How did 2016 go by so quickly? Time flies. I have been here now almost two years and it seems like yesterday that I was looking for the coffee room.
A lot has changed at Business in Vancouver in 2016. For starters, let’s be clear: print’s not dead!
One of the reasons I joined BIV Media Group was to help make a difference with a company producing a specialized publication in a very competitive market. What I didn’t know was just how loved BIV was in the communities we serve and what a relatively small staff could accomplish. When I started we were publishing our weekly newspaper, 16 trade publications – some with partners and most on our own – populating our biv.com website with timely news announcements and contributing a business segment on Global News each morning.
The staff at BIV, many of them here more than a decade, really deserve a mountain of thanks. We sat down just over a year ago with a fairly ambitious plan, one that ran counter to the declines we were witnessing elsewhere in our industry. We set out to secure more readers, to find new audiences and to attract more advertisers and subscribers.
Today, no one is more pleased or more proud than I am.
This team has heart and accomplished what naysayers would have deemed impossible.
Over the past 12 months, we have doubled our circulation. We now surpass the Globe and Mail in Vancouver. Trust me, it wasn’t just a matter of printing papers and sticking them on a corner stand, hoping someone would pick them up. No company can afford to print a product these days that would be considered waste – it’s just too expensive.
Instead, we expanded partnerships with the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, added new partners at the North and West Vancouver chambers of commerce, the Richmond, Tri-Cities and Delta chambers and the Burnaby and Surrey boards of trade. We researched and targeted the highest household incomes in the Lower Mainland to achieve a controlled and audited increase.
With the growth in the newspaper came growth in our magazines. This year we added three new titles: Retirement Ready, Women in Business and, with our partners in the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, their Scorecard on Metro Vancouver’s economic and social well-being. We have four new titles coming in 2017, putting us at 24 magazines from only 16 a year ago.
We built a broadcast studio in-house. We now broadcast live from our offices for Global and produce our new daily business show on Roundhouse Radio, 98.3 FM in Vancouver, heard weekdays between 9 and 10 a.m. We have launched a weekly sponsored podcast with our newsroom journalists and newsmakers.
We have ventured into video production and are producing our own material for the numerous events and award shows we produce: Forty under 40, B.C. CEO of the Year, and Influential Women in Business, to name a few of the more than 16 major events we put on each year.
To top all this off, our investment is paying dividends. We have shown significant revenue growth over last year. We still have some distance to go before we are satisfied, but I wanted to make sure you actually heard a good story about media this year.
We have a lot of plans to grow further in 2017. We’ll be hiring some key positions to ensure this path continues. Watch for some exciting changes to our website, too.
We have an extremely loyal following in our readers, and I extend my heartfelt thanks to all of our many wonderful clients and friends who have worked with and continue to support us.
This was a great year for BIV and we are looking forward to achieving our new 2017 goals. We work hard, we work smart and we are extremely proud of what we have accomplished. We thought you should know, too.
