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Customer story: Hometown Values Magazine

How a four-person team sends 20 magazines to press every month

Associate Publisher Travis Henderson shows, on his own screen, how The Magazine Manager replaced pencil-drawn layouts, a separate accounting system that cost close to $100,000 a year, and a billing process that froze sales for up to five days.

Customer since 2013Using The Magazine Manager
Includes 2 live screen demos 19:24

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What you’ll see in the video

  • 4:09Why they stopped paying for separate accounting. The re-keying, the blackout week, and what replaced it.
  • 7:32A live report tracking pages across 20 editions. How Travis locks each book size in the final week before press.
  • 11:24Booked ads that drop into InDesign on their own. Approved art lands on the page with no dragging and dropping.
“It was just night and day.”
Travis HendersonAssociate Publisher, on moving from paper layouts to The Magazine Manager
~$150K
Estimated yearly savings from retiring a separate accounting system and an outsourced art vendor
2x
The revenue of 16 years ago, produced with half the staff
20
Magazine editions sent to press every month, all at the same time
5 days
Of monthly billing re-entry eliminated, with no more sales freeze before press
Hometown Values MagazineA division of Deseret Media Companies, Salt Lake City
Close to 20,000 account recordsmoved into The Magazine Manager at onboarding

All figures as discussed in the recorded interview with Travis Henderson.

The story

From pencil sketches to a single system

When Travis took over Hometown Values, reps were drawing magazine layouts on paper and faxing them in. Every dropped ad meant redrawing the page. The Magazine Manager started as a fix for contracts and flat plans, and grew into the system that runs sales, production and accounting.

Before Disconnected and manual

  • Reps spent hours sketching layouts for a 60-page magazine with pencil and paper, then redrew them whenever a client changed or dropped out.
  • A shared legacy accounting system cost close to $100,000 a year. One person re-keyed 600 to 1,000 ads a month into it, which took up to five days.
  • Sales had to stop during that re-entry window so nothing changed underneath the billing team.
  • Creative went to an outsourced firm overseas, and finished art had to be uploaded back into the system by hand.

After One connected workflow

  • Close to 20,000 account records moved over at onboarding, a process Travis calls pretty seamless.
  • Flat plans replaced paper layouts. In Travis’s words, it was night and day.
  • Accounting runs inside The Magazine Manager, so the separate system and its cost are gone, and reps keep selling all the way to press.
  • Design moved in-house. A team of four now produces 20 editions plus supplemental products.
There’s four of us pushing out 20 different magazines, and all of our supplemental products that we do within the magazine, with half the staff we were using 16, 17 years ago.
Travis Henderson, Associate Publisher, Hometown Values Magazine
Across the suite

One publisher, every module

Travis has run both the sales and production sides of Hometown Values, and today uses The Magazine Manager for all of it. Here’s what each part of the platform looks like.

app.magazinemanager.com
Sales and contact record in The Magazine Manager

Sales and contracts

Reps enter contracts once. Rate cards and products are set up in the system, and everything downstream reads from the same record.

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app.magazinemanager.com
Flat plan in Mirabel’s Digital Studio

Production and Digital Studio

Flat plans and pagination for 20 editions, with ad jackets linking each placement back to its order.

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app.magazinemanager.com
Receive Payment screen in The Magazine Manager

Accounting and billing

Billing lives where the orders live. No re-keying, no blackout week, and reporting on the same data.

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Screens shown are from The Magazine Manager product, not Hometown Values’ account.

Built for how they work

When out of the box wasn’t quite enough

With 20 editions closing in the same week, Hometown Values asked the Mirabel development team for two custom tools. Travis shows both on screen in the interview.

Custom report

Page availability, live

Page counts must land on 4- or 8-page signatures. A custom report shows every edition at once, including pages sold, covers and revenue, so Travis can lock each book’s size in the final week and sell it out from there.

InDesign workflow

Ad jackets that fill themselves

When an ad is booked, a jacket with the client, order number and ad size drops into a shared finals folder for InDesign. When the rep uploads and approves the art, it appears on the page automatically, replacing hours of drag-and-drop in the last week.

On working with the team: Travis describes the pricing for custom work as very reasonable and the team as quick to respond and quick to tweak. He also values that product updates come included, and that a wishlist item he submitted showed up in a release about a month later.

Full interview

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19 minutes, including live demos of the page availability report and the InDesign workflow. Enter three quick details to start watching.

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    Customer story

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    4 peopleOn the Hometown Values team
    20 editionsTo press each month
    2x revenueWith half the staff