Strategic Planning, Budgeting and Resource Management

A publishing firm must master the basics before it can realize its fullest competitive advantage. Based on our broad range of industry-specific experience, Cross River Publishing Consultants works with you in the present to ensure a profitable future.

CRPC's consultants are skilled in the areas of strategic planning, budgeting, cash-flow projection, process re-engineering, accountability, and managing by objectives. CRPC's consultants can help your management team be better leaders, by being better organized and by understanding, at base level, what it is they must do in order to succeed.

Strategic Planning
The success of failure of any publishing business rests squarely on the ability of management to translate goals and objectives into successfully completed tasks, within a prescribed budget and time period. Without a clear vision and without strategic plans and goals, management can't effectively tell its staff or its customers what it wants to do, when it wants to do it, and where it wants to go in the future.

Planning and communicating goals is the cornerstone of the management process. CRPC can help you to frame your goals and objectives and to communicate them within and beyond your organization.

CRPC's systematic approach is to:

• Identify basic long-term goals.
• Create objectives and tasks that will achieve those goals within an agreed upon timeframe.
• Determine and allocate the resources necessary for completion of those tasks.
• Monitor progress.
• Verify results.

Whether you want to revise your present long-term strategy or wish to develop a new one, CRPC works with you to ensure that your business activities move directly toward the realization of your objectives. In the end, the systematically researched strategic plan becomes your most valuable tool in reducing risk and in maintaining a competitive edge.

Budgeting
Too often, a publishing enterprise will falter because of avoidable undercapitalization or improper investment. Your future rests on flexible budgeting, profit planning, cash-flow forecasting and investing, which form the solid foundation from which to make sound financial decisions concerning your publishing program. Cross River Publishing Consultants can play an integral part in your strategic planning process by helping to assemble the corporate and divisional budgets and cash-flow projections needed to monitor progress both in the short term and in the long term.

CRPC's consultants are skilled in the budgeting process, no matter how simple or complex your company needs are. Our consultants can help you

• Review past concerns and budget for them in the future;
• Raise future issues you may have overlooked;
• Benchmark current and future projections against industry norms and standards.

Budgets are only as good as the numbers and assumptions that go into them. CRPC's consultants can guide you through this process so that your numbers and assumptions are valid, so that the results you achieve are in line with what you, and your investors, expect.

With budgeting, the best surprise is no surprise. Cross River Publishing Consultants can help you achieve that goal.

Resource Management
Cross River Publishing Consultants knows that getting the most from your available resources is a difficult task. While every business faces resource limitations, it need not be limited by the quality of those resources. Juggling talent, time and money between diverse functions, however, may leave you accepting second best. CRPC's expertise in resource management, therefore, can help you make the difference between marginal and record growth.

CRPC believes people are your major resource. For new or young publishers, employees make the difference between failure and survival; for established publishers, between inertia and market leadership. CRPC's professionals understand that careful selection, substantial and ongoing training, and competitive employee compensation lead to growth and success. At the same time, we realize that properly selecting employees, providing training programs, and benchmarking compensation packages takes time and expertise away from your primary goals. We offer publishers the full range of human resource services:

• Discreet executive search and recruitment
• Creation and revision of job descriptions
• Specialized on-site training
• Effective sales/marketing incentive programs
• Evaluation of salaries and benefits

Your goals become our goals; motivation, satisfaction, and productivity.

And productivity doesn't stop with the individual. In today's dynamic business world, a static, "time-tested" organizational structure may be costing you profits. On the other hand, the mere upgrade of your computer system or the creation of a new department could cost valuable time and money if handled incorrectly. To avoid such scenarios, Cross River Publishing Consultants applies tested methodologies to the evaluation of your organization, to determine its optimum efficiency and define implementation changes.

CRPC can also show you the benefits of (and teach your personnel) techniques for identifying alternative financial scenarios, freeing extra investment capital, and budgeting for profit.

CRPC understands the many difficult trade-offs confronting you and your enterprise. Publishing companies, like all companies, face fundamental business decisions: decisions which must be made quickly and executed properly. Our professionals find accurate answers accurately and expediently. By bringing CRPC publishing expertise to bear on the basics, your operation can attain and maintain profitable growth.

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Information Systems/Electronic Publishing

Should technology expenditures be considered part of operating overhead or as an investment with a demonstrable effect on profits? While tradition holds with the former, we believe that rapid innovation in the publishing systems arena will allow forward-thinking executives to manage systems implementation efforts to a better bottom line.

The Information Matrix

Until recently, most publishers only dealt with computers to manage their order processing, financials and, to a lesser extent, to support their marketing efforts. Today, publishers face a bewildering set of system alternatives for every department of their organization.

Some of the directions being taken include:

• Automating the field sales force with portable PC's;
• Providing computer support for telemarketing departments;
• Providing direct link financial reporting from subsidiaries to home offices;
• Developing an integrated, relational marketing database with substantial history on customers, products, prices and ordering patterns.
• Automating page layout and other production activities;
• Providing real-time modeling and budgeting for all departments.

CRPC, through its affiliate Lexicon Group, has been at the forefront of publishing technology since its inception. With each new wave of automation, CRPC, through Lexicon, has provided its clients with a focal point for deciding not only what processes to automate, but how.

Our trained staff of publishing technology experts has had experience in every form of computing and communication technology, from large order processing systems running on a mainframe to simple design and layout programs running on a micro. In addition to our technical expertise, we also provide our clients with in-depth financial analysis which demonstrates exactly what benefits can be derived from each level of expenditure.

Selection and Implementation Methodology
Cross River Publishing Consultants, through its affiliate Lexicon Group, employs a methodology geared to the successful selection and implementation of computer-based technology. Our methodology can be summarized as follows:

• Complete review of all department needs and requirements;
• Careful selection of a wide range of possible system suppliers;
• Development of weighted selection criteria;
• Final system selection;
• Contract development;
• Development of implementation plans;
• Project management;
• System sign-offs.

CRPC/Lexicon, provides its clients with progress reports whenever major milestones are reached. These reports provide updates on project status and an opportunity to add or subtract elements from projects.

The benefits to be derived from CRPC/Lexicon's involvement in your system and implementation program include the following:

• The highest level of technical and managerial expertise in all areas of publishing technology.
• A proven methodology derived from 20 years of corporate publishing experience.
• Techniques for using technology that are pragmatic and immediately results-oriented.
• A clear-sighted view of the relative merits of technologies from one vendor to another.
• A total understanding of costs and benefits.

CRPC/Lexicon has built its reputation on developing information systems recommendations that work. We have no prejudices for one technology versus another.

Everything we do is geared towards your needs with the most appropriate technology available, giving you the flexibility to make your investments last well into the future.

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Magazine and Book Publishing Synergies

The constant need for, and development of, editorial material provides magazine publishers with a unique advantage that can often be leveraged into new products: an editorial and art database that is usually owned by, and accessible to, the magazine company.

With these databases in hand, and with the demographic research that most magazine companies do on a regular basis, these companies can significantly augment their revenue streams by setting up book publishing programs and re-using material from their magazines in book form. They can then begin to branch out, and create new books that can expand and enhance the visibility and the readership of the magazine program itself.

CRPC's consultants are experts in determining the synergistic elements between magazine and book publishing. Whether a one-time special or a long-term program; a one-shot or a continuity series, CRPC can help magazine companies leverage their strengths and turn them into additional products that can become profit centers in their own right.

Cross River Publishing Consultants can help magazine companies:

• Research the proper editorial program to capitalize on the strengths of both magazine and book markets.
• Organize a book program whether in house or through the use of outside freelancers.
• Determine the best way to market new products, whether through use of the house file, through separate distribution, through synergistic licensing of the product to another publisher, or through a combination of these means and others.
• Set up book distribution, once the methodology has been determined.
• Analyze results and determine future direction of continued book development.

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New Product Research and Development

In addition to books, there are many other new product programs that magazine publishers can implement to significantly increase revenues and profits. Based upon in-house research and the customer database, CRPC is expert in providing substantive new product concepts that can be thoroughly tested and effectively implemented.

CRPC has the experience and the knowledge to broaden your product base in a logical, safe, budgeted manner. Results can accrue on a one-time, or continuous, basis.

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Seminars and Speaking

If you need staff training in any publishing area, CRPC can provide you with trainers, facilitators, and materials. CRPC is skilled in teaching the intricacies of every aspect of publishing, from introductory level courses through the highly complex.

CRPC's on-site seminars and problem-solving sessions have received high praise from satisfied clients. You too can bring this to bear on your company.

In addition, if you are putting on a seminar or a publishing event and need speakers, CRPC consultants can solve your problem. CRPC's consultants are in the forefront of exploring publishing issues. They are up-to-date on every aspect that is of interest to publishers, from marketing issues to electronic issues; from the history of publishing to its future.

Let CRPC help you organize and staff your next training session or your next seminar. We guarantee you'll be pleased with the results.

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Temporary Management

Sometimes, events seem to conspire against you: Staff leaves, a new project develops that you don't have internal resources to cope with, or you just need someone to help out in order to get something done.

CRPC, in addition to consulting services, offers temporary management services. Because we have people on staff who are already expert in managing publishing programs, you don't have to show them the ropes. Our consultants can come into your particular work environment and immediately take charge of the situation at hand.

Because they are used to quickly analyzing internal processes, our consultants can, among many other things:

• Acclimate to your particular internal structures and management processes fast, and work within them.
• Work with your staff to accomplish the needed tasks.
• Work within your budget.
• Provide guidance and training to your staff while working with them.
• Provide you with expert feedback about your current systems.
• Introduce you to new sources of information and new vendors.

Our temporary management rates are reasonable and competitive. And, you don't have to pay the added costs of FICA or benefits.

The next time you have a problem that needs immediate on-site staff help, just call on CRPC. We can help you help yourself.

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For more information call 914-232-6708, e-mail us at twoll@pubconsultants.com or leave us a message here.