(From yesterday - In November 2001, talks began between what was to become Paizo Publishing, LLC and Hasbro’s Hobby Games Division, Wizards of the Coast. Hasbro wanted to form a new corporation to publish the titles currently being produced by Wizards of the Coast. This two-part article is the tale of how we became a new publishing company. If you missed Part One, see it now.)

What information was needed from production?

When asked to crunch numbers I first formulated a transition plan for the production staff. I knew that our workflow would be in disarray due to the move to new quarters and I needed to mitigate that as much as possible. My transition plan consisted of:

- Gathering the manufacturing cost of goods numbers necessary for the business plan

- Contacting vendors regarding the move

- Assessing what physical components our new company would need to purchase from Hasbro

- Contacting and purchasing the equipment necessary to form our own prepress department

- Reviewing our contracts with printers to determine exactly what was needed from a legal standpoint to transfer ownership of the titles, or at least ownership of the invoices for manufacturing!

- Assessing computer and software needs and pricing

- Mapping out our physical move so as to impact the workflow as little as possible (This proved my biggest challenge as we couldn’t pull the trigger for the move without the contract signoff and we had no idea how long that would take, thus no idea of where it would fall within our scheduled workflow.)

Cost of Goods... Our Bottom Line

For our business plan, I researched backwards 6 months for our monthly title and 1 year for our bi-monthly titles. Our total cost of goods were derived from the following sources. This is simply good information to always have on hand:

- Itemized manufacturing invoices from our printers

- Actual paper usage (including waste) and extended costs for each issue

- The cost of any collateral project associated with a specific issue, including overs

- Outside editorial and art costs

- Imaging and prepress costs

- Postage

- Freight

Once my spreadsheet had its blanks filled in, I listed the individual cost of each component to the cost of goods and the extended cost, with the cost per unit for each issue. This gave us a very detailed picture of where we were late last year (this was, by the way, updated several times before it was final to add new issues) and what our cost trends were. We found that through creative production and cost cutting we had reduced our final cost of goods by a very nice dollar amount over the last year... a trend potential investors like to see!

Equipment and Personnel

Two very important aspects of our business plan were, of course, equipment and staffing needs. We knew that we wanted to replicate the processes available to us at Wizards of the Coast. We sought out and secured the Prepress Manager from Wizards and with his help evaluated different digital front ends, finally going with Brisque 4 from Creo. In conjunction with this acquisition, I made recommendations to our Technical Support person regarding needed workstations for not only the production staff, but our art and edit staff.

Once the final contract was signed by all parties licensing aspects of Wizard’s and Lucas Film’s operation to our new company, we pulled the trigger and ordered the needed equipment and software.

Getting your vendors involved

Once we had a signed contract, I could contact our vendors and let them know the plan. We wanted to make our move without skipping a beat and as luck would have it the move came with two titles in prepress (ouch). We prepared "Assignment and Assumption" agreements for R.R. Donnelley and Quad/Graphics, taking on all terms of their previous contracts with Wizards of the Coast and sent out credit information to our other primary vendors to establish accounts there.

We worked closely with our suppliers to ensure that all Wizards of the Coast business was completed prior to our departure to new quarters and to discuss how the move would possibly affect schedules.

We also didn’t forget our advertisers. Each was contacted with new numbers provided for future business. Our digital advertising specification was updated to reflect Paizo Publishing information and we worked a deal with Wizards of the Coast’s Shipping and Receiving (thanks Jason) so that we could get ads sent to the magazines from Wizards if delivered there.

How do you produce two magazines and move?

As we had two magazines in prepress the day of our departure and our own prepress equipment not yet delivered we needed to strike a deal with Wizards. That we did and they allowed four of us to stay on-site for an extra week in order to get our two titles shipped to the printer. We shipped on time and then moved our last four people to our new offices.

In retrospect

No matter what anyone might think, moving a publishing company from an in-house operation to a private business CAN BE DONE. What we did successfully was a result of good old fashion prior planning. We endeavored to see where bottlenecks and pitfalls might occur and tackle them before they became issues.

We were flexible with our schedule (just this once! <smile>) and got our vendors involved as early as possible so as to enlist their help and support as needed. We also didn’t re-invent the wheel. What could be salvaged from Wizards of the Coast, like our workflow, we salvaged. This saved us a great deal of time and effort when we actually did hit the ground running at our new quarters.

My very best to you all!

See Part One.