A $100 Million Question: Are You Fish or Are You Fowl?
One of the biggest advantages I had in my business education was the mentoring I received from JSN – first, as an editor of financial information, and then, eventually, as his partner.
In the late 1980s, after we had built our newsletter publishing business from a start-up to the second-largest in the industry, I could see he was getting itchy to expand the business horizontally, to get into magazines and TV advertising, but also to begin selling physical products.
I had just begun to read the popular books about business management, and one of the commandments all those gurus seemed to agree on was this“If you get too greedy and grow too quickly by taking on too many different products, or even product types, you will lose your hold on the market and risk a fast slide down to the bottom. The best way to have success and maintain it is to stick to selling the products and services you have always sold because you know those products and how to sell them. In other words, don’t be distracted by all the shiny objects.”
That made perfect sense to me. That was exactly the formula I had taken to bring our business from just a few million when I started to more than $30 million at the time.
And so, whenever JSN brought up the topic of selling anything other than financial newsletters, I’d remind him of this commandment. And because he, too, understood the sense of it, he allowed me to focus on the one thing we knew how to do and were doing.
But then one morning he came into my office, shut the door, and said:
“I’ve been thinking about our conversation about sticking to one product line. But I’ve been thinking about what we both do well and what we like to do, and I don’t think it’s publishing financial information.”
I asked him what he meant. He sat down, learned toward me, and asked what became a game-changing question.
“Mark,” he said. “We have to decide.”
“What?” I said.
“We have to decide whether we are fish or fowl.”
“Meaning?” I said.
“We have to decide whether we are financial publishers or marketers.”
“I thought we were both.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. And then he recounted for me the many conversations we’d had in the previous years – how excited we’d always get when we were figuring out how to position a new product to appeal to current market trends, and how much fun we had writing the advertising campaigns and structuring the offers.
“Yes, those were great conversations,” I admitted.
“Tell me when we ever had so much fun talking about the technical or fundamental aspects of the stock and bond strategies we were selling.”
I shrugged as if to say, “You have a point.”
“We have to decide. Fish or fowl?”
“As in,” I said, “financial publishers or…”
“Or direct-response marketers!”
In truth, I would have preferred to think of myself as a student of stocks and bonds and a publisher of information. “I’m in publishing” always felt good to say when I was asked what I did for a living. “Direct-response marketing” had a very different and much less prestigious ring to it.
But I was a junior partner. I held, at that time, about 20% of the equity and 20% of the voting power. JSN had always been kind (and smart) enough to never allow that to factor into his final decisions. He’d always told me that if I ever gave him a hard “no,” he would respect it, and he always did.
So I never indulged myself in saying no to any of his ideas unless I thought they were seriously dangerous to our business. In this case, I didn’t feel that way. On the contrary, I knew at a gut level that he was right. And so, I acquiesced.
Within twelve months of that conversation, we had sold off all our financial newsletters.
Meanwhile, we were very busy selling all sorts of other things: off-brand perfume and cosmetics; inexpensive watches and jewelry; radios, cassette players, and little, portable TV sets.
And within another year. we were selling betting systems, astrology and psychic counseling, and a magazine about playing the lottery.
We had grown our publishing business from nothing to $30 million in less than seven years. And we were proud of that. But four years later, as “fish” (or was it “fowl?”), our revenues exceeded $130 million!
The story doesn’t end there. I eventually went back into the publishing business – selling financial newsletters, but also selling travel books and magazines, academic books (in English and French), membership clubs, and eventually real estate and hotels. And that part of my career was a ride from a business with revenues of $8 million to $100 million in less than seven years and more than 10 times that much 10 years later.
So today, when people ask me what I do for a living, I say, “Publishing.” But I know in my heart what I really do – and that’s marketing.
Recognizing this has given me a secret power – the understanding that I have the ability to learn how to sell anything, even all sorts of things that seem at the surface to be completely unrelated. And I will always attribute that to that first fish vs. fowl conversation I had with JSN so many years earlier.
Next issue, I’m going to tell you about one of the marketing secrets I learned along the way that has been instrumental in taking and holding a dominant position in many markets. It’s something that I have been doing for so long that I was surprised to learn that one of my major clients – ironically, a financial publisher – was not aware of it.
Stay tuned.
