Hi :) starting a new business and need advice

[melt71]

Hi, I'm a regular lurker but this is my first post!
I've been wanting to start my own business for years, probably about 10 years on and off but I'm finally getting around to it.

I was looking at franchises and came across the mymag and community mag ideas and that kind of thing appealed to me, although not enough to pay the £3.5 fee! I live in a small rural(ish) town and we currently have 3 free publications; one of them a weekly paper which is ok but mainly consists of a property section, one of them is a weekly A4 mag but is printed using newspaper type print and the other is a monthly publication which is rubbish - it could be 10 times better than it is. Both of the magazine's cover a huge area of our county and 80% of the info in them is irrelevant to people in my town. However in my postcode area we have 16000+ residential addresses and 2000+ registered business addresses, so I know that there is a market for a decent publication here. Both of the existing magazines are FULL of advertisers and I'm convinced that advertisers would be willing to pay to advertise in our high quality glossy and reach their target audience (as opposed to people over an hour away).

My partner will be joining me in this venture and will the one concentrating on the advertising, I will be doing the magazine design, website and all of the finance/admin.

Our mag will be a 40 page A5 glossy and to start making a profit we need to sell approx 12.5 pages of adverts. We are 90% of the way through our business plan, we've sorted the printer, priced up delivery via Royal Mail, organised the website (although it has nothing on it yet!) and we have pretty much all of the operational stuff (computer, software, phoneline etc) we need to get started.

so... can you give us any advice?

We are still decided about the legalities of the business; we will need to register for VAT as our income should be over the threshold. We will be visiting an accountant shortly and hopefully he will sort this out for us.

I am currently working 30 hours per week and earn £18k so I will need to register the business as my second job but my partner has cut his hours right down to about 16 per week so that he can go and visit businesses during the day.

Do you think we should become a limited company? Or is that not the best option for our situation. If we should, is it easy to do as I've looked at the Companies House website and it looked...confusing!

ANY advice would be really welcome. I'm having a daily crisis of confidence although most of the time I'm really excited. On the other hand, my partner is totally convinced everything will work out great!


Thanks, Mel

[DuaneJackson]

Hi Mel,

Good luck with it. Magazines are not the easiest businesses to turn a profit from. Although I do know people that have done very well from it.

It sounds like you really need to talk to an accountant. S/he will be able to advise on the best structure for the business (ie, ltd co, partnership, etc).

Most accountants will provide an initial consultation for free.

[melt71]

Hi, thanks for your reply. I can imagine that magazines can be a nightmare at times, we havent even started yet but our prints quotes vary by almost £3k for the same spec!! Which would have meant that we would have had to have sold double the amount of advertising to break even. I anticipate that the first issue will be done at a loss as most businesses won't want to risk us because they cant see the magazine, however, I'm confident that once issue one is out that they will want to advertise in ours rather other publications. Thanks again for your reply.

[DuaneJackson]

No problem. Have you had examples of real mags from both of the printers to see why the cost is so different?

I know two magazines that started at the same time aimed at the same market (they were formed by a falling out at another mag that closed up shop).

Magazine A didn't give a sh*t about it's audience and saw the mag as a money making machine

The owner of Magazine B was very in to the 'scene' and cared about the readership on a personal level.

One has gone on to be a huge success financially and is known by everyone on their target audience.

The other is still ticking over but hasn't made much of an impression.

Care to guess which is which?

Regardless of wether your mag is a finanical success or not, you'e guaranteed to have a whale of a time getting it off the ground. Enjoy it!

[melt71]

Well I hope that our mag will have a balance of wanting to give the readers a quality publication both in print and online with relevant local info, whilst making a nice profit for us!

I think the main difference in the printing prices was firstly the local printers turned out to be very expensive and as I was talking to a printer later on it appears that certain printers are better equipped to print magazines than others, I can't remember what he called it but he very honestly said he wouldn't be able to do the job (he was more of a letterhead/leaflet/small brochure printer). I have seen samples from the one we are going to use and he's doing a proof for us, so it should be ok. The samples were great, even better than I imagined and I can't wait to see our proofs!!

Thanks again for your replies.

[freshventures]

Hi,

We are launching a local magazine with a website to run alongside targeted at our local community.

Our advertising has already been secured for the first 12 months by going out and speaking with the potential advertisers and getting deposits to secure this. It hasn't been easy - its been 6 months of hard work!.

I think our main selling point has been the locally targeted market through the magazine but we also offered website advertising at no extra cost. The website will be a portal for our local area so this is also targeted to the local community and also generated content through forums etc.

If you want any further advice, PM me.

Best of luck!

[amaze]

Sorry to sound negative, but print is VERY hard to make a success from and you really do need a sound niche and be ready for lots of hard work. Having said that "if there is a will there is a way". Be confident, focused and driven and you will hit your targets and more.

Good luck!

[carolb]

Hi Mel

I ran my own local magazine a couple of years ago until my son became ill and I had to give it up. I really enjoyed it even though it was very hard work but when locals gave feedback saying they looked forward to it arriving through their door or businesses called me and said they had received another job/booking it really boosted me.

I'm a little confused about your figures though, are you saying you only need to sell 12.5 pages of ads to make a profit on printing and the RM delivering 18k magazines?

[melt71]

Originally Posted by carolb

Hi Mel

I ran my own local magazine a couple of years ago until my son became ill and I had to give it up. I really enjoyed it even though it was very hard work but when locals gave feedback saying they looked forward to it arriving through their door or businesses called me and said they had received another job/booking it really boosted me.

I'm a little confused about your figures though, are you saying you only need to sell 12.5 pages of ads to make a profit on printing and the RM delivering 18k magazines?

Hi Carol, thanks for your reply. Good to know you actually enjoyed doing the magazine even though it was hard work.

We have a max 30 pages of advert space (it's a 40 page mag) and we need to sell 12.5 of those to pay for the printing costs and royal mail delivery. This is taking into account the maximum discounts (for long term ads) so in other words I've averaged out the figures and took off the maximum discounts that we offer - it leaves us needing to fill 12.5 full pages of ads and once we go above that we're in profit.

We could save a grand by trying to deliver the mag ourselves or get volunteers to do it, but I don't think it will be worth it. One of our selling points will be that it will delivered by royal mail every month to all homes and businesses in our postcode area, so I think it will be worth the money.

I've set my advert rates by comparing prices with other local mags and also using community magazines elsewhere in the UK as a price guide (they have the same distribution figures).

I hope I've got my figures right, I'll be annoyed if I haven't as I've been doing this part of the business plan for about 4 weeks!

I'm moving on to the Marketing part of the business plan tonight so if you have any ideas I would certainly welcome your input I'm especially interested to hear how you got started as I've heard that the most difficult part of the initial selling is that businesses want to 'see' the finished magazine How did you get past that hurdle? We will have a media pack (an 8 page glossy mag) which will look like our magazine and will be the same quality paper. Do you think this will be enough?

Thanks again,

Mel

[cjd]

Who's doing the selling? There are lots of facets to what you're about to do but it seems to me that there are two mission critical ones:

1. content
2. ad sales

All the other stuff about company structure, print runs and distribution will take your time but is straightforward and a given.

I'd highly recommend that before you do anything else you put together a sales pitch to potential advertisers and get out and provisionally sell space. You'll need the detail of what you're doing to have been worked out and you'll need a mocked up first edition. The key thing a potential advertiser needs to know is reach - ie how many people will see their ad.

Reach is not just circulation it's circulation x N where N is the number of people that will read each copy and circulation is the number of copies delivered. For instance there are 2 people in my house that would read it but if you get it into my dental surgery that might be hundreds.

Content is supposed to be king but infact content is cash. You must have local and interesting content otherwise it will be binned as spam but you probably also have to have advertorial or even just blatantly business sponsored articles - get the mix right and you should crawl into profit fairly quickly.