Staying Close to the People We Serve
When we developed an international strategy, I made an agreement with my boss about the kind of relationships I would forge with the publishing partners we would work with around the world. It involved three basic points.
- People at our own company would refer to the companies that we worked with as “partners,” not vendors, not licensees, not other publishers.
- We would adjust our process to meet theirs as well as we could.
- I would visit their companies at least once a year.
Could we have completed our business by not doing any or all of the three? Most certainly we might have. Other publishers did just that.
However, by keeping to these three “rules of conduct,” our company became the first partner of choice. We enjoyed special access to content, and we were the only company in the US that was given files rather than required to share the first print run of books with the smaller publisher to help their bottom line.
Because I visited the companies every year . . . I was also a person to them and a true relationship formed. That relationship, and the access it afforded us, allowed us to save $1000s and to control the timing of our inventory at every product launch.
Companies are buildings with people inside.
Liz Strauss
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