My Two Biggest Business Challenges

Norah Casey is a Dragon. No, we are not insulting her - she is one of the panel of Dragons on the Irish version of the world-famous business-pitching TV show, Dragon's Den. More importantly, she is also a Country Representative for the 2011 European Business Awards due to the continuing success of her publishing firm, Harmonia.

A trained nurse, she started up the magazine company on her own and quickly realised her dream of being Ireland's foremost publisher of consumer content.

The business continues to grow despite tough economic times in her country. So we asked her what were the two biggest business challenges she is facing right now?

Once you have read about the challenges and opportunities Norah faces, tell us about your own on our Linkedin group

1)Publishing in a digital age

The business of periodicals is going through significant changes and along with other publishers Harmonia’s challenge is to succeed in a digital age. This is a complex challenge and not as easy to define in the multi-layered world of information retrieval.

While online has progressed significantly in areas such as news information and strong pockets of advertising streams, research continually reaffirms the strength of consumer magazine sales.

Harmonia is by no means resting on its laurels - we have a strong and balanced media strategy to ensure that the traditional magazine brands have a multi-faceted media approach.

For instance, a title like Irish Tatler tweets regularly, has a lively Facebook following, an online presence, a number of very high profile events, awards programmes and spin-off magazines to ensure that it reaches out to consumers at all levels.

Our strategy has been different to other media outlets – rather than bolting on complimentary on-line offerings we have grown the brands into multi-platform offerings – this is proving effective and recognises that our customers want to have a dialogue with us at many different levels and in many different ways.

Possibly the greater challenge for Harmonia is how to monetise its online offering – a challenge that all media companies are currently facing.
 

2) Export sales

Another challenge for Harmonia is to increase export sales within the EU.

The industry has a number of barriers to entry for magazine publishers exporting to other countries – not least the language barriers. There are also various different approaches to distribution; most entrants require significant budgets to get on-shelf presence.

There is little harmonisation in areas such as VAT on periodicals and while Ireland has recently lowered its rates to 9% there is no VAT charged on magazines in the UK, for instance.

Like most publishers, the recession offers the biggest challenge to growth. With contract publishing growth limited in coming years, small to medium sized publishers are rationalising their portfolio and focussing management effort and resource on more mainstream titles.

This presents opportunities for Harmonia – not least in acquisitions – but also in terms of growth in areas where it has excelled in the past and in particular in the micro-economy of Ireland.

With an extremely advantageous cost base and the ability to incubate and test titles in a smaller market Harmonia is well placed to export to the UK in particular.

Tell us what your business challenges are by discussing this thread on our LinkedIn page