A Journey of a Thousand Miles ?EUR??,,????'?????<

By George Schmok

You know how sometimes things kinda sneak up on you . . . Well, over the past two years of this lingering recession, we at Landscape Communications have been investing in the future at a pace that has not let us dwell on the actual goings on of the outside world.

With this being the 25th year of publishing (LCI publishes two magazines, Landscape Architect and Specifier News was first published in 1985, and Landscape Contractor / Design Build Maintain was first published in 1996), we?EUR??,,????'?????<

By the time you read this, LCI?EUR??,,????'?????<

I have had the opportunity to get back into ad sales over the past six months and reconnect with many of our clients. One thing I can tell you is the vast majority of the vendors supplying goods to this industry are eager to see a change in Congress this November.

That said, I see many companies struggling to make sense of the uncertain economy and I see others laying bricks in anticipation of a more certain future. While almost everyone has pulled in their horns, you can sense that the ones who have put down their heads and are plowing forward will come out of this funk with flying colors.

Here at LCI we spent a ton of money and time reinvesting in landscapearchitect.com. Well, all of a sudden, this year we have had more than 875,000 page views and will likely have more than one million page views in 2010!!! landscapearchitect was already the largest landscape-oriented database on the web, with 14,000 vendor listings, 8,700 product photos and 14,000 posted articles. This year, with the redesigned site, we have gained viewership as never before.

In a few weeks our ?EUR??,,????'?????<

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As a part of this online service we have been able to grow our demographic profiling of you, the readership and concentrate on maximizing our interaction. As a result of this growth, we all of a sudden have had two of the best months in the history of both magazines as far as reader interaction in renewing subscriptions and requesting product information from our advertisers.

So, anyway, while the rest of the country is waiting to see what happens with this coming election, I think it is important to know that the landscape industry, by nature, has the most solid roots of all the professions . . . . And the best thing you can do to ensure a solid future is to keep those roots well watered and fertilized. It is not a good idea to keep your head in the sand and wait things out, but it is good to keep your head down and focus on the next step forward . . . Who knows, you may just look up and see that you?EUR??,,????'?????<

God Bless.

George Schmok, Publisher