Former F15 fighter pilot John Thompson is living his life in Germany, consciously growing his publishing house 'AdvantiPro'.AdvantiPro makes newspapers for the military stationed in Germany. He found himself a well defined target audience of 150,000 American military consumers in Germany who enjoy all of his publications free-of-charge.
John will soon end a 3 month intense 'search' campaign, a campaign he designed himself to look at all ins and outs of his own business, 'searching' for all possible ways to make the business more efficient. This meant looking at cost side, but also looking at sales side and HR. He rolled up his sleeves and is actually going out in the night distributing his own newspapers with his team to check up on all exisiting processes, questioning them one by one. He told me he found numerous ways to significantly reduce logistical costs.
Because of the fact he has a lot of American customers and advertisers, all working with a weak dollar, he needed ways to boost business. He hired more sales people and asked good people already working for him a long time to adapt to a more sales oriented roll. These employees are now bringing in more and new revenue.
On the picture, John holds a new newspaperstand for one of his new pubications "The Reporter".
He publishes newspapers such as The Saber Herald, The Herald Union, The Kaiserslautern American and The Reporter, as well as the popular Find-It Guide, a yellow pages for American Military living in Germany. AdvantiPro and The Wall Street Journal Europe collaborated successfully in Jan- Feb of this year, whereby we as WSJE started tapping into the American military community in Germany through AdvantiPro's newspapers.
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