The Fall Of A Business—Why My Dislike Of All Government Is Personal

The Story Continues

Last week, I talked about the earlier days of the newspaper business I owned, first solo, and then in a partnership. The partnership didn't last, in spite of the growth we were experiencing and at least the potential for more. What had started off so promising in my mind was now rent asunder, and I was left to pick up the pieces.

Fortunately, things weren't nearly as bad as that sounds. I knew I was capable of running a business. Against pretty long odds, I had done it with the first newspaper. I wasn't making much if any money, but I was meeting deadlines every week and there was some advertising to keep it afloat. But things didn't really take off until a partnership was formed and legal notices were added soon after.

My partner and I really were friends. Our boys all played together on a regular basis. My wife and his wife considered themselves friends. We did a lot together. But with the partnership split, all of that would be going away, too. And while I enjoyed working with him and all the business experience and intuition that he brought, that would not be what I missed the most.

My issue, then, wasn't whether or not I could carry on alone. I felt I could. In fact, I was of a mind to show everyone that I could. The problem was, I didn't want to be alone. I wanted a partner, and my friend.

Our newspaper office up for sale. It served in that capacity from 2000 through 2012. It finally sold in 2015.

Self Pity Time Is Over

Well, the partner wasn't coming back, so I had to come to terms with that pretty quick. What I might have been lacking in desire was quickly swept away by deadlines and everyone else doing their job. The full-time staff remaining, for the most part, made it easy. All except for the editor, who had been a problem from the beginning.

A Change In Personnel

For some reason, she wasn't happy that her bosses, and now me, were not involved in the day to the day production of the newspaper, even though that was why she and others were getting paid. I'm not sure to this day what she expected, but the relationship soured pretty quickly. On top of that, she wasn't really that fast at layout. More specifically, she would spend way too much time arranging pages, wanting to make them just right. Well, there was only so much you could do and then you ran out of time.

With her, we missed a lot of deadlines. The press, which by then had changed to a local daily newspaper, was remarkably understanding, but it often meant shuffling us around and pushing back the times we could get to the post office or the newspapers in the stores. The more it happened, and the more she and I disagreed, the more it became apparent I would need to make changes.

Soon after the split, I took over layout. She continued to function as the editor, but that only went on for a while. She just didn't seem happy with anything I did, and her attitude was affecting other staff. Eventually, it all came to a head. We had a final meeting where she basically told me to just go for it. So, I did. I told her things just weren't working out and I would need to let her go. She wasn't surprised, and didn't seem overly upset about it, either. Not with me. I think in some ways it may have come as a relief. For me, it just felt miserable. To that point, it was the hardest decision I had to make.

Later, she would go to the doctor and be diagnosed with a couple mental disorders. It explained a lot of things, including why no matter what I did, nothing seemed to work. Unfortunately, knowing she had been ill didn't help my decision, and for a while I wondered if there was something else I could do. I finally decided it was the best decision I could have made with the information I had at my disposal, and I think there was relief from the other staff, too.

I would say morale picked up from there. The woman who was working as our distribution clerk was hired to do the editing. She made it her personal mission and put in many, many hours, working around the schedules of our freelance reporters. She was good, and eventually, the reporters and her were more or less in sync, even though that meant some freelancers dropping out while we picked up others.

And More Change

We went through quite a few reporters over the years. It wasn't much of a living wage, but then what they contributed regularly didn't really warrant it, at least not from a business standpoint. I tried to pay the full-time employees well. They ended up making more than they would have in a comparably sized company by the time it was all said and done. But because of who they were and what they did, I thought they should be paid more, so I kept working in salary increases and bonuses, while paying myself well, too.

I guess you could say that was the benefit of not having a partner. I could afford to pay everyone more.

The Good Times

We had some great years. From 2008-2011, while much of the economy was down due to the housing bubble bursting and the slow recovery, our business, thanks to the legal notices, was better than ever. Prior to those years we grossed nearly the same on an annual basis. While growth is always preferred, it was nice having more or less an idea how things were going to go. Expenses were kept to a minimum, and there weren't a whole lot of raises in those first few years.

However, when growth began to happen, I used some of it to increase salaries, to maintain things like insurance and paid vacations, while trying to improve what I could with the newspaper itself. By the time 2011 rolled around, we had the best product under my tenure, and I would add, the best in the history of either newspaper. I don't know if anyone else outside of our office saw it that way, but I think we all took some pride in knowing that we were functioning at a pretty high level, regardless of our size.

Interlude

It's here in the recounting of this story that I should interject that all this time, there were outside forces at work, trying to steer the legal notices away from us. Be it other papers who competed for them in the counties we served, or be it individual agencies or organizations that wanted to save money by publishing on their own websites, there was always something threatening to take those away. Without them, the papers would not survive. The advertising markets were too small, even if every business advertised. I had tried bringing in business from outside, but most weren't interested, because both of the areas we published in were bedroom communities that already depended on the larger towns for a lot of things. Without a good way to quantify the business they might get through advertising with us, these out of town businesses couldn't justify more ad spending.

Which meant, even though we were doing well year in and year out, there was this ever present specter of doom that would hover over me. I could never fully enjoy the good times because good times eventually come to an end, and I didn't have a counter for that.

Maybe I Wouldn't Need One

I had determined that at some point, for the newspapers to continue to grow, I would need to step away. Either sell them off, or come up with some arrange where I made more of a passive income from the papers. I entertained the idea of selling them in 2010, but never made it past a preliminary evaluation. Trying to determine value for a newspaper wasn't the easiest of things, unless there were assets involved, like buildings, press equipment and other things. We had a small office but it wasn't downtown. It was on a main drag, but it was in an area of town that had been rezoned. Eventually, we would have to sell the building as a home rather than to another business.

The view of our newspaper office from the back.

I could have tried to come up with something, but in the end, I didn't pursue selling because my wife wasn't thrilled about the idea. We had finally strung together some good years, and the prospect of giving that up for who knows how much and an uncertain future was not appealing. I can't say that I blame her, but had we found a buyer when things were good, we might have avoided shuttering the doors.

The Beginning Of The End

But we didn't, and in April of 2012, the Oregon State Legislature passed a bill changing the way foreclosures, of which the notices were the main source of the legals we published, would be processed. Better said, they made it more open ended and thus confusing. Prior to the change, Oregon went through a trustee process, where the trustee acted as a third party arbiter between the bank and the home owner. As far as I know, it was a system that worked well. But because the housing situation was still lingering (Oregon is always late to enter or leave any kind of economic boom or bust), they decided to add a judiciary element to it, too, where the courts could decide cases.

Unfortunately, by the time the statute went into effect in July of 2012, three short months later, they didn't have the statutes in place to govern the law. The banks didn't know how to proceed, so they stopped foreclosing completely, not wanting to run afoul of whatever the new rules would be. That meant by the end of August, all of the foreclosure notices had dried up, leaving us with about four months worth of operating income if we kept going, with enough left over to repay any outstanding subscriptions. I wasn't about to let the subscribers eat even the very small expense of their annual subscription, even though in all, they totaled around $10,000.

Decisions, Decisions

I asked the editor and the office manager what they wanted to do. We could shut the doors the end of September and end up with some operating money left over that I would then give to them in severance pay, or we could hold out until the end of December and hope for a fast turnaround wherein the foreclosure notices started up again. Both of them wanted to continue, which we did, even though I already believed it would be to no avail.

I let people know what was happening in an editorial. I told them we would try to find someway to stick it out, potentially getting some kind of financial backing or a bigger newspaper publisher to buy us so the papers could continue. Well, there's little leverage when you're in a position like that, and the only one who came calling was one of the larger Trustee companies who wanted me to continue on by myself, while they picked up the monthly expenses for a time. They, too, were hoping things would improve.

I turned that offer down, such as it was. It wasn't going to work, anyway. I couldn't maintain the standard of publication we'd built. And my heart wasn't in it anymore.

I contemplated for a few moments potentially suing the State for the law. That would have meant the taxpayers would foot the bill for what the legislature did and I knew I wasn't about to do that. Not the way I felt about taxes. I emailed the local representatives about the situation, but only heard back from one of them. She was less than sympathetic, and she was a Republican.

Bringing Her In For A Landing

So, with very little business, and me foregoing pay, we limped along until the end of December, 2012. Nothing changed. The legals did not come back. My wife told me I should let the office manager and the editor go and I continue, even if we weren't making any money. We could burn through the savings we had built up, which was substantial, during the good years, which probably would have given us another six months at most. I told her I wasn't about to do that to them, not after years of loyalty, awesome work and friendships forged in good times and bad. Besides, I added, we would probably need the money we'd saved live off of while I found work. I hadn't been employed by anyone else since September of 1997. Some employers might be good with my experience as an owner, others might not.

On December 31, 2012, we shut the doors on the newspapers. The one I had started with, which was no longer a newspaper when I picked it up, and the one that had ran uninterrupted for consecutive weeks with only six publishers over its nearly 123 years of service. Through economic downturns, illnesses of the owners, two world wars, and untold storms, both natural and manmade, to watch its beacon of life and light be snuffed out, perhaps permanently, on my watch.

Finally saying goodbye to the office manager and the editor were the hardest things overall to do. Being the publisher who saw the end of a 123 year old newspaper was the most personally stinging thing. I would forever be known as that publisher. It still does not sit well. Most days, though, I don't think about it.

Life Goes On. What Else Is There?

As far as I know, new versions of the newspapers have not sprung up in either town to take the place of the ones I shut down. There was an attempt in one of the towns for a time to print something up while maintaining a Facebook page. It didn't last. I checked on the status of the legal notices now and then through an online website maintained by the Oregon Newspapers Publishers Association. As of the last time I checked in the summer of 2013, some notices were beginning to trickle in, but they were nowhere near the size they were before, nor the quantity.

I wish I had a happy ending to tell. I suppose there is one. My wife and I are okay. We're making ends meet. While she works full-time, I'm trying to make a go on STEEM for as long as she can hold out. I have really felt blessed throughout this process, even when it felt like Providence withdrew its protection. In all of this, we have had enough to sustain us. We have not suffered, other than in our own insecurities. I try to be thankful every day.

This Is Why I My Dislike For Government Is Personal

I suppose I could be bitter. I haven't really liked any level of government for some time. Now, as you can imagine, I like it even less. It's impart why I'm here. Not just because I have the time. Not only for the possibility of earning something. But for the promise that decentralization and a global digital currency brings. The opportunity to freely trade without a government interfering. The hope that at some point, governments will be dissolved all together and we'll be left to live in ways that we see fit.

That way, too, has its perils. Unfortunately, I already know where the current path we're on ends. History, if nothing else, is filled with the falls of civilizations, both great and small. In this case, I'd rather take my chances with the road less traveled, if I manage to get a say in any of this.

About This Post

This is the second and final post chronicling my experiences owning my own business. The idea comes from a few discussions @mazzle and I have had regarding his own business, and business in general. All images courtesy of Glen Anthony Albrethsen