Industry Events

Circulation Management Show
June 16 and 17
New York

WFMA Dinner Meeting Thursday, July 21
Los Angeles

FMA Day
September
New York

CircDayLA
Thursday, Sept. 15
Los Angeles

Two years ago, Michael Jordan left his job as circulation director at Los Angeles Business Journal to join ESP. After six years at the Business Journal, preceded by six more at Petersen Publishing, Mike sought a new challenge and elected to cross the road from circulation to fulfillment.

"I’d had experience with both in-house and outsourced fulfillment and I always thought I could help improve that experience for the circulator," Mike explains. His connections with ESP were already strong. At the time he was president of the WFMA, and ESP VP, Stefan Beeli, also sat on that board. Mike had known ESP President Jack Miller, for six years already.

"I liked the idea of moving to a company that was doing something special, and ESP’s services were special," Mike says. "The access to the data, the updates in real time, and their general technological expertise caused me to realize these guys can program anything. I wanted to be a part of setting a direction for a company capable of getting there."

Mike took the role of operations director at ESP, where he oversees the customer service and data entry departments. He hired a full-time trainer and directed development of training manuals. He then split customer service into groups so that they could focus on a selection of publications and develop a better level of expertise for the publications they handled.

He also set new measurement tools to better gauge employee performance. "My circulation experience definitely helped me with that one," reflects Mike. "I was trained to test and measure, test and measure, so I tackled order entry performance in the same way." Order entry has increased productivity by over 30 percent under Mike’s guidance.

Last month Mike accepted the responsibility of overseeing the account executives. He’ll now be working directly with the circulation clients who have the same needs and responsibilities he once had. "When we hired Mike, we always knew that this would be the best use of his skills, but we had more immediate needs in other places," says Jack Miller.

"My work is just beginning," says Mike. "And it’s not done over here (referring to order entry and customer service), but we do have a good nucleus of supervisors and managers now – all of whom have been working with me since I started. My next step is to build a better bridge between account executives and customer service, which ought to be easier now that I oversee both areas."