‘I Don’t Know How We Would Have Survived’
Logan Aguirre isn’t sure her business would have made it through the pandemic if she hadn’t changed her approach to management.
In a recent conversation, Logan Aguirre, owner of 417 magazine, talks about why she opened her books to her employees, how she learned to forecast, and why she decided in 2022 that the most important thing she could do for the business would be to get her employees to take all of their paid time off.
Loren Feldman
First of all, tell us about your magazine. Why is it called 417?
Logan Aguirre
417 is the area code in southwest Missouri.
Loren Feldman
Ah, of course.
Logan Aguirre
And that’s what the magazine is named for.
Loren Feldman
And how long has it been around?
Logan Aguirre
We’re celebrating 25 years this year.
Loren Feldman
Congratulations.
Logan Aguirre
Thank you. It was founded in ‘98 by a radio group, and then my parents purchased it in ‘01, and I purchased it from them in 2020.
Loren Feldman
And the type of magazine. What’s your mission?
Logan Aguirre
We’re a city/regional magazine. So most cities have a magazine that highlights food and culture and travel. That’s who we are for our region of southwest Missouri. And we are a luxury lifestyle magazine. And we also have a business magazine, a home magazine, events, and social platforms, and lots of digital newsletters—everything that’s expanded off of the platform of our print publications.
Loren Feldman
I know from personal experience—I used to work at a city/regional magazine, and a bunch of other magazines—this has not been an easy time for the magazine business the last 20 years or so. How have you guys been doing?
Logan Aguirre
Well, our mission is to shine a light. And so we don’t have to do news. We don’t have to do breaking news. We don’t have to do bad news. We don’t have to do politics. A lot of the things that you can consume really quickly, at any moment, that’s not our game. So we are all about reflecting why this is a great place to live, work, and play—and telling the story about the people behind those businesses, or the best ways to enjoy your life right here locally. And we have just continued to grow and thrive and really haven’t faced a lot of the challenges that people might think of when they think of magazines or the news business.
Loren Feldman
Actually, I loved working at a city publication. There’s something wonderful about being able to walk around your town and run into people that either read the publication or are likely to appear in it, something that doesn’t happen with a national publication very often.
Logan Aguirre
I agree. People always say how much they love the magazine. If they grew up here, they love that it shows—it gives them a sense of pride. Because often, if you’ve grown up here, or anywhere that you’ve grown up, you might not appreciate it the way that an outsider might. And we get to pull out all the best things. And there’s people that grew up here that say, “I had no idea.” Or, “Thanks for making us look so good.”
And then from the outside, we are the fastest growing region in the state of Missouri. The magazine is sent out as a recruitment piece, and I get people telling me all the time, “My wife did not want to move here, but I showed her 417 magazine.” Or, “Our family was really not sure we wanted to come to southwest Missouri, but then we saw 417, and it’s like a real place with culture and food and beautiful outdoors.” So we like to say that we’re the cheerleaders of 417 land, which is what we call our area here.
Loren Feldman
I’ve worked with more magazines than I care to admit. They all struggled with the transition from print to digital. How’s that been for you guys?
Logan Aguirre
Well, I think content-wise, it’s easy for us to put everything out. Custom content—you know, writing things that are just for our digital audience is—we’ve had a little slower time adapting to or starting to do more of that. Our audience online is big. Our content gets a ton of traffic. It has a lot of credibility, for searching and that kind of thing. We still have a really strong print subscribership, and it keeps growing—and same with our digital content. It continues to grow and attract a broader audience. And we are able to monetize that audience. And obviously, the more traffic we get, the more we can monetize it. And that’s a big part of our five- and 10-year plan. And we’ve already had 40 percent year-over-year growth the last couple of years with our digital revenue.
Loren Feldman
And you anticipate continuing to publish the print edition?
Logan Aguirre
Yes, like I said, we just in the month of January—I think they were telling me we had 700 new subscribers come in. And for a market our size—we have about 10,000 print subscribers so to get that kind of new in one month is really big. So, yeah, we continue to have a really strong print base and then everything is really launched off of that. But we play the Great Game of Business. So our five- and 10-year critical number is about moving our revenue to be 50 percent on the page and 50 percent what we call beyond the page. So lots of opportunities to continue to expand the beyond-the-page part of our business.
Loren Feldman
You’re right there in Springfield, which is where Jack Stack helped found SRC and launched the whole concept of open-book management, I guess, some 40 years ago. How did you come to the Great Game?
Logan Aguirre
Well, our family has known Jack since we moved to Springfield. My husband and I moved here so I could work for the magazine. That was about 17 years ago. We came from St. Louis. So I’m not from here. This was not my hometown. My parents moved here after I graduated high school, and Jack and my husband got connected, because my husband was an engineer. He worked at Boeing, and was looking for a good spot to land here. And his resume was a little intimidating in this market. So Jack has really just been a family friend and champion of my husband and of our family for a really long time.
So I was aware of the Great Game through that. And then, as my parents and I worked on scaling the business, and as I continued to take on more leadership roles, they strategically were taking on less. When we started talking about how I would eventually buy the business, I needed a system in which I could win at. And my parents had bought the business when it was about to go out of business and had turned it around and created quite a success story with it. But their system and my system—I just needed something that I could get my head around better. And to me, the Game just makes it so simple.
I always joke that I went to journalism school so I could avoid math classes. Turns out when you own a business, there’s a lot of math. And also, we’ve always been a profit-sharing company. That was something that was important to my parents from the get-go, since they were buying a business that was about to go under. They kind of rallied everybody around and said, Hey, if we start making money, we’ll share it back with you. And so that was always at the root of the spirit of 417. But I needed to just move it to a different operating system and one that I can really champion and get behind. And my parents were open to it, because we had to do it while they still owned the business. But it certainly made the transition for me buying the business really feel like a breeze at that point, because we had done so much work to get the business positioned in the right way.
Loren Feldman
I think a lot of people have the impression that open-book management is largely for manufacturing companies—maybe because it started with a manufacturing company. I’m not sure. But I certainly don’t know of a lot of magazines that have tried it. Was it clear to you that it made sense for a magazine from the beginning?
Logan Aguirre
No, and I don’t think it made sense to them either. They were sitting down with us and saying, Okay, we might have to really think completely differently about how you set up a scoreboard. And we don’t have inventory, and we are a service-based business in a lot of ways. But our coach was amazing. And we just figured out what worked for us. And we stayed really, really true to the Game. It wasn’t like we made up our own Game. But we kind of used the spirit of the Game and a lot of the principles and just figured out how to make it work for our business.
And I don’t know any other magazines that play the Game. I wish they all would, because I think trying to get your head around paper and page quantity, the size of the magazine, and all of that—we definitely were always just guessing. And now we have the system down to where we’re just as efficient and profitable as possible, because we understand our metrics so well. So for me playing the Game was really about multiplying the brainpower. We have a lot of smart people that work there, a lot of creativity. And I just like multiplying the brainpower, getting everybody’s thoughts and ideas on how to most efficiently and profitably run the business.
Loren Feldman
Can you give me an example of how it changed the way you manage the business?
Logan Aguirre
I would say the simplest way to describe it is we went from reacting to forecasting. And a lot of it is, living in that reaction mode is so anxiety-ridden. And you’re looking at your financials at the end of the quarter or the end of the year, and you’re thinking, “Hmm, I wonder why that didn’t go the way we saw it.” Or, “Oh, I wonder why that’s so much better than we thought.” And all of our plans were just kind of based on what we had done before and what we thought we might do next time.
And now we’re always looking way out ahead. And then we’re making plans for where we want to get rather than where we thought we ended up, if that makes sense. So I think that’s the biggest game-changer. And we had been playing the Game for a full year before the pandemic hit. And I can get emotional anytime I think about it. I don’t know how we would have survived if we hadn’t already been playing the Game and had such a good handle on our business so that we were able to weather that really successfully—better than I thought we would, obviously, when it all started at the beginning. So yeah, I think it changes it from reaction to forecast.
Loren Feldman
Can you explain what allowed you to weather that particular period?
Logan Aguirre
Well, Great Game offered so many resources, right off the bat, some really like free webinars. Black Swan was a big one that they did. And I would say one of the best ones was just almost right away, within a couple of weeks, with Jack just saying, “It’s all going to be okay. This isn’t gonna last forever.” And I kind of needed somebody to tell me that, because in my mind, this was—I couldn’t see past the next day. And at this point—
Loren Feldman
It wasn’t just you.
Logan Aguirre
Yeah, at this point. I didn’t own the business yet. My parents were actually on a cruise in South America and couldn’t get home. They were just literally stranded at sea. And I was back here. And that was really, for me, a pivotal moment—I think for me,and for my parents, of like, Okay, I’ve got this. This is mine. And I always show up like it’s mine, no matter what. That’s just who I am. But it definitely put it in a different perspective. And the Game helped us with, Okay, create your emergency plan. What is the worst-case scenario? What could the worst-case scenario be?
And we did that. We got our whole team together. How much revenue do we think we’ll lose? How many copies do we think we’re going to be able to print? How are we going to get some of these copies out—the ones that are at waiting rooms, our distribution that we’re promising? How are we going to change our distribution strategy? How are we going to position ourselves as the cheerleaders of 417 land when the print product—we’re just not sure how it’s going to get out in the market like we need it to? How are we going to help our advertisers stick with us? How are we going to work with advertisers that are small businesses like us and need help and need a break or need to stretch their bill out?
How are we just going to show our audience in our community that we’re here for them? And then in our huddle every week, instead of forecasting against our original plan, we forecasted against our emergency plan. So we had something to cheer for whenever we were able to beat it. And we were really lucky that we didn’t lose hardly any advertisers. We definitely had a pretty long stretch where we didn’t sell anything, because, you know, it wasn’t appropriate to be reaching out to people.
Loren Feldman
You’re not going to get a lot of ads from restaurants when they’re in lockdown.
Logan Aguirre
Right. We are also, in my opinion, very lucky that we opened up very quickly. So Southwest Missouri—Branson, especially—we opened up almost right away in May or June. And then people were flocking here. And so that really helped our whole economy here recover quickly. And so I think our magazine is just a reflection of our local economy. And so we were able to get through it much better than I thought, but we at least had a plan in place. And we were able to then have something to cheer for anytime we did better than the emergency plan, rather than looking at the original plan, which was—that was depressing.
Loren Feldman
You’ve mentioned forecasting several times. That’s something that I think a lot of business owners are a little bit skeptical about. They’re not sure—how can you possibly look into the future especially if you’re talking a three-year plan or a five-year plan?
Logan Aguirre
I think one thing that helps us is we are usually selling 12 months ahead. So most of our people have a full-year contract. So right now, we’re booking revenue into 2024. And so we already have a pretty long lens and can see how things are going from a year or more out. So we’re not a business that every day you’re wondering how many cars you’re going to sell or something like that.
But obviously you have your trends that you look at, and then you have where you know you want to get to or where your more high margin business is that you want to spend more time on or where you are the most inefficient—just by looking at the hours that your team puts towards things or what your materials are for those. So there’s so many factors you can be looking at, that you can then be forecasting out. What are the expenses that are going to be tied to this? And what are we going to work on to make sure we’re hitting our numbers?
Loren Feldman
You also mentioned the term “critical number,” which I know is an important term in the Great Game lexicon. Can you explain what that’s about?
Logan Aguirre
Your critical number is the number one most important thing your organization needs to be focused on. So it can be a threat or an opportunity. But it’s defined as, if you don’t pay attention to this one critical number, it can be a detriment to your business. And so all businesses have different critical numbers. And obviously, they can be financially driven. They can be about a profit margin. There’s all kinds of things you can look at, right? And we always have a profit number that we’re trying to hit since we’re a profit-sharing company. But we have, for the last couple of years, picked more creative, inspiring, critical numbers that everyone can get excited about.
Loren Feldman
You picked a very unusual one last year. I’ve never heard this one used before. Tell us about that.
Logan Aguirre
Last year, our critical number was 100-percent PTO use. We wanted everyone on our team to use their full PTO. We are not an unlimited PTO company, but we found we were having a lot of burnout and a lot of turnover. But when we looked at things like overtime, people weren’t booking overtime. So it wasn’t that people were overworked. They were just worn out. We’re a small company. We have lots of deadlines, because we publish over 30 magazines a year plus everything else we do. And we decided that from the mental health standpoint, we needed everybody to be taking their full amount of paid time off so that they were healthier at home, healthier at work.
And then that forced us internally to look at all of our systems and processes and figure out what we were going to stop doing or what we were going to automate or what we were going to do more efficiently so that when people were out of the office on their PTO, it wasn’t at a detriment to everyone else left in the building. Because that’s also why people don’t want to take their PTO—they feel like they’re letting their coworkers down. And they don’t want to leave all that work for somebody else. So it helped us get a lot of things in order in the building. And we’re gonna announce tomorrow that we went from 75 percent PTO usage the year before to 100 percent. So we got it done.
Loren Feldman
What was the hardest part of it? I assume people were open to the idea of taking all the time they had coming, but what did you have to do to make sure people really followed through?
Logan Aguirre
Well, we worked on it. So every month when we would look at our actuals, we would announce where we were. We forecasted out for people, Hey, based on what you’ve submitted in the payroll system, this is how much you have booked—so you’re not going to get there or you are going to get there. We just made sure everybody wasn’t taking their PTO all at the last couple of weeks of the year because we couldn’t have that. So it was just a lot of staying in touch with people.
And then every week in the huddle, we had a moment where people shared out their photos from whatever they did with their PTO the week before. So they could have taken the day off to get a massage or gone for a bike ride. Or maybe they went to New York City. It was really anything in between. And so we all got to share out pictures and stories about our time off. So that really—you just got a different level of connection with everybody on the team. And everyone was excited for people to get to take their trips. And so I think people really wanted to make their coworkers feel like they could go out of town and do these things and not worry about it. So there was not any negatives to this critical number. It was all positives.
Loren Feldman
Do you feel it had an impact on your relationship, the business’s relationship, with your employees?
Logan Aguirre
Yes, absolutely. I mean, just all year, people kept commenting. You know, it just feels better here. I don’t know, just the energy feels better here. So some of the intangibles, but we only spent $650 on overtime last year. So people, again, they weren’t putting in a ton of extra hours. They were getting everything done. We didn’t miss any deadlines. We had an incredibly profitable year. And everybody got to take all their time. So I think it really helped people know that it was okay to come to their director and say, I have too much on my plate, I need help. What can I not do? Or what can I delegate? Or is there a faster, better way to get this thing done?
Loren Feldman
Did you have any interesting conversations with business owners who were a little surprised to hear that your primary focus was on making sure your employees took all their time off?
Logan Aguirre
I think most people seem to be really intrigued by it in a positive way. I know at the Great Game, at the conference, I had a couple of owners or leaders come up and say, “We pay out PTO if you don’t use your PTO. So we’re actually encouraging people to not take their PTO. So maybe we need to really rethink that.” And I think the unlimited PTO companies, it’s probably even worse with people not using their PTO. So I hope that there’s a ripple effect and that others will be inspired to do the same, especially since we can prove that we still had our most successful year on record since I’ve been there for 17 years, financially our most successful year.
Loren Feldman is editor-in-chief of 21 Hats. Once a quarter he interviews a practitioner of open-book management with the help of the Great Game of Business, which suggests business owners to interview but plays no role in the reporting or editing.
