Take the high road: there is no low road to success.

• Author: Wiesner, Pat
• Position: On MANAGEMENT - Communications Publishing - Column

I HAVE BEGUN MY LAST YEAR AS COLUMN WRITER for ColoradoBiz. Perhaps you have noticed that I have tried to move a little up-market and have been writing about things that I felt were important in the formation of the company and the people.

1 have begun to write about things that have been important to me and the success of our company over the years. My hope is that people would like to know what worked, what didn't and some of the things that got us started.

Back in the very early '80s, we were just three people who wanted to start their own magazine company. We were weary of doing all the work and not getting much of the glory. At least, that was what it felt like to us. We had sort of a plan for three magazines, but one, having to do with the technical side of the land mobile business, seemed to be the best.

One of my two partners was Jim Fahnestock, the most technical of us. He also had a lot of experience writing for McGraw Hill, and among the three of us: he had the most clear-headed view of life in magazine: publishing. Jim passionately wanted us and our magazines to be very good. Actually it was his world view that kept us in business, as we shall see.

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The third guy was Phil Cook, who had worked with mc as a space salesman at Communications Publishing. Phil was a competent salesman, Jim knew how: to write, and my job was to somehow pay the bills and arrange for us to have an orderly future.

When you start a business and begin asking for support (in our case it was support in the form of advertising) there are three kinds of people: those who don't pay any attention to what you are telling them you can do to provide advertising and publicity for their product; those who just try to take advantage of you; and strangely, a third group that really pitches in to help you because they believe you will make it. The problem is there are not enough of this third group, so to make it, you must work really hard on the first and second group.

So we worked very hard to put together our first issue. Jim wrote some really great stuff that was sure to get us known as the best place to discuss mobile technology. Phil and I begged people to try us...