Read the COW Magazine Online - Creative COW Magazine

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Ron Lindeboom
Paso Robles, California USA
T H E B A C K F O R T Y
If You Fail to Plan, You’re Planning To Fail
A case study in why our Business & Marketing forum is one of our Top 5 most visited forums
Looking down the road a couple of months
or so, it will be 2011. Once again, dear ole
Dad was right: time passes far too quickly — especially
if your business is searching for its place in the
market. At that point, time drags like a sixth-grader
counting down the last 30 days of school before
Summer vacation.
When we started building online peer-to-peer
support sites back in 1995, it wasn’t long before
our original site outgrew our ability to fund it.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to maintain something that
eats far more resources than it brings in. Back then,
most of the industry’s advertisers were not interested
in the goings-on on the web. (A rare exception was
Artbeats, who started with us long ago and remains
with us to this day. Without their support, we’d have
quit long ago. Please let them know you appreciate
their longtime support of it all.)
Even when we launched the COW, we had to
wait for the market to catch up with the web’s earlier
adopters. We built the new site using hard-won
lessons about the deadliness of uncontrolled growth.
Those lessons provided a sense of cautious well
considered planning and implementation and we
played within our means, always. Well, almost.
We balanced our cautious slow growth plans,
with a sense of thrice weighed and considered
strategic gambling. Still, to really win the hand,
sometimes you must throw caution to the wind and
push all your chips into the game — risking it all.
You are holding in your hands, our biggest
gamble. If the magazine had failed, Creative COW
would have quietly faded into the ether.
Why did we do it? Because we knew that the
time had come to make our move, as our goals were
far bigger than to remain where we were in 2005.
The scary part was that we made our most risky
move “without a safety net.” We had no investors and
we had just enough money in the bank to produce
only one issue, nothing more. Crazy, huh? But we
knew that in the end, markets mature and consolidate
— as bigger, stronger corporations acquire smaller
and more innovative companies, largely to maintain
their own perceived “innovativeness.”
In the end, usually one dominant player leads
the market, with a few support players splitting the
rest. It would happen in this market, too. It has. We
wanted that dominant player to be Creative COW, so
we gambled. We drew on all that we’ve learned over
a lifetime and we had many great minds to draw on.
From Day One of Creative COW, we have been
grateful to be surrounded with an incredible body of
leaders and members daily posting in our Business &
Marketing forum.
I still recall over a decade ago when Nick Griffin
called me to discuss starting a business forum. “I
think it would become one of the most important
forums in the line-up,” said Nick. And it has. Today it
is nearly always in the Top 5 most trafficked forums in
the line-up, and I am regularly amazed by the kinds
of discussions that are raised there.
I have drawn many lessons from the forum and
have combined these ideas with what we see in the
news, what we see our competitors doing, what
trends we see in the market, and what we need to
do to “be there” for our members and meet their
expectations and needs. If it is true that “two minds
are better than one,” then many-minds-as-one is
even better. Our Business & Marketing forum has
been a great value to our business over the years. As
another year draws to a close, let it become a value to
you as you make your own plans for the days ahead.
n
To discuss this topic, please visit:
http://forums.creativecow.net/businessmarketing
The Asset Management and Distribution Issue — Creative COW Magazine
The Divergence Issue — Creative COW Magazine
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