertising team and they’re quick to let you know that they have zero interest in that press release from that advertising account you have been trying to get in the newspaper. 

Just walking into the newsroom caused side eye glances and sneers. 

In any event, I was on a first name basis with several of the journalist and the editor and I had to get some questions answered so I could make sense of the situation and figure out what to do.

Stakeholder perspectives.

Talking to the editor made it clear the book was part journalistic responsibility to the community to cover the tragedy of the storm and part co-creation with John to create another positive revenue stream. 

Tim, the editor, had zero interest in the revenue and didn’t care about the money aspect of my problem.  But he did show some compassion for me and gave me a rundown on how newspapers will occasionally make books and they were partnering with a company to help them produce this book and he gave me all their information. 

Ok, so new to me, but not necessarily new to newspapers.  Got it.

Walking back downstairs, I talked to the Advertising Director to get her perspective.  She had been in the newspaper business for a couple decades and suggested a few ideas and was largely dismissive saying it was just some motions we needed to go through.  Her perspective was books were not money makers and to not be worried about it, just carry it to the finish line so John can check it off the list and see another line item in the P&L.

Ok, so no real expectations on sales. Got it.

Then I put a call into the company that was working with Tim to produce the book. 

That’s when things really became clear. 

“Coffee table books are our specialty, it’s what we do day in and day out, we don’t do anything else” Brad said as inquired about their role in all this.  Brad was the owner of this publishing outfit, and they provided a turnkey service where they partnered with a newspaper newsroom for content, and they did all the layout, printing, binding, and shipping.  They even included the print ads we would need to run in the newspaper and online to promote the book. 

It was Brad who told me the reason John asked for 1,000 books. 

On the initial call between Brad and John, all he wanted to know was how many books he could we expect to sell and since Brad had our circulation and population data all he had to do was compare it to other markets like us across the hundreds of newspapers they did books for. 

The answer was simple, newspapers like you will sell 1,000 books based on dozens of similar sized projects. It was a numbers game and the turnkey service could be expected to generate those results, I just needed to help them get ads in the paper.

Brad emailed me examples of other books and advertising campaigns promoting the books in the newspaper and their online and printed forms to buy the book.  Since they provided everything from idea to editorial to book to ads getting readers to buy the book, I just needed to help with some basic marketing details and ad specs and they’d handle the rest - end to end.

Fascinating. 

No wonder everyone had such a hands-off view of this project.

Now it was clear to why it was just tossed in my lap.

The newsroom wanted to give the readers something to cover the hurricane.  The publisher wanted an “easy” revenue bump.  The advertising director didn’t want to distract the sales team doing higher revenue work.  This was just a quick turn project.

Unique insights and opportunity

I saw things differently. 

Using my framework vision, intention and means brought an entirely different perspective.  After talking to all the stakeholders, I saw a different endgame in my mind.

Because I was unifying all this and went through the process of understanding all the players involved, what our reasons and vision was, and what we thought success looked like and what resources we would have, I was able to look at the situation clearly to come up with my own vision and strategy.

To help you - let me show you one of my mental models.

I talk about this a lot with the teams and consulting clients I work with. In this case, I’m going to edit some of the model down to highlight the good bits for you as it relates to this story.

When you want to create value and get stuff done, everything we seek to do follows this general sequence. 

We need to see something valuable, an artifact, and we need to have shared knowledge so that we can get some visibility to the situation and establish shared context.  From there, we can activate new ideas and what I call chains of insight that can only come from these pieces coming together.  And from those chains of insight, we activate our imaginations and have clarity that leads to decisive action.

When we apply the vision, intention, means framework alongside this, we will undoubtedly see the opportunity differently. 

This is what I saw:

1. A high quality book that acted as a time capsule for the hurricane.

2. A community deeply impacted who would be telling “the hurricane story” for years if not generations.

3. A newspaper circulation of about 70,000 readers all of whom could be buyers.

4. Ads to promote the book in our newspaper.

5. Near unlimited potential to run ads since we owned the newspaper.

6. A motivated partner who could do creative work such as ads, flyers, and sales sheets because they benefited by selling more books as a part of their turnkey service.

7. An under-realized set of expectations by the publisher and advertising director going through the motions.

8. A large base of business relationships from the newspaper to local businesses who were advertisers.

A better strategy gives better results

My chains of insight and clarity along with the universal pattern of success using vision, intention and means brought me to a very different conclusion about how this project should go. 

Despite being clueless when this started, I was very familiar with getting stuff done, creating growth, and seeing how things come together to create value.

I asked Brad to give me cost levels based on selling 1,000 books, 5,000 books, and 10,000 books so I could understanding the quantity breaks to try and structure packages.

Brad was dubious and said if we sold 5,000 books we would be doing what most major markets did and that they rarely saw 10,000 or more books getting sold unless it was something like a Super Bowl or College sports related book. But he gave me the price list by quantity anyway and offered to support any creative requests I had. 

I framed up some sales material and mocked up some ads for reference. I created a dummy cover so they could visualize the final book.

The first thing I did was go to a large employer in the area and talk to them about this book since their employee base was impacted by the storm.  I presented them the idea of a custom book cover that included their logo and business on the inside jacket of the book cover as well as a letter insert where they could describe their support of employees during the hurricane.  All this could be a gift to their employees.

They loved it and agreed to do 2,500 books. 

Next I went to the owner of a fuel company that owned gas stations in all the local cities and offered a variation on this idea with the emphasis on them having at least 12 books to sell in each location at the cash register.  They would buy it at our discounted cost and sell it at the retail price of $39 and we would run their business locations in all our ads as a destination to get the book.  All they had to do was put in a bulk order.

Free advertising and a profitable markup were an easy yes.  They agreed to buy 1,000 books to resell.

By this point, I was about four weeks into this project and only had a couple weeks left before the newspaper ads would start running. 

I went to the regional director over the Walgreen stores in our community and showed him the early proofs of the book and told him about the ads we would be running to promote destinations to pick up the book and I emphasized how their clientele would expect to find a book like this in their stores as they were picking up their prescriptions and stopping in for their items on the way home.  My angle was to press hard for their role as a neighborhood partner. 

It took no convincing, he saw it immediately.  I asked how many cases he wanted per store and just like that another 3,000 books were sold.

Lastly, with all that, I went to the local grocery store who was a major advertiser and gave the same presentation and asked for books to be in all their locations in the community. 

Another 1,000 books were sold.

There were a few smaller deals but basically the headline is this:

Within about six weeks from learning about a project to sell a thousand books through ads in the newspaper, I had single handedly pre-sold just shy of 10,000 books by partnering with the community businesses and creating a shared experience. 

With the newspaper ads, we sold over 10,000 books and what was originally going to be about $50,000 of revenue for the newspaper ended up being about $500,000.  Ten times what they expected, from a guy who knew nothing about selling books. 

It was a banner success.

I was rewarded by zero bonus and the pleasure of renting a uhaul packed with all about 9,000 books in case packs of 12 books per case. I owned the hand delivering of books to over 100 locations across three days - traveling over 500 miles. This ensured all locations had books on site when the ads began.

Fun times.

Very GSD.

So ask yourself this.

• Have you considered the motivations and success criteria of everyone involved?

• Have you done your part to unify and understand all the information and context so you can create new chains of insight?

• Do you have all three; vision, intention, and means accounted for in your opportunity or problem?

• Have you accepted responsibility for the problem, truly owned it, and turned it into a plan of action?

• Have you looked for other partners who can join your vision and deliver value?

• Can you get over the title and role you have to see the complete picture?

• Can you defy the status quo and offer more value?

Hope something here inspires you on your current work!  Being a practitioner of the GSD way is not easy, but it is rewarding - and not always in the conventional sense.

Keep your chin up. You got this!

#GSD

I appreciate you,

Justin