Couple Hits Home Run in Swing at Baseball

With a circulation of 60,000, Dave and Dayna Destler seem to have hit the sweet spot with Junior Baseball magazine--a bimonthly publication the couple launched three years ago.

Although they won’t disclose earnings, the couple says the magazine has given them a better living than they had as publishers of a magazine for British car enthusiasts or, before that, as graphics designers.

Typically 40 to 56 pages, Junior Baseball is filled with full-color ads for Wilson gloves, Louisville Slugger and Easton bats, even snack foods.

“Junior Baseball has been supporting us very comfortably over the last two years,” said Dayna Destler. “Previously, with our other [magazine], it was always hand-to-mouth.”

The first year of publication for Junior Baseball was a struggle, but by 1998, Dayna said, the company had profits in five figures. By the end of last year, she said, profits were into six figures.

But it’s not exactly easy street. Today’s crowded magazine market, plus changes in magazine distribution systems, put small publishers such as the Destlers in a constant struggle for shelf space, advertisers and subscribers.

New technology, however, has also made it easier than ever for a mom-and-pop publishing venture to go to press.

“Traditional publishing economics have changed,” said Hugh Roome, executive vice president at Scholastic Inc. and chairman of the small magazines group at Magazine Publishers of America, a New York-based trade group.

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“Access to newsstands and direct sales has diminished,” he said. “But on the other hand, some of the entry barriers have fallen. Technology has lowered the cost of actually producing a magazine.”

Technology has also allowed publishers to use databases to more easily target specific groups, a boon to niche publishers. Niche publishing can be lucrative, Roome said, if a publication can find “an area of interest to readers and advertisers that is defensible against competition.”

“On balance,” he added, “a new entrant is going to come in with a different business strategy than someone who launched even three years ago.”

The Destlers are no strangers to publishing, having founded British Car magazine (which began as British Car and Bike) in 1985. Like Junior Baseball, British Car began as a labor of love, born from Dave’s hobby of restoring classic British autos.

The Destlers, who met while students at Cal State Northridge, graduated with art backgrounds and started their own graphics business in the 1980s. He concentrated on technical illustrations for automotive and electronics firms, while she worked for landscaping and pool companies.

But as businesses began doing their own desktop publishing, the Destlers found their bread-and-butter jobs drying up. Since Dave was also writing freelance articles about classic cars, the time seemed ripe for a magazine devoted to the British auto.

With only an idea and not even a prototype, they began selling subscriptions at car shows.

“We had more enthusiasm and naivete than publishing experience,” Dave recalled. “We just figured out the publishing as we went along.”

Using their personal resources to finance the first issue, they began publishing the mostly black-and-white magazine in 1985, coming out with four issues the first year before graduating to bimonthly. They soon gave up the graphics arts business entirely.

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By the early 1990s, they were ready to take British Car “to the next level” and make it a bigger publication.

“We wanted to build something with potential,” Dayna said. “We wanted to be able to pay for our kids’ college education, to put money away for retirement.”

Meanwhile, their son, Dusty, then about 9, was playing baseball, which became a family activity as Dave coached and Dayna became a scorekeeper.

One day, while at their magazine distributor’s office, they were looking for something for Dusty to read. They searched among the hundreds of magazines on display but couldn’t find anything baseball-related that would appeal to a 9-year-old. An idea began to glimmer. When Dusty’s traveling team went to the Amateur Athletic Union national championship games in Kansas City, Mo., the Destlers realized many families were spending a lot of time at ballparks around the country.

“We realized then what a market we might have,” Dayna said.

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The Destlers, who had gone to the nonprofit Valley Economic Development Center in Van Nuys for help in getting financing to expand British Car, began to think in another direction. The more they researched, the more “we decided it would make more sense to put the effort into a new title” rather than refinance to expand the old one, Dayna said.

For instance, 1990 census figures showed “more than 9 million kids play baseball. But there were only 500,000 British cars in the U.S. at that time. Baseball was a bigger market.”

Through the Small Business Administration’s Small Business Development Center, the Destlers took a 10-week entrepreneurial course to learn how to write a business plan, then went to work researching the market.

“We compiled a list of potential advertisers, made a business plan, did the research and discussed risks,” Dayna said. They used census figures for demographic information and the Encyclopedia of Associations to find various baseball programs across the country.

They used national computer telephone books for leads on equipment manufacturers and potential advertisers. They collected magazines and newspapers related to baseball, children or family activities to find advertiser leads and to learn what kids--and parents--were reading. They investigated costs of paper, printing, distribution, even salary trends in publishing.

The Destlers also worked with the nonprofit Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE), a nationwide group of about 12,400 mostly retired business executives who offer free counseling to entrepreneurs in small businesses.

Finally, after about three years of research, they were ready to make the leap. To finance the new publication, they sold British Car and--armed with a two-inch-thick business plan--got a “substantial” SBA loan.

Unlike British Car, they wanted the new magazine to be full color. They upgraded their computer “so we could do all the setup and layout in-house,” Dave said.

They created a slick, four-page prototype to show to potential advertisers, and in December 1996 launched Junior League Baseball. Later, they changed the name to Junior Baseball to broaden the magazine’s appeal to include all types of youth baseball, not just leagues.

Initially launched as a monthly, the Destlers realized within a year that the magazine would be more cost-effective if published every other month. Subscriptions are $17.70 for six issues.

When they started, Dave said, there were five full-time employees.

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“After a year, we saw that money was going out faster than it was coming in,” Dave said. “When we hit bottom, it was very scary. We got very ambitious. Sometimes the hopes and dreams you have keep you from being realistic.”

“We used up all the money from the loan and the sale of the other magazine,” Dayna added.

They had to lay off their employees, “which was one of the hardest things we ever did,” Dave said. But in six months, they turned the magazine around. Because of that experience, Dayna added, “We will be very cautious with our growth.”

Today, the staff is mostly Dave, Dayna and Dusty, now 15 and a high school sophomore who plays junior varsity baseball for El Camino Real High School. Dusty is the magazine’s official equipment tester and also interviews professional ballplayers for the “When I Was a Kid” column.

Even daughter Deanne, 10, occasionally pitches in at the office, though her interest veers toward acting. The Destlers also have two part-time employees and rely on free-lance writers and expert contributors for editorial content.

Although the bulk of readers are boys aged 11 to 13, the magazine also includes articles aimed at parents, coaches and other players. For instance, the “Coaches’ Clinic” offers ideas for coaches, while a sports psychologist writes a column aimed at parents.

The couple, who live in West Hills, run the magazine from a three-bedroom converted house in Canoga Park.

According to their 1999 circulation breakdown, the magazine has 11,000 paid subscribers and 27,600 non-paid. Single copy sales were estimated at about 24,200, and about another 1,000 magazines are distributed for promotional purposes.

Advertising support has been good, the Destlers said, with about half the magazine’s revenue coming from advertising and about half from subscriptions.

Advertisers, primarily baseball equipment manufacturers and some sports camps, pay anywhere from $150 for a small black-and-white ad in the “marketplace” section to $5,100 for a four-color, full-page ad, plus extra for premium positions.

“It is a quality publication that is filling a niche that no one else has,” said James Sass, director of marketing for the Louisville Slugger division of Hillerich & Bradsby. The company has been advertising there since the magazine began, Sass said. He added that he likes the publication because of Dave Destler’s knowledge of the various divisions of youth baseball and because the magazine reaches players directly.

“Destler understands the market,” Sass said. “This is a very good fit.”

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Junior Baseball is distributed through some newsstands and chain stores, such as Barnes & Noble, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Sport Chalet, 7-Eleven and Kroger supermarkets.

Nevertheless, “fighting for newsstand space is a constant battle and has become more difficult over the years,” Dave said. “You have to be there for the exposure for the advertisers, but you don’t make anything. It’s very hard for a special interest magazine to survive on the newsstand today.”

They have better luck these days through an Internet site [juniorbaseball.com] and through venues such as trade shows, junior baseball conventions and tournaments, where a copy of the magazine is given to tournament players as a way of offering more exposure to advertisers and generating new subscriptions.

Their previous publishing experience and the thoroughness of their business plan have put the Destlers “ahead of the game” in making a successful magazine, said SCORE counselor Sunny Miller, a retired consumer marketing executive who has offered advice to several publishing entrepreneurs.

The Destlers, Miller said, appear to have found their specific audience, and don’t need to rely on traditional newsstand space to sell magazines.

“We feel the formula we have now is working very well,” Dave said. “The last two years were the best we’ve had. We’ve barely scratched the surface [of this market].”