The brand has resilience and respect which came from the Channels and Connections Publishing lineage that started in 1990. But by the time 2010 rolled in, structural problems threatened to topple the whole business. At the 20th birthday bash on 21 August 2010, Doug Parkinson and a cast of dozens laid on the fun for several hundred subscribers and supporters at the JuliusMedia campus. Forty college students, signed to JuliusMedia's tech production college business, helped to deliver a great night.
Hours later, the management team met to overhaul the business metrics. Forward enrolments at the college were at all-time lows. Part time school holiday courses, once a given, were being cancelled due to low numbers since high schools had somehow started delivering the Certificate 3 in Live Production, Theatre and Events to Year 11 students. In large numbers - IBSA say there were more than 1000 kids enrolled in 2010. That was a big knock to our college.
On the other side of the empire CX was slowly losing readers and advertisers, and the treasury was looking sad. Especially when the party catering was settled. The only thing left on the horizon of optimism was the government funded Priority Placement Program. See the Feds PR, below.....
www.productivityplaces.deewr.gov.au/
The primary objective of the Productivity Places Program (PPP) is to provide targeted training to support the development of skills in Australia to meet existing ...This new program gave us $1,500 for every eligible student start, in a part time training course that should produce qualified crew after several years of night school. Trouble was, the 32 places left for 2010 were hard to fill. Who would think? The Fed's fork over all but the TAFE equivalent fee, and people get the best we can deliver. Which we did, two nights a week with serious intent. A rump of forty worthy people were already in the classes, and all we had to do was recruit the latest hastily awarded bunch of 32 (the NSW cohort emailed unfilled spaces to us very late) for the 2011 classes. Problem was, to unlock the $1,500 start funding, they had to - umm - actually start in 2010. Try to make that work sometime.
So the college was rendered dead in the water, like an aircraft carrier with no juice.
Don't misunderstand, we were extremely thankful of the opportunity to supply funded training. Before PPP we mainly made do with user pays. The only funding out there was the state subsidized trainee-ship funding. But over the years (2004 - 2010) we discovered in our drifting, ethereal Petri dish, that the entertainment biz did not embrace indentured trainees. Who would know? We found out the very hard way, that you can't encourage our cohort to hire youngsters so someone like us can train them. This could be interpreted as a lack of confidence in (our) structured training. But we think the issue is more generalized than that.
All of this is history - we shut down, we refunded money, awarded Competencies up to the end of 2010, finished all the paper work. With some quiet tears and angst, we wrapped up and quit a facility that cost us $1.5 million over the time since we first had the starting idea. Our lovely, generous landlord Greg Kean took back his building. The whole dream started strangely enough on Sept 11, 2001 - as the Twin Towers crashed. The thinking then, on that most horrible day was that it was time to unfurl the training dream since the media company would (correctly) suffer a downturn, which it certainly and rightly did in that terrible climate. I (Julius) apologize to anyone upset, because there I was thinking of the survival of my stuff, when the world seemed to be collapsing. At the time I had four girls at school, so that is how I thought.
Back to the headline - CX was suffering death by a thousand cuts, with a lack of love and attention.
So if there's a moral to this story, it is that any business or venture or endeavor needs all the attention of its founders and visionaries to succeed.
At the end of 2010, we had $50 in the bank and it looked like CX was headed for a final edition.
What a difference a year makes. We really turned CX around in 2010, with new layout, CX2 APP, CX-E and CX-TV. We moved into the studio at Chatswood, and hit a heap of goals with expose articles and better impact. The subscribers voted with their Paypal and the advertisers returned. (Thank you everyone!)
The plan is that in 2o12 we will keep adding on value for our readers and advertisers - and importantly, support our constituent industry even more strongly.
- Julius
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