Robert Kiener is a free-lance writer in Stowe, Vt.
Growing businesses share their experiences in creating and marketing new products and services.
In 1969, when Terry Ehrich, then a 27year-old advertising manager at The New York Review of Books, bought Hemmings Motor News with several other investors, the modest monthly was selling about 30,000 copies and grossing $250,000 annually. Today, after Ehrich has built the magazine into what's come to be known as "the bible of the car-collector hobby market," it sells nearly 265,000 copies a month and grosses more than $20 million annually
Each of those copies of the magazine, which at 800-plus pages looks more like a telephone book, is crammed with about 20,000 advertisements, offering anything a car hobbyist could want.
A recent issue advertised everything from a 1932 Rolls-Royce Henley roadster (for $650,000) to a wheel-bearing set for a Model T Ford ($55) to a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle that needed "tinkering" ($3,200). As car buffs have learned, if you can't find it in Hemmings, it probably doesn't exist.
What's the secret of Ehrich's success? The soft-spoken, self-effacing publisher and editor in chief of one of American publishing's healthiest cash cows says the magazine has grown merely by riding the popularity of car collecting and restoring through the past three decades.
"I'm just a mediocre jockey on a helluva horse," says Ehrich, 57, in his comfortable, antique-filled office in Bennington, Vt.
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