The best business decision I ever made.

• Author: Wiesner, Pat
• Position: Pwiesner@cobizmag.com - Pat Wiesner, retired chief executive officer of Wiesner Publishing

Now THAT I'M SORT OF RETIRED, someone asked me the other day what I thought was the best business decision I ever made, Tough question.

Fortunately for me, the best decision I've ever made wasn't the result of some excruciatingly difficult moral dilemma or some painful lesson learned the hard way.

It came about rather innocently, kind of by accident or default.

It happened early in my business life and is a concept that has been responsible in no small part for whatever success this company has had.

Wiesner Publishing was started on a shoe-string. I had been "consulting" for about three years after my last real job and I had decided to try to start my own business. So I leased a one-room office in old Littleton and outlined an idea for a magazine, "Private Cable."

I couldn't afford to hire anyone so I did everything myself. It was in the days of the first Apple computers, and I bought one and learned how to do my own circulation list. At the same time I solicited articles and tried to sell advertising.

It's not the easiest trick to sell advertising in a magazine that doesn't yet exist, but it's also something I've learned many times since.

At the same time I went to the State of Colorado to register a name for my new venture. My first try was the name LAMP Inc.

I wasn't going to tell anyone what the name stood for (Laugh A Minute Publishing!), but it was chosen to remind me that I never wanted to get into the kind of pressure cooker that I had left a couple years earlier.

The state, however, told me Colorado already had a LAMP Inc., and therefore I had to settle for the much less meaningful and mundane Wiesner Publishing. So much for the easy part.

That done, I went back to doing everything myself.

It occurred to me that I knew a couple of guys who knew a lot about the business and that they might be interested in joining a new company One was a great editor, the other a great salesman. Just what I needed! So we all...