Teufel also put me in charge of single copy sales which Rodale at the time did none of.Having no idea how single copy sales worked，I went to a conference where Mike Andrews spoke.Mike was a retail consultant who had been the circulation director of The New Yorker and then had launched penthouse in the U.S.
Mike taught me that the retail business was：
·a business of detail
·of finding what works in one town or even one retailer and then aggressively duplicating that success in other towns and in similar retailers.
And in those days with over 400 wholesalers，400 separate experiments in your magazine's distribution，it was almost always possible to find something to build on.While the distribution system has consolidated and changed these principals still hold.
These three people and an amazing group of executives-Pat Corpora，Bob Reinhart，Ed Fones，Barb Newton，Joyce Shirer，Rich Alleger and now Terry Day-and suppliers-especially Bob Castardi at Curtis-reinforced these lessons and taught me many new ones.
Some of the Things I Iearned as a Circulator：
·lessons
·editorial leads
·the importance of positioning
·sell benefits
·substance，quality and leadership sell
·live in a fact based world
·understand that patterns and trends matter
·make numbers pass the common sense test
·too much data is as bad as too little data；act now
·aggressively follow up on success
·pay attention to two major cost centers：circulation expense and production expense
·good ideas can come from anywhere
In our business we are dealing with new media，recent circulation scandals，new ABC rules and circulation categories，and changing reader and advertiser expectations and demands.I'll start by describing the world as I see it.
Magazines Suffer from Troubles of Their Own Making
Because of the poor circulation practices of the recent past-especially the practice of counting unpaid circulation as paid-magazines have a credibility problem with the advertising community.While the creation of the verified category has brought more transparency to the ABC statement，we still spend a stupid amount of time dealing with the past instead of building for the future.