Vacation? We dont need no vacations

It has been no summer vacation for Phillips Publishing, obviously the entity responsible for producing the Robertson County News and The Silsbee Bee. We have been flooded with expansion work for the company since the summer began.

Most people don’t understand the amount of work we actually produce in this office. You see the work done for your newspaper, but you would have to multiply that by two and very soon by three to get a full grasp of the amount of news content, photos, and such that we produce every week, given the website that is updated every day, the newsletters which are put out every morning, as well as, of course, the weekly newspaper which is distributed throughout the counties.

The folks in Jasper County are about to get a brand-new weekly newspaper printed and distributed throughout their area. They are already enjoying a new website, which we are updating daily, and a newsletter that is produced every morning and out by around 10-ish, maybe 10:30-ish. But it gets much more exciting from there, as this past week on Friday we finished the purchase of the new building which will house the Jasper County News and, very soon, Phillips Publishing LLC’s main office.

And there’s still more. We opened the new building and were greeted by the building inspectors, so we’ve got a few small tasks—nothing overwhelming—that we need to complete before they allow us to take occupancy and open the building. All of this, we were hoping to be done with by August 5, the launch date for the new Jasper County News.

And still, the expansion continues. Over the next two weeks or so, we’ll be finishing the purchase of the Center printing plant, which produces our newspapers. We’ve been engaged in the purchase of that facility for the past six months or so, and as of a week or two from now, we should be signing closure papers on it, giving us the ability to produce our own newspapers off the press plant—and we named that new facility, creatively, The Press Plant.

By owning our own printing facility for the papers, it will ensure the future of all of our newspapers and their ability to continue to print—keeping our costs down and allowing us to deliver even more news. Because, obviously, when we control the printing, we are able to control costs and produce the best paper possible for our communities.

So in the next couple of weeks, we’re looking forward to adding that to the company’s roster of facilities, newspapers, overall buildings, and such. So that has been quite a bit of expansion—but there’s more!

Our goal is to own five newspapers in total and the print plant. That’s about as big as I want this thing to get. So currently, we have three newspapers as of August 5. But I got blindsided with a very interesting offer—and a situation—for yet the fourth and maybe even the fifth newspaper to add to our ever-growing business. That would mean we could stop expanding and start building these papers up where they belong, and concentrate our efforts with our staff to literally bring our style of newspapers to five different Texas counties.

In Woodville, which is a city in Tyler County, there is a newspaper called the Tyler County Booster—it’s been around since the 1930s. In Trinity County, there’s another newspaper over in Groveton, Texas. Both of these papers are for sale, along with the Polk County Enterprise and a San Jacinto paper. Now, the Polk County Enterprise is a little bigger than we want to focus on, and San Jacinto kind of goes with Polk County, so whoever buys those two will take them together. Our current offer and situation is pretty much strictly centered on Woodville, Texas, in Tyler County, for the Tyler County Booster, which is a very healthy newspaper, and then the newspaper in Trinity we’re taking a look at. But this would round out our goal of five papers and one press plant in a record amount of time if we manage to acquire one or even both of those papers.

So as you can see, over a short amount of time, we’ve been dealing with expanding the company, and I, for one, am about worn out. It has been an absolute labor of love, with a lot of help from a lot of different places—from financing, to my staff pre-selling and working on Jasper, to buying the buildings, to just overall negotiations. And now, with the additional work for Woodville and Trinity, it’s been a very busy summer.

So I wanted to take a minute, bring you all up to speed on where we’re at and how things are going, and I also wanted to thank all of the people—and they know who they are; I won’t name them all here—for their dedication to my goal, my vision, and my dream of what is becoming Phillips Publishing. There’s a long list of people I’d need to thank—almost as if I’d won an Academy Award. It takes a huge amount of effort and teamwork, and I have one of the best teams—both staff and outside partners—who are involved in making this dream of mine come true. So I want to thank them all.

See you right here, next week.