Cool Companies

Canadian entrepreneur and founder of Cool Companies Inc, Claudia Sammer,
blogs about growing the magazine and company

Cool Companies magazine was invited to be a contributing sponsor at the YPO event on innovation last week in Toronto. YPO is an exclusive networking club for business leaders. You have be under 55, have a company with $8 million in revenue and about 50 employees. There’s about 1,500 YPO members in Canada and 10,000 members globally. I’ve always wanted to know first-hand what happens at an YPO event. Needless to say, the content of the event was fantastic. I also had the chance to meet some YPO members in Toronto. You wouldn’t believe the CEOs and Presidents in this crowd.

It’s funny though how the unexpected and extra things around an event you are making a big trip for can turn out to really make a trip special. Several of those things made this trip an awesome learning experience for me.

As soon as I found out I was going to this event in Toronto, I decided to ensure my own luck and called 2 Toronto-based publishing experts – mentors – to see if I could meet with them the next day after the event. I’m really glad I did. Each of these guys started a magazine from scratch, just like I’m doing, and built it into a big success. They gave me insights into my magazine and business that will save me a lot of time and frustration. I’m very grateful.

One of those publishing mentors I had met through a Canadian business professor that is one of our readers and a fan of our magazine. I was a little nervous cold calling this potential mentor – he’s a Canadian publishing legend – but I found the courage because without guts you never achieve what you really want. We hit it off in that first call. I started our conversation with a few burning questions I had been thinking hard about. These weren’t the type of questions that have answers written in books. After that initial call, I talked to him on the phone a few times and met him in person in last summer. He’s a super great guy that knows a hell of a lot about publishing and writes like a god. Hopefully he will write and edit for Cool Companies magazine soon too.

The other publishing mentor I had only talked to twice before. I picked him because I really love how inviting his magazine is and the high quality of its content. That’s what made me think he was the right mentor for me. In my first call, I explained that I liked his magazine, told him a little about our magazine and that I was looking for a publishing mentor. I said I would send him a copy of our current issue and call him back in a few weeks to see if he wanted to chat. No obligations.

I’m sure glad he liked our magazine. When I did followup with him early this January I asked if he wanted to meet me and we arranged to have lunch in downtown Toronto. This mentor was every bit as amazing as I thought he would be and more. What makes him really special for me though is that his magazine and company has style and soul. He cares a lot about what he’s doing and how he does it. He has a lot to be proud of – a high quality magazine his readers love and a company his employees love to work in. His story of how he grew his magazine and company was heart-warming and inspirational. He’s now my role model. And, yes I’m going to take his advice on how to grow our magazine – well, a lot of it anyway.

I think that’s another thing I look for in a mentor – someone that shares my approach to business. Actually I look for this with everyone. People are the key. So, another benefit of having mentors is that, if they share the same values you do, it helps you better visualize what your company will be like in the near future. Visualizing where you want to be is an important part of being an entrepreneur.

Mentors might not have grown their business exactly the way you think you’ll do it – where would the fun be in that anyway? For example, both of these Toronto mentors had investors and started with controlled circulation (free magazines) before converting to a paid circulation model (where subscribers love the magazine so much that they purchase a subscription). At the moment, those are hard ideas for me to accept into Cool Companies’ business model. One of the reasons for that is that I’ve got some advantages – new potential publishing innovations maybe – that they didn’t have. I want to test out those advantages first.

Another great thing that happens when you talk to mentors is that you usually walk away with an increase in your own confidence about yourself and your business. This might seem counterintuitive because good mentors will find your weaknesses and potential problems. But they also open your eyes to a new world of thinking that takes your game to a new level of professionalism. I love having my mind bent like that.

The increased confidence comes in unexpected ways through conversations with mentors when you discover that you are doing things very right too. For example, my new mentor said he liked that I think things through (long term strategic thinking) and that I’m focused on building our brand. These assets have served him well in his magazine. I have also been using a marketing technique to acquire readers that I found because it made sense to me to do it that way. I had no idea it was an innovation in publishing and is one of the reasons my mentor’s magazine enjoys such a high retention rate (lots of happy readers who want to continue being magazine subscribers every year).

The day to day life of an entrepreneur can also be pretty lonely sometimes. To a non-entrepreneur this might seem a strange statement because many entrepreneurs come across as people-oriented people. But an entrepreneur tackles challenges most people never experience and you may not know the right answer all the time, which can led to feeling self doubt. Mentors help you feel that you’re not alone and often can give you the answer you need or at least point your head in the right direction.

The bottomline is mentors are invaluable. Get some if you don’t already. I doubt you can ever have too many in all areas of your business.

Actually, I enjoy talking to all kinds of business people and you never know what you’re going to learn from whom. On this trip, I sat beside an interesting one of the plane. He was a professional Canadian drummer who plays for some big Canadian groups and we talked for the full 3 hour flight on WestJet from Edmonton to Toronto. It was great. Musicians consider themselves entrepreneurs too. In our conversation I also learnt that the Rolling Stones were the first to invent a new way to do tours. Instead of being in a different hotel every night, the band stays in one hotel for 2 weeks in a big city and then take their jets to do a concert in different nearby cities and towns every night. The band is prepared to play in big stadiums, medium arenas, and small nightclubs. This approach makes living on the road easier, and other artists have started to adopt this innovation.