Case Study Two: The Biz, Ogden Publications, Inc.

Reader Contribution by Staff
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In 1996 we moved our family to Kansas when my employers acquired a small company in Topeka and asked me to run it. At that time it included Capper’s magazine, GRIT magazine and Capper’s Insurance Service, which sells insurance mostly to the subscribers of the magazines.

My colleagues and I hoped the small, unconventional company would provide a platform for something bigger – something that could grow. In fact, it has. Today Ogden Publications employs about three times as many people as worked in the business when we started. I feel very fortunate to have shared this business adventure with my colleagues.

One of our first – and best – ideas was that a media company could focus on the idea of sustainability. I thought that the converging interests of the baby-boom generation, which had always been interested in protecting the environment and the millennial generation born 30-40 years later would create a new surge of interest in lifestyles that preserved valuable traditions of self-reliance while minimizing humanity’s negative impact on the environment. I was working on that theory in the form of a business plan when we had the opportunity to acquire Mother Earth News near the end of 2000 and my colleagues and I put the theory to work.

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