16. Talk about your advertising agency and newspaper?
In another of my "past lives" I owned a "Shopper" in the little town near my home...a Shopper is a small newspaper that has nothing but classified ads and display ads in it that now-a-days you pick up at the C-store....back then we filled them with circulars and we mailed them to each and every home in the town....now you have to pick it up at the store when you are buying gas and cigarettes. It was a two person operation...I would sell, collect and run the business and I paid this lady to come to the office twice per week to lay out the paper. It wasn't too long when that "Shopper" started to fail, I thought it would be smart to start another one in another neighboring town to help the first one...so I lost twice as much money
Later I started an advertising ageny in my small town. Between my years in radio and now my short stint in publishing I was convinced that I could be a great advertising agency. As you may or may not know, an ad agency makes commissions on all of the advertising that the client does and my ad agency only had one problem...we had no clients. It didn't take too long to realize that this was probably a mistake.
--T