Episode #9 Jason Feifer, Entrepreneur

Hanna (01:25): Hi Jason!

Jason (01:26): Hi!

Hanna (01:27): Thank you so much for joining us today.

Jason (01:29): Of course.

Michael (01:30): So before we get into the thick of this, you’re Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. Could you explain to our listeners what exactly an Editor-in-Chief is and what you do on a day to day basis? 

Jason (01:42): It’s very funny that you ask. People ask me that and I have not come up with a succinct answer but I'll try to be as succinct as possible. You know an Editor-in-Chief is ultimately responsible for the editorial direction of a brand and every brand’s Editor-in-Chief is going to be a little different. I have worked under, in prior jobs, I have worked under EICs that also oversaw the business side of things. I’ve worked under EICs that really only cared about the print side of things and didn’t even focus on digital. Everything’s a little different but ultimately it’s the person who is responsible for creating the direction of the brand ultimately, everything that is published should in some way be seen as hard on digital but certainly in print and I also think the Editor-in-Chief is the person who is the spokesperson for the brand and goes out and is the face of the brand. 

Hanna (02:33) You recently featured 137 entrepreneurs on the magazine cover. 

Jason (02:38): I did.

Hanna (02:41): So usually we know it’s like a one or two lucky people, so how did it come about? 

Jason (02:50): Well yeah, it’s funny, people you know, we’re going to talk a lot about how people get press and how they get approached. And something that people tend to do which is logical sometimes and other times illogical is that they see something that was published and they assume that this is now some kind of ongoing opportunity. So I remember when I was at Fast Company, I once wrote a story about cat food brands and then for the next three months I got every single pitch that any publicist who works with a cat-related brand would send. 

And you know, my joke was like, I am not on a cat beat. So the 137 came out, which I’ll explain in a second but, I started actually getting a bunch of emails from people being like how can I get on the next one? And there is no next one, there’s no next one. It’s a one time only thing but the idea that we had was that we wanted to do an issue that honored all entrepreneurs because there has been so much stepping up in this time either to be there for your team, for your community, for your industry, for your whatever, and um it didn’t feel right to put one singular person on the cover and so we tried to cram as many people as we possibly could and the math actually worked out to 137.

Hanna (4:08): By the way, we were so excited to see about 20% of the honorees are from our own industry, hospitality and travel. 

Jason (4:19): I love that you crunched the numbers. I did not, I would not have known that off the top of my head.

Hanna (4:21): And it was so great to see you know some of their names you know like Chef Tom Colicchio, Jon Taffer, Tariq Farid. So how do you choose these people? What’s the criteria? 

Jason (4:36): Right, so listen, I would try to set aside your desires, speak to your listeners to be on the cover of a magazine because it is a limited set of opportunities. This thing that we did was really unique where we had a smattering of famous people throughout but our goal was largely to have people that you’ve never heard of. Really, which is the opportunity to do that. Right, I mean I hate that the marketplace rewards putting famous people on the cover. If it was possible to sell magazines on newsstands with people that you’ve never heard of on the cover then I would prefer to do that but that’s not how the world works. So we usually put celebrities on the cover of the magazine. 

It’s and so they are celebrities from the hospitality world, Jon Taffer actually had once had his own cover. We had Bobby Flay on the cover, we’ve had hospitality folks on the cover before but um, but this was an opportunity I felt like where the statement that we were making was a collective that we didn’t need to lean on celebrity as much and so we didn’t. 

The way that we made this decision which you know is a one time thing so don’t put any stock into it in the future but really we were really, we were honestly, you know what? Actually there is a lesson here because this, this cover functioned in a similar way to every list issue that I have ever been apart of, not just at Entrepreneur but at Fast Company when I worked there and when I’ve freelanced and helped out with other lists uhm you know you look at these list issues “100 most innovative this or that” or “100 whatever.” 

And people always wonder how to get on those and you know the answer is that there is really no specific methodology to them, it is very, very editorially driven and it’s about the mix. So we’re looking for a mix of people, a mix of industries, a mix of types, a mix of ideas, uhm and and, and so the best thing you can really do is be on people’s radars on a consistent basis so that when they’re sitting around and trying to pull these things together and they’re like “you know we need another person from the hospitality space” they’re like “ah ha, I remember that person.”  

Michael (6:39): So Jason, you write for the magazine, online and host the podcast for Entrepreneur, how do you decide what goes into print, what goes online and what goes on your podcast? How do you choose the medium that you tell your story in? 

Jason (6:52): It’s a great question, the answer is that each of those mediums are serving different roles in what I think of as different audiences. So it’s not really like I find a story and I say “I would like to run this in print.” It’s that I find a story and I say “oh this is a story for print.”

Um, I’ll break it down for you as it is for Entrepreneur, but of course every publication is going to be a little bit different. So I see Entrepreneur in print and online. They’re both service oriented so they’re both ultimately telling people how to do something but they’re doing it in very different ways. Online stuff is largely explicit service so it’s really clearly saying do this, step one, do this, step two, do this, step three. Print is implicit service, so we do very little of addressing the reader directly or of giving very specific advice. Instead what we’re constantly looking for are opportunities to tell somebody’s story in a way in which it is informative for our reader.

I don’t want anything in the print magazine to just be about the person that I’m writing about. You know, in the way in which, and I know that this may not make sense if you’re not in the industry but think of it like this, if you pick up Vanity Fair and you read a profile of a celebrity, that profile is just about that celebrity. The only thing that that profile is about is that celebrity, the only itch that it is scratching is your interest in that celebrity. But in Entrepreneur, we’re doing something different. 

So instead of writing about somebody just because you’d be interested in them, we’re writing about somebody because they have something to teach you. And so the story as we tell it is very, very focused on the decisions that they made, why they did something, how they solved a problem, and we’re constantly trying to extract this information so that somebody can read it and say “ah I now have a better idea of how I can solve a similar problem in my own business.” 

So when we find those opportunities, it's gotta have a good narrative, it's gotta have a good character and it's gotta have at its core, a really valuable takeaway, then it becomes a print story. And then for a podcast, it’s something else. In this case, the mission of my podcast Problem Solvers, that I do for Entrepreneur, is to really walk through how somebody solved one specific, individual problem in their business. How did they do it? And it’s gotta be relatable, and the solution has to be something that other people could replicate in some way. And so when I find somebody who’s got that great anecdote, something that’ll take just 15 minutes to tell that story, then that’s what I’ll do. 

And sometimes these things are transferable, because sometimes I talk to somebody for the podcast and afterwards I’m like “you know what, that actually was a perfect 600 word print story” or whatever the case is. It can move around. But my advice to anybody when they’re trying to land their own piece is to understand the differences between what’s being communicated in each medium and then target the one that you feel you fit best. 

Hanna (10:12): So in terms of Entrepreneur's content, how much of it comes from outsider pitches, people like us versus your own writers or freelancers? 

Jason (10:22): Well it comes about in a ton of different ways. Unlike you I have never sat back and tried to tabulate percentages of where everything in the magazine was so I don’t, I don’t know the answer to where exactly the, what percentage of things came to us through pitches. You know certainly some portion of it does uh people are pitching our staff, they’re pitching me, although I would discourage that. Just because my inbox is so stuffed that I’m going to delete almost every single thing that comes my way. And they’re pitching freelancers who you know, who work with us and we do work with freelancers. 

And so sometimes things just kind of, they come to us but also mean, let's be honest you know and I say this with love knowing the side of the business you guys are on but I don’t really like getting stories from PR people because it makes me feel lazy. It makes me feel like I’m not doing my job and going out in the world and finding good stories. You know like, my job isn’t to sit here and just like print something that somebody asked me to print. My job is to go out and sift through the world and find the stuff that’s going to be most valuable for my readers. 

So you have to kind of work extra hard to overcome my general resistance for publishing something just because it was pitched to me. And so, another way that I get a lot of stories, at least in before coronavirus, is that I would speak at conferences and I would talk to people afterwards, I would take random meetings, I would go to incubators, I would just chat with people and somebody would tell me to talk to this person and somebody would tell me to talk to this person, also I would sometimes source things online.

Sometimes, I would just post on Instagram or LinkedIn and say you know, “hey, is anybody done something like this” or whatever and then you know of course a bunch of publicists will reach out about that but I actually don’t really like hearing from them because I think that’s not the opportunity for you, like you have different opportunities right, like this is an opportunity for the entrepreneurs. 

So it’s a mix, I guess is the bottom line, it’s a mix but I think that the best thing that you can do is to really understand the kinds of stories that a publication is telling and then reach out in a way in which you’re very clearly communicating your story in a way that they would communicate your story. 

Hanna (12:51): Speaking of social media, do you use it to find story ideas or identify people to interview?

Jason (13:00): I am sure that at some point, somebody has caught my eye on social and I have written about them, though honestly it is more likely that somebody caught my eye on social and then I just develop some kind of relationship with them. And so, for example, there’s this woman, you know what it’s funny I’m embarrassed because now I’ve known her for a while and I don’t know exactly how to pronounce her last name, I think it’s Kaupe, Kim Kaupe, but it could be something else, sorry Kim. 

Um, anyway she's got a company called Superfan and she just started doing this really smart series called Coffee with Kim on LinkedIn. And where it was originally just a video of her, it was like a video of her talking direct to camera, holding a cup of coffee and offering some advice. And it was getting really good engagement, it just started showing up on my feed and I thought, this is somebody who is very smart, like just very smart in this space, probably worth knowing has developed a good following. So I followed her and sent her a message and just said “Coffee with Kim is really smart, congratulations.” 

And we you know, we stayed in touch online, we eventually did get coffee and you know now I consider her part of my network. She hasn’t gotten any coverage out of me, she also hasn’t asked for any coverage and, and I like that a lot because of course most times people interact with me, if they’re not asking me for coverage the second that they reach out, it’s like the second thing that they say to me. 

And it’s exhausting, that’s what everybody wants. So I would think that the better move is really to just try to develop relationships with people because it’ll be more powerful in the end. And now, how is it going to be powerful for Kim? I have no idea but she also wasn’t like trying to get my attention, she was just producing something good. I think that when you develop good relationships in the industry that things just happen at the right time, um the right opportunity comes along.

The next time somebody says “Who do you know who's a great female entrepreneur who’s like amazing on camera?” I’m going to say “You’ve gotta go talk to Kim”. Right like it’s, who knows, it all just kind of happens. People do pitch me on social media in the DMs and, uhm, honestly I find that pretty annoying. 

Michael (15:19): Years ago you talked about the concept of “right idea, wrong time.” Do you still agree with that? Let’s say a client of ours wants to open up a bar during this current difficult economic situation. Would it be the right idea at the wrong time? 

Jason (15:19): Yeah. I very much believe in the idea of “right idea, wrong time.” In fact, I mean, it’s funny, I know I’ve talked about it before so great memory on wherever you pulled it from, but I literally just recorded an episode of Problem Solvers that was about “right idea, wrong time.” You know what’s funny is the putting 137 people on the cover is an example of right idea wrong time because the first time that I tried that was in college. Like, this idea of putting 137 people on the cover is actually just, is just me reviving something that I did in college when I ran the student magazine, and I put every student’s name on the cover of the magazine. 

And it was fun and it worked, and it, you know, at the time I thought “well that was a good idea for the moment,” but then two decades later or some awful number, I am now running this national magazine, and I wanted to create a similar effect, which was to create a sense of community with a magazine cover. And this thing that I’d done a long time ago, I realized, wasn’t actually for that time, that was just the test drive for this time. 

And, so, yeah, listen I think that, I think that we all, we all have lots of ideas and some of those ideas are good and some of those ideas are bad, and some of those ideas are good but at the wrong time and it’s, it’s worth trying to figure out which is which and not abandoning things just because they didn’t work out once. Because it could be that the idea that you had is actually a really great idea, it’s just that you haven’t met the right partner yet or you’re not at the right stage of your life yet.

You know my wife and I wrote a novel called, “Mr. Nice Guy,” that came out a couple years ago, as you guys know, and that came out of an idea that I had like, 12 years earlier. I tried to write and failed, and as it turns out, who I couldn’t have known at the time, but eventually what I discovered is that it was an idea that wasn’t ready yet. It was an idea that needed me to find a partner, which turned out to be my wife, to write this book. And so, that’s great, that’s not a failure of an idea that’s a success of an idea. 

Hanna (17:39): So, our listeners, for example, our chefs, bartenders, bar owners, hoteliers, have so much to offer you with a compelling story. So how do they get your attention? Or, how do they pitch you or the magazine?

Jason (17:55): Yeah, so, before you share it, I would really encourage you to decide, to go through the process of figuring out who you should be trying to get press from. Who are you sharing your story with? Because there’s a kind of example from the food and hospitality space. I once had somebody who was running some successful hot dog food trucks, and they were doing a good job in the Washington, D.C. area, which is the only place that they operated. 

And now, they were trying to pitch me. And I told them, and I don’t usually give people this kind of feedback, but I think they were talking to me at a conference, and so I said “listen, you are, you have a limited amount of time. You’re an entrepreneur, you have, you’re stretched for time, you need to be using that time the way that you use your money, which is to say that it is a limited resource and you need to make the most out of it. And you are wasting your time pitching Entrepreneur Magazine.

Because even if I wrote about you, I don’t think that that gets you anything. Right, what it does is, it gets you coverage in a publication that is largely reaching a consumer base, that is not able to buy your hot dogs. And so, who cares? Right? You should be getting press because you should be driving sales of your hot dog. That is your top priority in getting press. And getting press in Entrepreneur Magazine is not reaching your consumer at all and it’s probably unlikely that at this stage you’re going out and raising investor money, and so, like, it’s not really worth, there’s nothing, there’s nobody to show this story to. I would instead focus on trying to get press from The Washingtonian, from The Washington Post, if Eater has a Washington-area, right?”

You need a publication that matches your needs. You don’t go out and get press just to get it because that’s an ego trip and there’s, you know, nobody has time for ego trips in entrepreneurship. But let’s say that you figured it out and for some reason or another Entrepreneur is actually the thing that you wanna try to pitch to. Well then, in that case, email. I mean the answer is just email. The answer is, that if you send a note, figure out a staffer, or a writer at a publication that seems most likely to be receptive to what it is that you do. If you are in the food space, see if you can find somebody who works at Entrepreneur who’s written a bunch about food, who Tweets a bunch about food, or something so that there’s some kind of entry point. 

If you have something that is easily sampleable, it’s not a terrible idea to send it, at least you get somebody’s attention. I’m not saying that you have to, certainly the number of things that are sent to magazine offices that just sit in a corner somewhere is tremendous. But, you know, if you, I don’t know, if you make great ice cream, and you got some ice cream to send to the office, somebody’s gonna pay attention. 

But really, it comes down to research, to understanding who you’re reaching out to, to what they publish, to what their publication publishes, and how do you tell your story in a way that’s most useful to them? I wouldn’t do phone calls, I wouldn’t try to get a meeting with somebody, cause people don’t have time, uhm, it, it, you know if you do see somebody at a conference by all means go up and say hi, that’s really a great opportunity but there’s there’s no shame in just sending an email. 

Michael (21:27): And now for the listener question segment of our show.

Jason (21:28): Great!

Michael (21:29): We have a question from Cory Fitzsimmons and Jessica McGlinchey of Method Spirits. They’re both former head bartenders...

Jason (21:33): Hey guys!

Michael (21:35): …At Danny Meyer’s Union Square Cafe, and they’re launching a New York State Vermouth, which is quite good, we’ve tried it. Uh, they’re curious to know, at what stage of an entrepreneur’s career trajectory is Entrepreneur most interested? For example, are they more interested in when they’re first starting out as newbies, or when they’ve achieved some success, or if they have a really proven track record with multiple successes under their belt?

Jason (22:00): Right, so great question, and the answer is that you’re, you’re thinking about it all wrong. It’s not about some specific checklist. It’s not about somebody at one particular phase. Because if that was the case, I mean just like, think about the logic of producing something. Right, if you were, if you were running a spirits company and I was like, “what does it take to be a spirit that you’ll make? Does it have to have alcohol in it? Does it have to taste good?” 

Right, like, what I’m asking are questions that are kind of ridiculous because they throw the doors open to everything in a way that doesn’t make any sense, right? If we were to say, right, so people seem to think at Entrepreneur, they think that we cover, we write about entrepreneurs. If that was the case, well then, what on earth is the filter by which we’re doing anything, and, most importantly, why would anybody care? Why would our readers care? Because we’re not here to serve the people that we write about, right? We’re not service providers, it’s something that I think people kind of misunderstand about media. 

We’re not service providers, we’re not here to write about you, what we’re here to do is serve our reader. So we have a mission and an idea of how to serve our reader, which is, which is an audience of entrepreneurs, and we do that in a very particular way. And so the stories that we tell serve that mission. If we were just to write about everybody who’s like, if I, if I were to tell you, “Oh yeah well what we’re looking for is, um, that you have to be in business three years and you have to have reached $7 million in sales,” well then, we would just write about everybody who hits that and that doesn’t make any sense. How is that valuable to any reader? 

So, what am I actually looking for? What I’m looking for are problem solving strategies that have played out. Right, so what I want are, cause I said before it’s like all about learning from people, so I want to be able to share a story in which somebody faced a challenge and then they did something that was very smart, perhaps counterintuitive, to overcome that challenge, and then enough time has passed so that we see that they were correct, and therefore we have a sense of problem solution validation. 

That could happen at any stage of a business and for that reason, sometimes I’ll write about somebody who’s problem and solution happened three years ago. I don’t care, because it’s not a news magazine, it’s a magazine that’s telling you a better way to think. So that’s the filter that I use. Don’t think of it as if it’s something that you have to check some particular boxes, cause again, it comes down to reading the publication, getting a real, critical understanding of what it is they’re doing in the way that they’re telling stories, and then figuring out how you can tell your story in that way. And if you look at Entrepreneur magazine, what you’ll see is that we’re all in one way or another about telling stories about problem solving. 

Michael (24:59): As you know Jason, our podcast is Hospitality Forward because we believe our industry will bounce back. And as you said, “the future is coming.”

Jason (25:08): It is! The future is coming, the future is here, the future is not optional. It is not, you cannot opt out of it. 

Michael (25:12): In your opinion, what are some of the things that you’re seeing, or hearing, or even thinking about, that you think will move hospitality forward, or more broadly, move business forward?

Jason (25:26): Yeah, well, when I think about hospitality right now, the thing that I am most interested in and excited about, aside from, just kind of um, enjoying the things that are produced, the thing that I’m really fascinated with really is policy, and I’m not much of a policy guy, but, when I saw…I saw like everyone saw, that, shortly after restaurants all had to close, that suddenly they were able to sell alcohol in ways that they hadn’t before. You could now walk up and buy a drink and walk down the street with it. 

Or, they could deliver alcohol to you in a way they hadn’t before. And I thought, “what is that? What’s going on with that?” and the answer, of course, is that all these regulations had been swiftly waived away because this was an opportunity for restaurants to drive revenue, and it was a way for them to stay afloat. But I called the National Restaurant Association, and I asked them about this. I talked to this guy over there, and he said they have been trying for years, for years, to get states to adopt exactly what we’re doing right now. 

Which is to get rid of completely ridiculous, nonsensical regulations over the sale of alcohol and just let people sell it like a normal product, which it is, and nobody would do it. Everybody was terrified of it. And so that just went absolutely nowhere until dot dot dot a pandemic comes along and it completely changes the way that everybody thinks. 

And that to me is very, very exciting, because you’re seeing this not just in uhm, not just in the way that alcohol is able to be sold, but for example, zoning has also changed a lot in hospitality now where suddenly, you know, there used to be a bazillion restrictions on where you could put a table outside your restaurant, and now that’s all gone. Good! Get rid of it! It was stupid to begin with! 

And so the alcohol stuff. I’m really excited about all these changes, because I think that it’s finally moving us towards where we needed to be in the first place, which was having more sensical conversations about regulations and how hospitality can serve people. And so my challenge to everybody is to take advantage of that stuff and show consumers that it’s good and valuable, and that they want it and they should be able to keep it after this is all over. 

The National Restaurant Association’s internal polls show 80 percent of consumers like this change and want it to stay, and I think that it’s gonna be hard for a politician now to start reeling that stuff back in, and that is good. So I’m very excited for those things and for all the other kinds of changes that are now made possible because the pandemic has allowed us, finally, to consider things that we were afraid to consider before, and we need to encourage that and keep going with it. 

Hanna (28:22): Jason, it’s been so much fun talking to you. Where can our listeners find you?

Jason (28:26): Ah! Listeners can find me in all sorts of places, but I’ll distill it down to a few. Uh, you can go to jasonfeifer.com, which has links to pretty much everything that I do. You can also sign up for my newsletter there. I’m very active on social media. Instagram, LinkedIn, just search Jason Feifer, and then also, you know, we talked about that Problem Solvers podcast, you can go check that out. 

Hanna (28:50): Great. As always, thank you so much for inspiring us. 

Jason (28:55): Oh, thanks so much guys. 

Hanna (28:56): Thanks Jason!