Real Estate Magazines: Dealing with a Double Whammy

Management during a downtown takes consistent and fearless data analysis.

By Ava Seave
02/23/2009 -09:27 AM

When Dan McCarthy [pictured], the CEO of Network Communications, described how he personally manages his company during the economic downturn, his story resonated with his listeners at a breakfast hosted by the MPA and DaSilva & Phillips. Network Communications—being in the magazine and the real estate market (13 million print and electronic magazines each month in 650 North American markets) has experienced the meltdown early and deeply.

As a manager, he says he can’t manage feelings or morale, which he says is impossible in this environment, but he can try to manage the “energy” of his employees. He does this by being as transparent as he can and sharing information with his managers as soon as possible.

Dan also did not bring in any outside consultants or advisors when he had to restructure. He had his management team act as the consultants, after giving them a one-day training session in interpreting internal and competitive data to make recommendations.

Dan, in giving advice about how to know when you are in a severe downturn, or just a blip, cautions against just look at trailing 12 months of your revenue or profit. This CEO bathes in the data by looking at it in three key categories:

· “Activities.” Dan counts the number of everything, from internal metrics to external, market dynamics. Internal: New advertisers, repeat advertisers, Web traffic, sales calls, customer service calls. Outside: Real estate activity by market

· “Conversions.” What you would expect: Sales calls to ads, customer satisfaction surveys, and so on

· “Rhythm.” Dan was semi-apologetic about this category sounding a little squishy, but he looks at the shape of all the data and how the distribution, patterns and averages have changed to look into the future as best he can.

Hear Dan McCarthy talk about the company’s operations generally on a video clip on the NCI Web site.

Ava Seave is a Principal of Quantum Media, a strategy and marketing consulting group.