by C.P. Boyce III

Why change our name? Everyone who knows us, knows us as Network–or at least some variation of it. Most of our new business opportunities come through referrals from current clients. Why confuse the issue? Coca-Cola has not changed their name for 100 years and they´ve done OK.

During the past five years, we have made some significant additions to our leadership team. In that time, we´ve worked to connect the "newbies" and the "old-timers." The old timers had seen us grow from an office in a row house with a few clients 15 years ago to the larger Hunt Valley space we have now. They´ve seen our client base evolve from local organizations and a mix of consumer and b2b products to primarily large regional and international associations. As the newbies arrived at Network, they saw what the old-timers had done, but they had little idea of what it took to get here. They came from various backgrounds, all with a fresh perspective on how to run a media services firm–and the energy and know-how to help Network continue to evolve and grow.

When you grow as a company, you reach a point where you have to hold meetings to keep each other up to date. Yelling across the room stops being a reasonable form of formal communication. So the leadership team began to meet monthly. Soon, we felt we could benefit by getting away from the office and spending a couple of days reexamining our strategic direction.

So the retreat dates were set. Two days of discussions followed by a less structured weekend of bonding. At that first retreat in 2007, our goal was to build a plan for growth with an eye toward the next ten years. A lot had changed since I bought Network in 1992. Back then, there was no internet…at least not as we know it today. People were still getting used to voice mail. No smart phone, YouTube or streaming video. No iPod. No instant messaging. How did we exist?

Inspired by an article authored by Lisa Junker in Associations Now, "Be Your Own Worst Enemy," we divided our group in two: A Blue Team representing the current business plan, and a Red Team, tasked with creating a business model that would knock the socks off of the current Network–in essence, they were asked to create a company that could outperform Network if they were competing in the marketplace. The Red Team should exploit our weaknesses and neutralize our strengths. No limitations, no idea too crazy.

That first session of the retreat was a history lesson that continued well through dinner. The old-timers started at the beginning and recounted good times and bad, challenges, opportunities, and the personalities of staffers, both remaining and long gone, who helped make us what we are today.

The more we talked, the more we realized that we already had an unusual approach to the market. As custom publishers or sellers of various media go, we are likely the only one led by an industry outsider–a businessman (a banker!) interested in creating a service organization that worked with associations to increase their bottom line, rather than, say, a person with the experience of just a sales rep or ad director.

And we had CPAs and lawyers on staff too. In fact, as I looked around the room, everyone had experience in business, but not necessarily the publishing business. And in a world changing as fast as ours, we´ve found that this diversity of experience, common sense, and a desire to learn is more valuable than just publishing experience. Our metrics revolve around ROI. We don´t care about "pages sold" as a leading metric, but we do care about return on pages sold, ad ratios, and profitability.

Over the years we´ve built a business model that made sense: Solid accounting; technology to maximize productivity and access to data; training; hiring the right people; and in the process, establishing "the Network way." I´d love to say there was a beautiful document that laid all this out 15 years ago. There was not. We go by a living plan that tunes in to the market and tries to adapt so we consistently deliver. The beauty of a company our size is the ease and speed of adaptability. We had an environment that encouraged that adaptability. And a business model that worked with it.

But we knew there were things we could do better.

The Red Team came to the table excited about the plans they´d made to outwit, outsmart, and outperform the Blue Team.

They did agree that a lot of what the Blue Team (remember those "old-timers"?) had put in place was a step ahead of the crowd. They wanted to build on that. The Blue Team listened as the Red Team outlined their company and plan. The Red Team was full of great ideas for growth and developing client relationships, many of which have since been implemented.

Click here for page 2