Maddux Report - Tampa Bay's Business, Finance and Development Magazine

Miles Media SEEs Florida
by Melissa Wells

Sarasota publishing firm
delivers print and virtual
information to Florida visitors.

Roger Miles, president of Sarasota-based Miles Media Group, has used his management savvy to transform the bottom line at the vacation guide publishing company from red ink to black.

Roger Miles has spent his entire 27-year career in the publishing industry. But his entrepreneurial streak didn't get a firm grip on him until 11 years ago when he acquired SEE magazines from his Boston-based employer, Prescott Publishing Company. SEE magazines - a division of Miles Media Group based in Sarasota - provide recreational and hospitality information to tourists in the form of small visitors magazines that can be found in visitors' centers and hotel lobbies everywhere in Florida.

"I ran Prescott's subsidiaries," Miles says. "I helped them grow their company to 23 weekly papers and a print plant. In 1985 I acquired the company that publishes SEE magazines for them. But their interest returned to daily newspapers and New England. In addition, the [SEE magazine] company's performance was far below expectations. It was losing a lot of money. So the executives asked me to sell the company for them." But Miles had another solution.

"Because I was so busy with my many responsibilities I'd become less involved in that company and had someone who ran it reporting to me," he explains. "It had been mismanaged in its day-to-day operations. I told them I didn't want to sell the company, I wanted to buy it. It took a year to get the capital and half of that time to convince the owner that I was serious. He had no idea I'd really leave.

"It was a wonderful family business, but I wasn't part of the family," Miles adds. "I decided to go out on my own and this opportunity appealed most to me."

Even though the risk was high in assuming ownership of a publication losing money hand over fist, Miles believed he was equal to the challenge of turning around this "minor" detail. "The number-one industry in Florida is tourism," he says. "SEE magazines were all over the state and had a good reputation. They also had a lot of advertisers that were happy. The market and product were there. What wasn't there was common-sense management."

With two venture partners and the seller "taking back paper," Miles says, "I acquired the company in 1990. We had our first profitable year in 1994." Although the company has grown at a 16-percent compound rate since Miles acquired it, "we were losing $1.5 million on $3.5 million in sales our first year."

Changing strategy
Moving the bottom line from red ink to black occurred as Miles made changes in operations. But first, he and his family moved from Boston to Sarasota. "We relocated because the company has always been headquartered here," he says.

Next, Miles cut back on the number of editions published in a year. "The magazines were monthly publications but the tourist season at that time was just three months," he says. "SEE had been publishing 12 issues on 17 books across the state. We went with fewer editions and more copies. Less than three million copies were printed in '90. By '92 we had 7.5 million, and our ad rates didn't rise. Our advertisers loved that and they started getting better response, so we got more advertisers."

Another successful strategy involved updating publishing technology. "We embraced technology from the beginning," Miles says. "We went to web printing instead of using sheet fed. We had a PC platform and were publishing electronically early on. Technology has boosted our revenue per employee - which has risen significantly - as have wages and income per employee."

Miles set up shop with no layers of middle management. "Our employees require a lot of self management and we pay them better than average compensation," he says. "We expect our employees to meet the requirements of the job, and we don't want to pay someone to make sure they do it. Employees that need a lot of direction don't work out in this environment. [Certain types] of people thrive in this environment (we have no time clocks and it's relatively loose although demanding) but not everyone can work like this."

The company, which had a staff of 65 employees in 1990, has since grown to 93. It has been operating in the 8,200-square-foot headquarters that has been its home since the company moved from a Siesta Key garage when it was founded in 1954.

But everyone's looking forward to occupying the second floor of a new 25,000-square-foot building in Lakewood Ranch in May. "We'll be the primary tenant in 12,500 square feet," says Miles. "We need a creative environment and like being on the water. We'll overlook Lake Osprey on a peninsula of land. It's a peaceful environment for our creative process."

Group expansion
That creative process has led to several new publications to complement the SEE magazines. Miles Media Group also publishes the In-Room Concierge, the Official Florida Vacation Guide, the Official Florida Camping Directory and Great Getaways. In addition, Miles Media publishes vacation guides and directories for seven of Florida's convention and visitor bureaus.

As the roster of product offerings has grown so have revenues. The company had annual sales of $4 million in '91. This year Miles estimates sales will be just under $20 million. Meanwhile, he has been buying out his partners since '96.

"One venture partner and Prescott are totally out," Miles says. "I bought out the other venture partner who came back in and bought stock without the usual preferred terms. He has come in as a minority shareholder and he's still on our board. He's a major asset to our company."

Managers also own 12 percent of the company. "We have a group of key employees who over time have earned stock options," says Miles. "We're all in this together." Miles and his managers scored big in 1996 when they won the bid to publish Visit Florida's annual marketing publications that are designed to attract tourists to the Sunshine State.

"We were privatized in July Ô96 and [already] had a vacation guide vendor, but decided to put the contract out to bid," says Dee Ann Smith, Visit Florida's senior vice president of marketing in Tallahassee. "Miles, the previous publisher and Meredith Publishing were our three finalists. [Des Moines, Iowa-based Meredith Corporation publishes, for instance, Better Homes & Gardens.] Miles went in as a major underdog against Meredith and the vendor that had been publishing the guide for 10 years. But Miles was awarded the bid on the basis of revenue sharing, number of books, ability to produce quality of product."

Beating such stiff competition created a wave of enthusiasm from the new publisher. "In-house they call our vacation guide "Wow" because they did it. They won the bid," Smith says. "That excitement has continued [through the years] and that's been great fun for me."

The value of timing
Call it smart thinking or fortuitous, but Miles also was able to capitalize on another challenge confronting Visit Florida. "In '96 I hired a young college graduate to figure out what a website for the state of Florida should be like," Miles says. "She worked on that for over a year. No one knew we were doing it and we referred to it as the Black Hole."

Nevertheless the "Black Hole" more than paid for itself. "While we were developing our primary printed collateral piece for the consumer with Miles, he happened to be in the building listening to me lamenting my fate," Smith says. "I had $35,000 and 45 days to get the Visit Florida website done. We had bids that came in at $500,000 and six months to develop it."

"We hadn't published our site," says Miles. "I saw this as an opportunity. We had the site and no traffic and Visit Florida had a $20-million advertising budget to drive people to our site. The next day we gave them a proposal. We created a partnership and www.flausa.com [the Visit Florida site] was launched in June '97 at the Governor's conference. Now we're rolling out the latest evolution of that site with 3,000 pages of content. The traffic will be four million unique visitors this year."

And results like these have impressed Smith. "Miles has very capable staff that are scouring state information," she says. "They also have excellent writers and they're willing to invest in technology to get the job done. They're conscious of hiring good people to go out and do the job. That's been a very welcome experience." For Miles Media, the website business mushroomed.

In addition to www.flausa.com, Miles has since launched more than 70 websites for convention and visitors bureaus, as well as sites for its own publications. "In our industry publishers tend to be either print people or technology oriented," Miles says. "Print isn't going out of business, but our biggest thing is that we've become an integrated media company. We deliver visitor information whenever and however it makes sense to do it."

While meeting this objective, Miles has set his sites on doing "another $10 million of growth in Florida in five years," he says.

"There's also a real growth opportunity outside Florida. [Vacation guide publishing] is a fragmented, unorganized industry with lots of moms and pops. There's an opportunity for an integrated media company to deliver a legitimate product to 500 convention and visitors bureaus of any size in the 50 states and 30 countries. Our largest credential is the fact that we've done it for the state branded as best for tourism. If we've done it for the best, we can help others."