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Small Businesspersons Of The Year - Paper Boys
Ever since they were grammar-school playmates, Jim Warner and Ryan Duques dreamed of starting a business together. Not so many years later, that's exactly what they did, and today Shore Publishing is eating its biggest competitor's lunch
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Business New Haven
1/20/2003
By: Mimi Houston
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A lot of ten-year-old buddies growing up together will talk about what they hope their lives will be like when they become adults. The best of friends will promise they'll go into business together - all of them will swear to become millionaires. Few of them will begin while they are still ten-year-olds.
“James and I grew up together in the same neighborhood in Madison,” says Ryan Duques, co-owner with James Warner of Shoreline Publishing in Madison. The company presently produces seven community newspapers delivered at no cost to residents. “We've always had a fire in our belly to do a business together,” We started doing anything we could. In middle school we made tie-dyed T-shirts.”
“My parents believed if I wanted to have a car, I'd have to earn it,” Warner recalls, explaining where some of the incentive to start their businesses may have come from. “I told them I wanted a Mustang and they said, 'Don't look at us - we don't have any Mustangs around here.'”
“But because I had to earn it,” continues the partner in charge of advertising, production and, oh yes, finance, “I learned how to handle my finances. The groundwork was laid when I was very young.”
Other business ideas followed tie-dyed T-shirts, and soon enough Duques and Warner found themselves in high school. That's when things became serious.
“We always had an interest in business,” remembers Duques, who is in charge of the editorial department, circulation management and the classified department, “and in high school we really liked marketing and advertising.”
“Our first love was marketing,” echoes Warner. “We were talking about opening an advertising agency on Madison Avenue.”
In preparation for such a grand dream, the pair went to area restaurants and offered their services as marketing mavens - gratis. A couple of restaurants took them on and applauded their spirit.
“We tried to develop good advertising,” explains Warner, “but we found there were no good advertising vehicles. So we just said, 'Let's make our own.' We read the local newspapers and decided we could do a better job.”
That was back in 1994. What soon developed was a town-wide restaurant guide that published the menus of popular local eateries. A niche was filled, and gradually it blossomed into the company's first community newspaper - The Source, serving the town of Madison.
“We launched the first one during my freshman year,” Warner remembers, who went off to Bryant College in 1996. “We did it with e-mail, voice mail, phones. And I came home on Sundays and Mondays to run payroll and have meetings.”
If the community was surprised at the unusually young age of their latest business professionals, those added to the payroll were, too. At least, they were in the beginning.
“I think our employees have become used to having bosses that are younger than they are,” says Duques. “It was harder when we were just starting off and people knew we were a young company. They were even more surprised to find out that James and myself were so young.”
Money for running the business was tight, and it took everything they had to keep the paper going.
“Our initial capital came from bootstrapping,” remembers Duques. “In other words, we reinvested every dollar we made back into the company.”
At the time, Shore Publishing employed three or four people. Duques, a student at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst, came home less often than Warner, since he was farther away. But he remained an equally active partner to the business.
“But every four or five months we added a few more,” he says. “By the time I graduated we were up to 12 people.”
The business the long-time friends started while still in high school continued throughout their college years and was there when each was graduated - with honors - to come home to.
“Everything we've done could not have been done without our people,” credits Duques. “We are so lucky to have found such talented individuals - those who are good with writing, with layout, finance, advertising - we really have a varied-skill workforce.”
Shore Publishing today employs about 35 full-time workers in addition to numerous freelancers, part-timers and independent contractors. They still have one employee who has been with them from the start. Others were added as growth permitted.
And that growth did not always come easily.
“We made a lot of mistakes when we launched the Branford newspaper,” Warner laughs, now. “But we really learned a lot, and we're now a stronger company because of that. The real-world experience has taught us to be better business people. We actually listen to what our customers want, what our advertisers want, and bring that to them.”
In fact, it's that personal service and commitment to the papers' towns that both Warner and Duques say has been the fundamental underpinning of their company's success.
“We really pride ourselves on giving accurate community news,” says Duques. “We really want people to be informed, but we want it done in a positive way. Also, we all want to work in a positive environment.
“It's really about investing in the community,” he continues. “And it's so much fun. This is really a dream job. We've definitely fallen in love with community newspapers. It's a great way to connect with these towns - to talk with people. We are always running into people who say, 'I really loved that article about…'”
Duques illustrates that community connection with a story about a boy in Clinton afflicted with leukemia. A high school student in Madison read about him and was so moved, he arranged and played in a benefit concert in the boy's honor. Those are the kinds of stories that fuel the long days necessary to produce each edition of the seven papers.
“It matters to us - that's the whole point,” says Warner. “We want to come here and be happy. We want to hear from our neighbors - and people do tell us. We'll be walking down the street and someone will say, 'Aren't you those newspaper boys?'”
And it sets them apart from their competition as well. And who, exactly, is that competition?
“Well, I guess you could say our competition is everyone,” says Duques. “Radio, television, all the newspapers.”
But Shore Publishing has one company in particular with which it is most closely linked, competitively. “We compete, as a weekly newspaper, with the weekly papers published by the Journal Register Co. [JRC],” says Duques.
Those papers include the Shore Line Times, Branford Review and other weeklies with which the upstarts go head-to-head each week along the coastline. But Duques points to a few differences in his papers that blow the competition away.
“We send our papers to every household and business in our towns,” explains Duques. “[The JRC papers] go only to subscribers, which can mean anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of the town's population. That's why we're so successful with our advertisers, and why we're able to steal the advertisers away.
“Plus, we're the hometown players. We're well connected to the towns. The Journal Register Co. is out of [Trenton] New Jersey. Not that that makes them a bad paper,” he's quick to add.
If you live in one of the seven towns the papers serve - Madison, Guilford, Branford, North Branford, Essex, Chester, Deep River, Clinton, Westbrook, Old Saybrook, Killingworth, East Haven and North Haven - Duques' and Warner's commitment to community is pretty evident.
Every reader seems to have his or her favorite part of the paper, a popular one being the “Person of the Week” feature. Every week a member of the community is highlighted and honored for her or his contribution to their neighborhood.
“Some are recommended [to us by readers],” explains Duques, “and others are found by our staff. It's so inspiring to read about these people, and it also makes a great story. We also try to run a lot of historical pieces, giving a lot of information about the past. We're really making connections for newer residents of the towns, and I think it shows that we're connected to the past, and to each town.”
Today the papers enjoy a combined readership of 87,000, Duques and Warner say. The content of each edition includes a general news section, a separate sports section, a living section and classifieds. The papers also publish updates on town projects, boards and committees, and columns by state senators, local authors, letters to the editor, opinion polls and submissions from readers.
The sports section highlights school and youth sports as well as health and fitness information and articles on national sports interests. The living section is anchored by a calendar of events, both local and in some cases, statewide, features on area artisans and general-interest features.
In addition to the newspapers, the company produces a number of special interest booklets including a holiday gift guide, spring and fall bridal guides and chamber of commerce guides.
While producing so much local content may seem mind-boggling to many, Duques says having refined the process down to a science over time makes it all easier.
“It becomes easier to launch new papers over time,” he assures. “The editorial content is similar to the other towns, and we keep the same integrated tools, such as the Person of the Week.
“James and I look at the different markets, geographic and, contiguously, advertising,” Duques adds. “We look at the size of the town to determine if that matches up to what we can produce - can we mail it to that number [of households]?”
The main source of information comes from advertisers, who after all, are the ones who pay the bills for the free-circulation papers.
“We ask our present advertisers, 'Where do you want us to be?' Then we'll look at that market and ask them for a commitment. If they give it to us, if they'll pay for it, we'll do it.”
Shore Publishing has become so confident about launching new papers that its unveiled two new titles simultaneously almost a year ago: the North Haven and East Haven Couriers.
“We're now in excess of $3 million in gross [annual] revenues,” reports Duques.
“We've had incredible growth,” states Warner. “We're really a fast-moving, aggressive company. Since 2000, we've increased our revenues by 300 percent. And that's very typical of our [annualized] growth rate.”
He and Duques attribute that growth to the success of their advertising department.
“Our advertisers really enjoy the personal service they get,” explains Warner. “Our sales reps go out of the way. They'll design the ads and even entire campaigns. And it doesn't matter whether you're a large business or a mom-and-pop store.
“And we really listen to what our advertisers tell us. They also like the fact that if they're upset about something, they can call me directly to talk about it. It's that personal touch. It's that we really do care.”
“We sell for all seven titles,” adds Duques, “so advertisers can pick and choose which towns they want to reach. We're very micro-zoned.
“We hear great things from our advertisers - what a good investment in their business it's been. It's so important to make our advertisers happy. We understand it's an investment for them, that it's vital to their business.”
“We customize our advertising,” adds Warner. “We can do a lot to keep costs down. For instance, in many cases it makes a lot more sense to do a [lower-cost] classified rather than a display ad. It's more economical and it can be more powerful.
“Our papers were designed specifically so that we would have repeat sales,” he continues. “We've never lost a true advertiser.”
Warner points out, however, that as the company grows in size it becomes difficult to impossible to sustain such a giddy growth rate. He's excited, therefore, about a new company development that he hopes can drive that growth to a new level - a partnership with the New London Day.
The Day has made an undisclosed equity investment in Shore Publishing, creating a new partnership that leaves Duques and Warner as majority owners of their company.
The partnership means the two companies can cross-sell advertising and IT databases. Together, they reach more than 200,000 households and companies, and the Day will gain a foothold west of the Connecticut River, a part of the state they have long sought to penetrate.
The partnership provides Shore Publishing access to capital to use for future growth.
“We're so lucky to have found a partner like the Day,” exclaims Duques. “They are a local, independently-owned newspaper, one of the last in the country. They are actually owned by a non-profit trust that takes the profits and puts them back into the community. We want to invest in the community like that as well.”
By now both Duques and Warner are heavily invested in the communities their papers serve. They are involved with chambers of commerce and various boards of directors as well as non-profit organizations and libraries.
Warner serves on the boards of the Branford, East Haven and Guilford chambers. Duques is a director of the Madison chamber and the Guilford Community Fund as well as the Suburban Newspapers of America board of directors.
“We can really make a difference to these organizations by getting involved,” says Warner. “Sometimes it's just by giving them an ad, or writing an article about them. I think it's our civic duty. And it's imperative - it's part of being a businessperson.”
That kind of commitment and caring is apparent to both readers and advertisers of their seven community papers. It's evident as well in the journalism community. Last spring, when they entered the annual awards sponsored by the Connecticut chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, they came away with ten, including first place for opinion writing and general reporting in the community weekly category.
“It's very personally satisfying,” says Duques of his company's growth - and growing stature. “And as an entrepreneur it is satisfying to have a viable business.”
“It's a lot of fun,” adds his lifelong buddy in work and play. “But we work hard here. Except, it's not work.”
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