Publisher's Note: Change

There’s no need to restate the perfect storm of challenges our business readers have faced in the last four years. You live them every day, and chances are good that you’ve made some changes in your business over the period, changes that will enable you to overcome future challenges to your business. Because change – and the challenges that come from change – are a given in business management and long term success.

As tough as times have been for IGCs, the world of business-to-business communications has also been slammed by a tsunami of change, perhaps even longer and harder than the garden center retail market. Online and mobile consumption of business and consumer information is mind-boggling today. Newspaper and magazine publishers have been scrambling for a decade to figure out the right “new business model” they need to survive long-term. And thousands of once-thriving publishing businesses have already shut down because they failed to change quickly enough.

The fact is that our magazine – like your business – can’t blithely go along as if nothing is different when, in fact, everything is different. Change, dynamic consumer change, driven by the internet and mobile technology is the most obvious challenge we both face. Less obvious perhaps is that your business success is the reason for Garden Center magazine’s existence. Every IGC that goes out of business has some level of impact on our sustainability. And let’s face it: there have been a lot of IGC business failures over the past four years since GIE Media purchased this magazine.

Admittedly, our business future may be of no concern to you. After all, Garden Center magazine is only one of the five business magazines dedicated to serving your business. But consider this: Garden Center magazine was dead last in a field of five publications (measured by advertising pages and readership) when we purchased it in the fall of 2008. Today, we’re number one by any measure. That’s a tremendous achievement and we’re very grateful for the support readers and advertisers have given us. But, and it’s a big but, we’re now the top publication in a market that’s been experiencing decline for a number of years. That’s a problem for both of us.

All of the above were good reasons for us to take a fresh look at our business model. Intellectually, and instinctively, we reasoned that we’d need to do something more dynamic if we were to have the opportunity to continue our business growth and profitability in this industry. And our business team agreed that that would take some out-of-the-box-thinking, and we reasoned that our starting point was to take a hard look at changes that have been impacting our reader market, as well as changes that will continue to impact our core business model– publishing. And in some way link a common business solution for shared success.

Our first step was to dig deep into our readership to see how various demographic segments of the market were doing. Happily, we found that the top-end of the independent garden center market – those with annual revenues in excess of $500,000 – are actually doing pretty well today. And the more we looked at the demographics of that segment of our readership, the more excited we got. That’s when we really began our out-of-the-box strategizing ... and that changed everything.

In late March we launched A Garden Life, a consumer publication utilizing “tablet” computer technology, mobile technology that is the most forward edge of media communications today.

A Garden Life is a beautiful, innovative, content-rich publication with one simple, practical goal: to direct consumers to our Garden Center magazine readers' businesses. To your business! To do that, we embedded the addresses of thousands of garden center locations (those that agreed to support our magazine launch with in-store point-of-purchase materials) into the magazine search format using geo-coding technology, so our consumer readers could locate their closest independent garden center retail location for product purchases.

I’m pleased to tell you that nearly 10,000 consumers – your customers – downloaded our magazine app in the first month of its launch, and our circulation continues to grow every day. Consumer reader response to A Garden Life has been hugely positive. It’s doing the job we anticipated, which is connecting homeowner consumers to our business reader locations across North America. We hope you agree that we’re onto something good, particularly since it doesn’t cost your business a dime!

Phase one of our business strategy was a success, but it was painful trying to manage the business development of A Garden Life and its linkage with Garden Center magazine with an expanded editorial staff based in Cleveland, Ohio, and our Garden Center magazine staff based in Ft. Worth, Texas, particularily since our innovative digital technology and graphic design staff are based in Cleveland. We ultimately came to the decision that in order to expand the development of A Garden Life and its critical strategic connection with Garden Center magazine, we needed to rethink our internal business structure.

After nearly four years of publishing Garden Center magazine from a remote office in Ft. Worth, Texas, we simply found that we could not execute our new business model successfully from two locations. And unfortunately, as a result, we had to move forward without the talents of editors Yale Youngblood and Sarah Martinez, and marketer Tiffany O’Kelley, all of whom have deep personal roots in Texas, and it absolutely stinks to lose them. But I’m also here to tell you that we’ve been fortunate to bring several new talents to our Ohio publishing team, individuals that add important expansion to our horticultural business team, which was already the largest and most talented communications team serving horticultural markets today.

Karen Varga has come to us with successful horticultural journalism experience serving growers in the Latin American market as managing editor of Productores de Hortalizas magazine. Kate Spirgen comes to us also with impressive journalism and consumer news reporting experience. Both of these professionals are skilled in the latest social media communications which is so very important to every business today. Karen and Kate are joined by the marketing and communications talents of associate publisher Jim Gilbride, and account manager, Matt Beirne; they collectively form the core of the Ohio staff dedicated to Garden Center magazine.

A Garden Life is led by managing editor Heather Tunstall. Heather’s been with GIE for six years ... a talented journalist and lead content manager of GIE’s Interactive Media Group. Heather’s content development resources include working closely with Karen and Kate as well as with nine additional staff editors that comprise our horticultural market editorial team based in our Cleveland, Ohio offices. Collectively we have 12 talented editors serving the golf course, landscape contractor, greenhouse, nursery and garden center markets. It’s a great team of editorial talent ... committed to personal excellence, and excited by the bold changes we’re initiating to serve your business success and our continued growth of the garden center market.

As a media communications team, we’re energized and motivated by the pace of change in business today, and we think that the new technology that’s changing consumer behavior today is filled with opportunity for our business, and yours. How do you see it?

rfoster@gie.net