SmallBizResource Blog -- SmallBizResource

Rob Levin's Small Business State Of Mind

Posted by Gayle Kesten Monday, Jan 26, 2009, 09:04 AM ET

So you want to start a business? Granted, what you know may look good on paper, while who you know may open doors, but if you have both elements going for you, then the chances of your new company succeeding are all the better.

Such was the case for Rob Levin, whose 5-year-old media business includes a magazine, The New York Enterprise Report, an accompanying Web site (which I'm proud to say includes SBR among its home page feeds), and conferences. Levin, who I profile today on sister site bMighty, describes himself as a lifelong "magazine junkie" whose career, in large part, had involved working with small businesses. He started in the early '90s as a CPA within Arthur Andersen's enterprise group, then after earning his MBA at UCLA held a trio of CxO positions for as many growing firms. But just a few years into the new millennium, he was ready to be his own boss.

"I had been doing a lot of work all along with helping out small business, and I saw this trend, which was actually very obvious: These businesses were very good at what they did -- I'm thinking of a DJ company in Brooklyn -- but it didn't have marketing expertise or an HR director. It didn't have a CFO. Without having that expertise accessible, it would create problems for these business owners as they tried to grow," he told me. "I realized I knew a lot of experts."

Those experts would become contributing writers. On the flip side, Levin also knew a lot of companies that were serving small businesses, but didn't have an effective way to communicate and market to them. "There was no media company serving small businesses in New York on a regional basis," he said. "That's when I decided to start my company, in 2003, effectively not having any experience in the magazine business."

In the half-decade it has been going to print, The NY Report (Levin is both publisher and editor-in-chief) has gone from 10,000 subscribers to 27,000 -- "all without outside capital," added Levin, who conducts most of the magazine's cover story interviews. (Here are some of his favorites.) He expressed plenty of confidence in the 10 people on his staff, proudly noting the work culture is one in which everyone chips in.

"One of the things I've noticed is that people were just meeting on their own without me," Levin said. "That, to me, is a huge sign that we're growing as an organization, and that I, as their leader, am supporting that growth."

Reading a magazine about small businesses that's put out by an entrepreneur who clearly knows how to run his own -- what better argument do you need? Indeed, "as the editor-in-chief, as I'm going through the articles, the article needs to mean something to me as a business owner," said Levin, who, among many topics discussed in this Q&A, shares what small businesses can learn from his own start-up mistakes, what to do when you have too much information in your head, and why he thinks the experience of the New York small business is representative of those in the rest of the country.

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