Pioneer publisher shares his story at BSM 3rd Anniversary

Pioneer publisher’s success begun with question: “What if I started a magazine without advertising?”

Roy Reiman, the founder of Reiman Publications, was creating social communities—and profiting from them— long before Facebook. Since the debut of Farm Wife magazine in 1965, Reiman hit on a formula for publishing success that combined the best practices of book publishing and social media: Let the readers generate both the content of the magazine, and pay 100% of the costs of it.

Like many entrepreneurs, Reiman cut his teeth on failure. In 1972, he quit his job and launched his first magazine from his basement.
He had managed to convince his wife Bobbi, then pregnant with their fifth child, to invest their nest egg of $6,800 into the magazine. Reiman worked in the basement, typing it on a typewriter propped a TV tray;

Bobbi retyped his copy later to prepare it for print.
The magazine failed, but from it Reiman said he learned a valuable lesson he applied to his later success: how to first test a subscription list.
“We lost $10,000 on it...but that proved to be my Master’s Degree in Journalism,” Reiman said.

When he used this experience to start his second magazine, Farm Wife News, at $5.00 per subscription, it was such a hit that Reiman couldn’t keep up with the demand, he said.
“We were receiving envelopes with $5 bills in them…one time we drove to the bank with $9,000 in cash in the car.

“The magazine was basically written by the readers…they sent us letters and we shared the best of them with subscribers,” he said. “I would describe us as a sort of a ‘distribution center’ for conversations among farm women.”

To learn more about Roy's book and purchase a copy, click here.

Below is a list of management tips he shared with the audience.
• Keep meetings to a minimum. Standing company meetings are the curse of modern business.
• You can’t run a company by committee; leaders must “set sail and get going.”
• Get rid of organization charts.
• Don’t set strict budgets; budgets kill ideas and creativity
• Employ the 50% rule: when your company gets into the 50% bracket, take bigger risks.
• Know your audience, how they talk, and listen to them.
• Don’t be a big shot. We never had a reserved parking spot.
• Don’t do business with people you don’t like. Never hire someone you don’t like, and don’t buy from anyone you don’t like.
• Catch people doing something right; you can never over-compliment someone.
• When the media contacts you for comment, ask for a list of questions via email, that way you are in control and have a document of what you say.
• When in doubt, leave it out.
 

Inspirational Entrepreneur Roy Reiman's Full Speech

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