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Guides to the good life
Entrepreneurs Josh Groves (above left) and Peter Massik (above right) are no strangers to the good life. What started as a project for an elective during the winter quarter of their first year at the Business School has turned into a product line of three books guiding people to the good life at Stanford and Berkeley and to great eats on the Peninsula and in San Jose. Good Life Publications provides an inside look at life outside San Francisco.
Nor were the two classmates and 1992 graduates of the Business School strangers to turning their interest in the outdoors and adventure into business opportunities. A former management consultant and mountain climber, Harvard graduate Massik lists Colorado's Department of Natural Resources and Division of Parks on his rŽsumŽ. Groves, a former Capitol Hill aide, published an employment guide to the Alaska fishing industry for college students after leaving Brown University.
Guide to the Good Life at Stanford, the first in the series, was published under dramatic circumstances just as the two were starting their second year at Stanford. Massik and Groves learned firsthand about the difficulties of the publishing industry as they made frequent trips to Sacramento to ensure that their printer -- who had filed for bankruptcy with their deposit in hand -- would get their job done. "Ironically, my work in Small Business Management suffered because I was tending to my small business," says Massik.
The small business took a leap with the October 1992 distribution of their first guidebook. The 282-page book was distributed free of charge to the entire Stanford community and was also sold in local bookstores. Besides the usual tips on restaurants and travel, the guide featured interviews with Stanford alumni working in different professional areas and a list of tips from Bay Area notables, including such tidbits as Apple founder Steve Jobs' favorite brown rice sushi. The inclusion of interviews with business graduates and accompanying advertisements from recruiting companies transformed the economics and appeal of the traditional guidebook. Students could learn about new career paths while corporate recruiters paid a premium to reach the target Stanford audience.
Groves cites an investment bank's commitment to purchase the whole back cover for advertising space as a milestone. "When we were first starting and companies were willing to write out checks for five hundred dollars and just wanted to know whom to make the check out to, I was surprised as hell," he says. Early sales were made while the two were still juggling the demands of first-year core classes. "I woke up and made calls between 7 and 9 a.m. to the East Coast and then went to class," Massik recalls. "Later, Josh would check the machine to find out if we had made any sales."
The early-morning routine paid off in May when the two persuaded the investment bank to purchase a back cover advertisement instead of the intended quarter-page ad. When the bank agreed to the back cover, they put into action their first lesson in pricing strategy -- instantly. Says Massik, "At the time, we had no idea what to charge for the back cover. Professor Bob Davis told us to price ourselves a small amount higher than the competition (at that time, the Stanford Directory)." A premium-priced product communicated quality and opened the door to premium sales -- and covered costs up to that point.
With the first advertisement in hand, the two recruited additional Stanford talent to publish the first edition. Thirty friends and spouses from the Business School helped write reviews, a Stanford undergraduate served as editor, and a team of four worked as advertising sales reps. Groves explained how the Stanford connection pushed them forward: "A history graduate student, our first ad sales representative, sold one advertisement each day for his first two weeks. We were amazed."
The amazement at their company and success continues today -- when plans are in the works for the third annual Stanford good-life guide, second annual Berkeley good-life guide, and another edition of their restaurant guide to the Peninsula and San Jose. They have accomplished all of this in nineties Northern California entrepreneurial fashion. While Massik works full-time on the business, Groves holds down a daytime job as manager of new business opportunities at Dialog Information Services. However, both work double time. "We each get paid for our jobs from 9 to 5, but past 5 p.m., we are both putting equity back in, planning for the future," says Massik.
The Peninsula and San Jose Restaurant Guide was one plan that solved two problems at once -- uneven cash flows and the opportunity to capitalize on existing content. The seasonal cash flows resulting from the campus-based guidebooks generated cash for internal growth but burdened the company with difficult staffing and funding issues. "Publishing the restaurant guide provides us with countercyclical cash flow while permitting us to work on the part of the guide (restaurants) that we liked writing -- and people enjoyed reading -- the most," explains Groves.
Generating even cash flows will allow Groves and Massik to run their business more to their liking, eventually enabling them to hire year-round employees instead of seasonal or project-based personnel. Says Massik, "At Stanford, everybody talked about building a team. I didn't realize how important that would be -- especially when people continually come in and out of our business."
Plans for the future include potential forays into cyberspace -- and of course, continuing to sample life in the Bay Area. "We enjoy the good life. People are too busy to eat at miserable restaurants, sleep in bad hotels, or travel to uninteresting places," says Groves. Luckily, the founders of Good Life Publications have made it that much easier for the rest of us to live the good life.
-- Polly Arenberg, MBA '94
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