Member Profile: Carlos Guzman, TheFlyer.com magazine

BY DWIGHT BITIKOFER Don't be fooled by the small, magazine-sized format they call a flexi. TheFlyer.com magazine boasts 2.275 million distribution. About half of that is in the two counties that make up the greater Miami area. The other half is mailed in the Central West Florida Gulf Coast communities that make up the greater Tampa, Clearwater and St. Petersburg market areas. It is the largest free circulation paper in Florida and one of the largest in the U.S. Carlos G. Guzman is president of The Flyer and the Flyer.Com. He is a corporate vice-president of Harte-Hanks, the company that owns the Flyer publications. Guzman lives near Miami, but divides his time among the Miami, Ft. Lauderdale and Tampa offices. Often half of his week is spent in Tampa, a four-plus hour drive across south Florida swampland from Miami. The plant in Tampa prints 166 zoned editions of theFlyer.com. Equipment at the plant inserts 5 to 7 million zoned pieces each week. All of the papers are mailed and reach homes on Tuesday or Wednesday of each week, and an average magazine is 48 to 52 pages and has half a dozen or more inserts, said Guzman. Four Flyer zones in Miami are Spanish-language editions - or actually bi-lingual editions with some ads in Spanish, some in English and some using both languages. Each zoned Flyer edition includes a weekly column of local community events. More than half of each publication is made up of reader ads. Private party items for sale for under $1,000 are free and plans are in the works to make it easier for readers to place their own ads online. While Craigslist and other Web-only advertising services have taken a lot of the free classifieds out of the paper market, Guzman doesn t think that Craigslist can deliver the results that the Flyer delivers. I have used Craigslist several times and haven t sold anything, said Guzman. Maybe I didn t go back often enough to move my ad to the top, but I haven t had a successful experience selling or renting anything. The online edition of theflyer.com draws 400,000 unique visitors each month. About 35 percent of the company s display ad print customers enhance their advertising with some form of online advertising. A new product is a PowerSite, which provides a Web site set-up for each customer and makes it possible to track phone calls and other contacts. Managers and sales reps in the company now have compensation packages weighted toward increasing the online involvement of their clients. The name of the print publication was changed a couple of years back to put emphasis on the company s commitment to Web technology. TheFlyer.com is the name of the print editions in addition to the online product. The Florida operation employs 325 people. Territory, classified and major accounts sales persons make up 100 of those employees. The Tampa production and print operations employ 175. Management and support staff round out the final 50. In two of the company s five sales centers, the reps are not given office space. They are given training, meeting times and clear performance expectations and goals. They are given tools of the trade: cell phones and laptops. In today s world of mobile technology we cannot lead our sales staffs the way we did 10 years or even five years ago, said Guzman. In the new economy and tech era, we must empower our reps to work from home, work from Starbucks, work from the customer s place of business ... work from anywhere. A condition of success in leading this way is that we set specific expectations and goals for results and, given the flexibility of time management, our reps meet and exceed those goals. Even with a new approach to leading sales, I still believe in many old school philosophies that got us here. I still believe in the importance of the Monday morning sales meeting, said Guzman. I believe in the one-on-one time with reps and their managers. Ongoing training and field ride coaching are still very critical. Coupling these things with more freedom in time management and technology tools, I think, will ultimately help our sales teams accomplish their goals. Dick Mandt began The Flyer in Miami in 1977. He sold The Flyer in Miami to Harte-Hanks in 1983. Mandt moved up to Tampa and started The Flyer there in 1987. That company was sold to Harte-Hanks in 2005. Mandt is currently involved with the Carolina MoneySaver in Charlotte, N.C. Carlos Guzman came to work for The Flyer as a reader ad rep in 1981. He was 19 and a sophomore at the University of Miami. He quickly rose to sales supervisor at age 20 and was promoted to director of telemarketing at age 21. He received his U of M degree in 1983, and later added a Harvard Business School MBA degree. He has stayed in the free paper industry. From 1985 to 1994, Guzman served stints as director of sales for the Austin Shopping Guide and as regional vice president of sales for The Pennysaver in southern California. There were also brief stints in El Paso and in Dallas. Guzman returned to Miami in 1994 as president of The Flyer and TheFlyer.com, and was part of the acquisition team for the Tampa Flyer. The biggest thing I am most excited about from the years is being a part of building a culture of long-term successful winning teams, said Guzman. That is something The Flyer has always been known for and is known for today. Our culture as a company has its roots deeply embedded in the Mandt philosophy of great service, teamwork, honesty and high performance. Guzman said he still enjoys a strong mentorship bond with Dick Mandt. Guzman has been deeply involved with the Association of Free Community Papers (AFCP) during his career. He takes credit for founding AFCP s Leadership Institute for manager and sales training. He also was involved in the start-up and growth of The Rising Stars, an AFCP initiative that recognized and sought deeper involvement for industry up- n -comers under age 30. Among Guzman s AFCP awards is a Publisher of the Year designation. The Flyer.com is also an IFPA member. Guzman was among the participants at the IFPA Publisher s Summit in Miami in February. Guzman has been married for 22 years to his college sweetheart, Susanna. They have four children: Anthony, 19; Christopher, 16; Alex 14; and Carolina, 10. Guzman has coached all three of his boys through their baseball years. He has lost count, but it is well over a thousand games, he said. And there have been numerous league and tournament championships. I wasn t much of a ball player myself as a youth growing up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan, said Guzman. But I turned out to be a heckuva coach later in life. Daughter Carolina is involved in music, dance, ballet and theater. Her father is a proud fan at her performances. In addition to family activities, fun for Guzman is his gig as a game announcer for local baseball teams. Part of the fun is getting to choose the music that gets played over the sound system. During baseball season, Guzman announces for two or three varsity and junior varsity games a week. The Florida High School Baseball Association and Archbishop McCarthy Catholic High School are the grateful recipients of his services. I am really a closet DJ, admitted Guzman, with a grin that was obvious over the phone from a thousand miles away. One of the first things one sees on theFlyer.com Web site is a music video that celebrates and markets the company with lively hip-hop and rap with dancers on the presses. Guzman said the video has no connection to his love of music, but that rapper s shades are pretty dark. One frame even shows a quick shot of a sign that reads: Guzman and Sons Lawn Service. Like other publishers, the economy has kept Guzman both dancing and trimming during the past couple of years. We were very aggressive about getting ahead of the cycle, said Guzman. The moment we saw revenue begin to sink, we reduced costs. We pulled out of recent expansion areas that were marginal. (We are already talking about going back into some of those within a year.) Aggressiveness in cost-cutting bought us some time. We survived this onslaught of negative energy in the market that caused our customers to pull back, said Guzman. We may be bigger, but we are not different from anyone else. We survived! Guzman appreciates the position of TheFlyer.com customers. Small business is the lifeblood of our economy and the engine of job growth, he said. Serving customers over the years and seeing the critical importance of our media and publications in the success model of their business is the ongoing affirmation. The servant leadership role of being the best provider we can be to small businesses is at the core or our values. Guzman believes the industry is in a sea of change and will be some time to come. The ingredients for survival include aggressive cost cutting followed by even more aggressive marketing and innovative selling approaches. I believe and stand firm in thinking that the free paper industry can and will come out of this economic cycle stronger than our daily newspaper counterparts and other media, predicted Guzman. (But that is) if and only if we remain aggressive in our competitive approach and if we fully integrate the Web into every facet of our traditional print offerings. Carlos Guzman s business philosophies have taken him in less than 30 years from a student telemarketer to the man at the helm of Florida s biggest free paper company. He coaches to win! Writer Dwight Bitikofer is publisher of Webster-Kirkwood Times In St. Louis and is an IFPA director