Hurricane to Opportunity: Rebuilding Western NC Business with Brett Hulsey

0:02Hi, and welcome to this week's episode of the Epic Entrepreneurs podcast where we are all about helping business owners just like you achieve success. So we don't do fancy smancy. We don't do flashing lights. We don't do a lot of things that a lot of podcasts will do. These are just real stories about real people and their entrepreneurial and business experiences. We go into their wins, their challenges, and their learnings. So we hope you enjoy it.

0:36hey there welcome to this week's episode of epic entrepreneurs i'm bill gilliland your host and i am also the principal at action coach business growth partners and one of the founders of the ashville business summit speaking of the actual business summit our guest today is one of the sponsors but before we get there i want to remind you hey it's not too late you can still get tickets to this major event that we're having in Asheville. Just go to WNCSummit.com, WNCSummit.com, and all the information is there, the schedule, the whole deal, and how to get tickets, the sponsors, everything is there.

1:18Just check it out, WNCSummit.com. Today, I'm super pumped to talk to my friend, Brett Holsey. Now, he owns one of our major sponsors, which is called the WNC Business Magazine, and it's part of a large organization that he owns called the Holsey Media Group, and he's got a number of publications in there. So, Brett, welcome to the podcast. Yeah, thanks, Bill. Yeah, tell us a little bit about you and Holsey Media and the WNC Business Magazine. Yeah, thank you. We have been in business now under Holsey Media for, We're just going into 11th, going on 12 years now. And we're really a continuation of a previous company, the Fisher Publications, based in Hendersonville, with a publishing history that goes all the way back to 1982 when Hendersonville Magazine was started.

2:12So the products that we have in our group with Holsey Media, the magazine titles, a couple of them are older than our company, really. They were around, and then we acquired them back in 2014 and formed Holsey Media. But myself, I guess I'll use the word veteran now because I'm getting older. I think I've been in local media now for almost 30 years, starting back to my college days when I was at the University of Alabama and started working at the Crimson White Student Newspaper. And that's how I got into this business. And I wasn't really studying that industry in college at all. But as a part-time job, it actually led to a career that I never expected.

2:56So I've always been thankful for that opportunity for sure. And it's opened a lot of doors for me and given me a lot of good experience. But originally, I moved to the Asheville area beginning of 2001 and worked at the Asheville Citizen Times newspaper and was there for a couple of years. and then moved to a couple of different newspaper groups in the eastern part of North Carolina and up and just over the line in Tennessee. And I was on the digital side of the newspaper industry for over a decade. Most recently, I worked as the vice president of digital strategy and development with a group called Jones Media at the time that published community newspapers throughout eastern Tennessee and as well as up in the Boone and Blowing Rock, Banner Elk area in North Carolina and ran their digital division for about seven or eight years.

3:43But we'd always wanted to come back to the Asheville, Hendersonville area. My wife and I had, and we'd started off here and always kind of looking for opportunities to get back here. And through mutual colleagues in the newspaper world, I was able to connect with Joni Fisher, who had Fisher publications in Hendersonville, and she had published Hendersonville Magazine and Healthcare Resources of Western North Carolina for many years. And fortunately, it worked out as a good opportunity for us to come back and acquire those publications and start growing from there. I always tell people the story about getting into that.

4:20It was a question I had was, what is the future of magazines? I mean, I'd worked for over a decade, as I mentioned, on the digital side of the publishing world. and everything seemed to be going digital, kind of drinking Kool-Aid every day, read all the headlines. And certainly digital has changed a lot of how media functions and how people consume information, no doubt about that. But I was pleasantly surprised that magazines still have a life, and it's a different reason why I think people would use them. And I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about how media works and how consumers behave.

4:57But I've kind of seen firsthand over the past 10, 12 years, you know, what really happens. And so that's part of our story is that, you know, we share with people that, you know, as I was kind of kicking the tires on the company looking to buy the magazines, my biggest question was, how long will I be able to do this for? Will these, you know, continue to be strong or are they just eventually going to fade away? And the thing that gave us confidence in moving forward with buying those two magazines at the time and then afterwards starting other publications is we see that they're being picked up and used.

5:27And they're being picked up by, I think, highly qualified consumers who are very engaged and they're actively looking for information, which really makes them a shopper. They're on the hunt for information as they use our publications, really. And we saw firsthand as this market has grown and boomed and tourism has always been a major influence here, relocation here as well, healthy economy, really diverse economy. We find that we keep putting magazines out and people keep picking them up. And our clients have been with us for many years now. And there are some people who are advertising in Hendersonville Magazine who have been advertising since it started in 1982, and they've been in the edition annually ever since then.

6:09There are others that started their business after Hendersonville Magazine began publishing, but since they've started, they've been in the magazine every year since then. So we've really been fortunate to have a lot of loyal clients and a strong retention rate, but I think that comes from the success and the benefits they receive from the marketing partnerships we have. So it's been a fun ride. And what's really been fun, you know, the last 10 years is once we got into the business and started publishing the two existing magazines, it gave us a platform to see other opportunities where maybe some markets were underserved.

6:44And, you know, we've jumped in and we've launched or acquired about 10 other titles in that time. we've launched several new brands, you know, in terms of local media publications that all have a digital component as well with, you know, the websites, social media, email newsletters, etc. And then over the last several years, there've been other opportunities where people who may have had, you know, one publication or a small group of publications have come to us and said, you know, it's time for me to retire or do something different. Would you be interested in carrying this on? You know, and so it's been a good fit for our company to do that.

7:16So, So, you know, if you look back over the past decade, only two of the titles we published today existed back then under our group. And so the growth we've had has been, I think, a testament to the people we've had working with us who are really engaged in the community. And certainly, you know, the hundreds of businesses that we work with across Western North Carolina and now into upstate South Carolina. That's cool. That's cool. I'm going to ask you some – I know you're a sponsor, and we'll get to the summit in a minute and what that's about. But I'm going to ask you the business questions that I always ask business owners because I think it could be useful for our audience.

7:57So, listen, if you had to start over in business, what would you do differently? That sounds like an easy question, but my mind goes a lot of places when you ask that.

8:18I don't have a great answer for you. I think I've learned things along the way and adjusted as I've gone. And I think, you know, probably, and I think this plays into what you offer through Action Coach as well, because I've benefited from you, an Action Coach, as I've worked with you over the years. is maybe a little more planning on the front end. But I also think it's okay that sometimes you don't know what you need to work on and need to plan for until you get into it. So I don't know that I would have known what to plan for at the very beginning, but I would certainly advise anyone, you know, plan as much as you can on the front end, but expect that you're going to need to continue planning and adjusting because it doesn't stay the same.

9:03You know, I didn't know what to ask myself or what I needed to find out information on. 10, 12 years ago, and I've learned some of that over the years. And so, but I think anybody would benefit from getting the best plan in place on the front end, at the same time, not putting it on the back burner, you know, continuing to proactively plan for what's next and the what ifs and those kind of things. I will say I probably haven't done as much of that. And I think, you know, I mean, something like Hurricane Alene is hard for anyone to plan for or avoid, but, you know, there were some lessons that businesses learned, you know, as a result of that, they never thought they needed to be prepared for, but they learned, you know, that now you should be.

9:48And so, you know, whether it's a hurricane or whether it's just a, you know, bump in business or change in the business climate or new opportunities or whatever, I think be more proactive and less reactive in planning. You know, hindsight, I wish I would have done more of that over the past 10, 12 years. And it's something I continually try to remind myself as I go forward that, you know, trying to get ahead of the curve more of really kind of driving the bus, so to speak, of where we're going next. Yeah. Sometimes you have to, like, actually do some stuff for a while before you can figure out what to plan for.

10:23But being proactive is way better than being reactive, for sure. Yeah. So, I mean, we, you know, we teach proactive strategic versus reactive tactical. So, you know, it's an interesting one. So, yeah, I think you hit on the next one. Like what are some of the bigger learnings that you've had over that time? You know, I think.

10:48From a hiring standpoint, a team standpoint, I've noticed that in my in my career, when I worked for someone else, you know, a larger organization, a newspaper group or media company. and I was in managerial roles where I had responsibility for hiring and training the divisions of my staff. I think, and this might have just been kind of coming with early age in the working world. I shared this with someone the other day that I used to think that when it comes to hiring someone, it was simply about the most qualified person on paper is who you should go for. And I'm not saying that we've made mistakes in that area, but what I've seen just in general business and talking to other business owners that I think sometimes there hasn't been as much emphasis as it should have been on, you know, who's the right fit for the team.

11:43And the other thing I think I've seen is when I worked with much larger companies that might have had, you know, I've worked in newspapers that had 400 people in one building. You know, if you hire someone at a 400, you know, and everybody has a different personality, different working style, different strengths, different weaknesses, different experiences. You know, one person doesn't change the culture that much of a group of 400, unless they're in a top leadership position, let's say. But what I realized in working with a really small team, you know, we've got, you know, roughly 10 people who are really full time with us and, you know, 10 more that, you know, do different, a variety of, of jobs and tasks in our group to help us get things done that are on different levels of, you know, part-time plans.

12:31But especially in a kind of a core full-time team, one person really changes the culture in a small group. And so, and that, not that this, you know, changes it for the worst, but it can feel different. I've gone through stages of our office environment feeling different based on who's sitting in the seat, you know, know, at the desk across the room. Um, and so, and I think that has been good actually is, you know, it's not stagnant. It keeps you on your toes. You realize that, um, you know, there's a new dynamic when different people with different strengths and weaknesses, ways of doing things, et cetera, are in the mix.

13:07Um, but I think it also leads to needing to be more thoughtful about, you know, who's the best fit for the team right now. You know, what, what do we need? We went through an exercise several years ago of, you know, doing personality profiles and disc profiles. And what we came out of that with was there was a, and I can't remember all the, you know, the different labels that are kind of titles that are given to those classifications, but there was a kind of a gap in our team. We didn't have somebody who really had a strong leaning towards, you know, this profile and this is how they work and this is what they excel in.

13:43We had a lot of people who kind of had the opposite personality, but we had a quadrant, so to speak, of that disc circle that was just missing from our team. And looking back on it, I realized not having somebody who had that work style and that mentality and that natural leaning was really kind of holding us back because I didn't realize it until we brought somebody who had that. Then I saw how much we improved by having that type of person in the company. And so those are things you don't think about when you're starting off in business. At least I didn't for sure, but it's something I've learned along the way.

14:17Yeah, no, I love it. I love it. Well, that gets into the employment side as well. What do you think some of the common misconceptions about running a business are?

14:30I don't know that anybody assumes it's just easy, but I think only business owners know what goes into it that nobody else is ever going to see um the little things that um you know at the end of the day it has to be done by somebody and if something hasn't gone well it wasn't planned for successfully or just wasn't executed successfully it's got to get done the little things to take care of you know there there are those early mornings and nights and weekends and craziness behind the scenes that I never knew existed until I was in it. I just think you can't until you're in it. I think the goal is to avoid that as much as possible.

15:16I know planning from your team can certainly help with that. Not having someone who's doing everything and trying to bring some order to the systems. I think sometimes there's no way around it. There are going to be things that just have to be done and it a lot of times comes down to the owner of the business to make sure that happens. I think it's also the feeling of responsibility because – and I think especially, gosh, over the last few years, surviving COVID, recovering from Hurricane Helene, with larger teams at the time. Our team was bigger during COVID than it had been several years before that as we were growing.

15:52And then our team had gotten even bigger over the last couple of years, particularly with the acquisition of the Laurel of Asheville magazine, which practically doubled our staff. And then Hurricane Alene comes. And the first thought I had after just the shock of what had happened to the to the area was, what is this going to mean next? And how are things going to be different? What do we need to be prepared for? How do we take care of our team? How do we make sure that they continue to have support and be successful? And, you know, when you're kind of the caretaker of that, I think, and, you know, for the employees themselves, for the families, for the businesses that you serve and their clients, you know, trying to help them grow.

16:41So you definitely evolve into having that sense of responsibility for everybody who's part of the organization to make sure that it's serving everybody who's part of it. Yeah, I like that. So what do you attribute your growth to? I think it's been easier to, you know, to, as we've launched something new or, you know, maybe acquired an existing publication that was in the market that, you know, was a good fit for us. I think certainly just the economies of scale, you know, and scalability make it easier tactically to do that. But I think, you know, with time comes the experience. And I think trying to get better every day, every week, every month, every year with doing what we do.

17:29So that applies to a new project. You know, if we launch something new, we've learned some lessons of, you know, how to position the product, how to market it, how to, you know, grow the revenue, how to make sure it's serving clients well and doing the best for them. I think kind of from a practical standpoint, one of the biggest things that has helped us here in the market is we're publishing more magazine titles than anybody else in Western North Carolina, is that our distribution just keeps strengthening when we add more things to it, because it means that we're cross-distributing one product and another in multiple locations.

18:05So, for example, we might work with the healthcare community through our healthcare resources publication. And delivering magazines inside of those facilities and those locations might also lead to expanded distribution of another product that makes sense to be there for that audience. So that has strengthened our visibility, our distribution network, which ultimately is where the rubber meets the road for us, is getting our clients' messages into the hands of the people they want to connect with. That's really, at the end of the day, what we do. And that has gotten better, I think, as we've grown because we've been able to leverage the assets we have to make that stronger.

18:48Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. Let's switch gears a minute and talk a little bit about the summit and what's going on business-wise in our region right now. So you've been a big supporter of the summit. You've sponsored it every single year we've done it. And first of all, I just want to say thank you for that. That's been a big – you believed in it before a lot of people did. And so we want to thank you for that. Enjoy. Why do you keep supporting the Asheville Business Summit? Well, I guess, you know, several reasons. But, you know, one is just I think it's important for the local business community.

19:37I know how beneficial it can be to take the time to step away from your business for a day and work on your business to get expertise from others who can share knowledge with you to connect with people. I certainly believe in the power of all that. And, you know, I love the fact that the Business Summit was getting started, you know, right as we were launching W &C Business Magazine back in the fall of 2022 is when we were doing our first, you know, addition to get out there to kind of show it to the local business community. So the timing was perfect, and we were glad to be able to sponsor Dan and have copies there at that event.

20:12And it kind of helped us kick off as well at the same time. So it's been good to grow with you all as we've been doing the summit and being the media partner of that for the last several years. So I think it just obviously goes hand in hand. We created the WNC Business Magazine because we realized there was a gap in the market here. There really was no there was no business journal. There was nothing that was really providing helpful information, keep people informed of what was going on around the region. And, you know, we've we've tried to focus not just on Asheville. Our WNC Business Magazine is is WNC wide, so to speak.

20:50It's 22 counties across Western North Carolina where we seek news and information. We have subscribers and clients from across the region. And so it's, you know, it's beyond Asheville. and we look for what we can share. We really try to be as diverse as possible in terms of the industries we're talking about, the examples and the showcase features we're doing on who's doing what in a variety of markets in different geographic locations. We want to know and share what's going on in Banner Elk, what's going on in Maggie Valley, what's going on in Tryon or Franklin, not you know not just Asheville and Hendersonville but I think you know connecting the audience we have of local business owners most of them are just you know small entrepreneurs we also have people that we reach who are you know they're not the owner of a company but they're the VP of sales or the CFO or the HR director and I think they all belong at the summit as well because I think there are lessons you can learn whether you're the business owner or whether you're working in the business you know really at a higher level you should be thinking like the business owner even if you're not the owner of the company, you should be thinking about your division of the company as the business you run.

22:01So I think there are lessons to learn whether you're the owner or whether you're a key employee of a company that's there.

22:11Yeah, no, I love that. I love that. And, you know, we called it the Asheville business summit because it's in Asheville, but it serves, I mean, we had a, we had a guy from, from Africa last year from Ghana, you know, come. So yeah, we're, I mean, one of our visions is to this thing that people would come from all over the world to Asheville to experience and learn business. And so that's coming about. So certainly we're about Western North Carolina as well. I have always thought it was a great fit.

22:49Now, what have you seen in the, you know, we had a lean. I mean, part of the deal with the summit is like, all right, it's been about a year. What do we do now? Like, how do we, you know, people have had a chance to absorb it. It's, you know, it's one of those impactful things of people in our region. Like, where were you on the day? Like, it was, there's a few events in your life. Like, where were you on the day that the hurricane hit and what happened and how were you impacted? Because everyone was impacted. And then, you know, what we've seen is, you know, somewhere in late spring, early summer, I think people finally wrap their heads around and are starting to think about, all right, now, how do we use this positively?

23:33First of all, how do we, I mean, one of the things when we created the summit was because we were coming out of COVID. I mean, it was one of the first events where, the big events where you could actually get together and not be too scared or, you know, there were a lot of masks still there. Sure. But, you know, one of the main functions of the summit is to get people together because I always say you're probably going to learn more in the hallway or over lunch. Then, you know, you're going to learn a lot from our speakers. We've got great speakers, but, you know, putting them together. So what are you seeing in the marketplace around where people's heads are going now and how we're going to be able to use this as a catalyst to move business forward in Western North Carolina?

24:17Yeah. I think I've seen kind of slow but steady improvement in the outlook and the mindset and just kind of the, you know, it's not real quantifiable, but the vibes that people have. Some of the things we were seeing are very quantifiable. But, you know, and I reminded our team last year as we as this happened. And of course, you know, we had we had one team member who was really displaced. I mean, was in a remote area with a lot of damage. And gosh, I mean, they literally had rescued people on a paddleboard for several days and running food and supplies and that kind of thing. So, I mean, everybody in our team was going through a very different experience based on where they live.

24:59This one went through a lot more than the rest of us did. But, you know, one of the first things we said to everybody is that, you know, tough times make tougher people. And we've already gone through COVID, which was scary and uncertainty was there and it was hard. But I think we came out stronger from that. And, you know, one of the first things I thought of when Lean happened was we've got to draw back on some of that experience from COVID. of what was it we did, what was it we said, how did we behave that led us through it. And so I tried to remember what worked then that we can reapply now.

25:37And it still wasn't exactly the same, but there were definitely some lessons. But one of the things we talked about as a team back during COVID and reemphasized again in Helene is that we know there are some things we can't control. We know that real things have happened. Some lives have been turned upside down for sure across the region. But nothing else really impacts us more than what we choose to do every day.