After Samantha Reynold's grandmother lost her memory, she used her journalism background to record stories of her closest family and friends. What started as a hobby, has turned into a hugely successful venture. Read or listen to our interview with Samantha Reynolds of Echo Memoirs.

Tracy: Hi, I’m Tracy Matthewman. I’m the editor for WomenCanDoAnything.com. I’m here today with Samantha Reynolds, the founder of Echo Memoirs. Samantha thanks for joining me today.

Samantha: My pleasure.

Tracy: I just wanted to start by asking what your business does and what kind of people or organizations purchase your products?

Samantha: Echo Memoirs is a private book publisher and we specialize in high-end corporate histories and family memoirs. Our clients are both corporate and families and the interesting bridge between them is that our clients typically have a very entrepreneurial spirit so even the personal biographies that we’re doing are often for people who have had an entrepreneurial past and with the companies that approach us about telling their corporate story, they’re often still led by the founders and entrepreneurial company rather than let’s say a government agency. They’re less, less likely to approach us. It seems [over the last 8 years] that family owned businesses and, and businesses led by an entrepreneur. The other thing I’ve noticed about our demographic is that most of our clients are male, typically aged 40 to 70 somewhere in there and, and most often from a relatively high income demographic.

Tracy: How did you get started in the business?

Samantha: Well I studied journalism at university and being the family scribe I had always planned to sit down with my grandmother and get her story because she was my only living grandparent. And about 10, 11 years ago, she went in for a hip operation and she didn’t recover from the anesthetic, she survived but it was as though a delete button had been pressed on her memory which was devastating for me I just, you know all that history was, you know just evaporated. And so it got me thinking though about roots and history, and what does it mean to us to know where we come from and I just started as a hobby really with you know, given that I’m a writer and, and I had studied journalism at school just sort of sat down with my family and a few friends, you know on and off and, and started to capture stories and so the business evolved kind of a surprise. A few people got wind of what I was doing and, and mentioned that they wouldn’t mind paying me for it and I thought pay me? [LAUGHS] What on earth will I charge you? And so it started very small, I mean I worked from home for the first couple of years just doing it all myself. And the one thing that I knew right away is that I really wanted the books to be as beautiful as the stories so right after I did my best to design the books and as soon as I could afford it, I hired a designer who was much better than me and always invested you know whatever profits I had into improving our process. The first 2 years was a lot about trying to figure out how we would find limited edition books at a time when you know it wasn’t nearly as popular as it is now.

Tracy: How do you promote and market your business?

Samantha: Well just recently we hired a permanent part-time PR person. So she’s been great at drumming up awareness about ‘Echo Memoirs’ in the press. Prior to her joining the team, I worked with a PR agency for a couple of years and they also did great work for us. So press has always been a big part of promoting ‘Echo Memoirs’. I’ve always joined business organizations and that’s where I do a lot of networking and, and get a lot of leads from, from those organizations; the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs, the Entrepreneurs Organization and the Board of Traders are 3 that I’m quite involved in. and we also give away gift certificates at high-end silent auctions in cities across North America and that’s another way that, typically what we’re giving away is an oral history so it’s an opportunity for us to spend some time with the, the person with the winning bid to get their oral history on record and about you know 25% of the time that person elects to take it farther and produce a book. But it also just gives us exposure at these high-end events so that people can see our books and see what we do.

Tracy: What was your biggest obstacle in, obstacle in launching ‘Echo Memoirs’?

Samantha: Well looking back I would say that the biggest obstacle was also my biggest mistake which was not really understanding the value of what we offered. And not really understanding my target demographic when I first started ‘Echo Memoirs’. I just had really no idea how to price what I was doing. So I don’t think it’s uncommon for, for someone who evolves from hobby into business because they soon have to teach themselves like I couldn’t really believe someone was willing to pay me anything [LAUGHS] Yeah I was really enjoying myself and it was such passion. So but of course as soon as I started to hire people and, and those people started to get mortgages and have babies then you know I realized okay, I need to take care of the people that, that work with me and that means charging more, and that means understanding what value we’re bringing to our clients. A great example is, is our corporate books. I had always figured that getting the foundation of a company’s history was really what we were doing but as I took more time to understand my corporate clients I realized that what they really wanted to use the book for was a strategic tool to recruit employees, to retain their current employees, to you know engage in relationships building with suppliers and foster loyalty and you know they were really thinking about this book as a strategic tool and I hadn’t thought about it that way. So the more I understood the values that we were bringing to our clients, the better I was able to shape Echo Memoirs into what it is now which is doing much more high-end work.

Tracy: Why do you think the business is such a success?

Samantha: That’s a great question. I’ve always had a lot of mentors right from the beginning and I credit you know great advice that I’ve received you know wisdom of mind from people a lot smarter than me over the years to a lot of important turning points in history of my company. Not being trained in business, I was really you know recognized early on that that was my weakness, was not understanding the mechanics of business. I understood how to write great stories and even how to design great books but it was a steep learning curve for me in terms of running a business for so many years it started to grow quickly those challenges multiplied so mentors in my life have I think contributed to the success of the business a lot. And I’m sure this is the same for most entrepreneurs I mean I worked so intensely hard you know in certainly in the you know first 5 or 6 years, you know I think I took one vacation and very few weekends and I was in a long distance relationship at the time which I think afforded me the opportunity you know to just really, I mean I really had no distraction, so it just that [silent], intense amount of hard work was I think starting to pay off eventually. And then I’ve you know I can’t say enough about the people that have been attracted to work with me in Echo memoirs over the years. Every time a new person joins the team, they accelerate the growth of the company, they improve the quality of what we do and so I see my job as just treating them well and empowering them to do what they love and do what they do best. And as we’ve grown and added more people to the team we think you know our success seems to multiply and that’s a huge credit to the people I work with.

Tracy: So where do you see yourself in the business in the next couple years?

Samantha: Well I’d like to continue on the tracks that we’re on which is to take on bigger projects with more creative challenges and bigger scope really pull out all the creative stops and start to develop a reputation beyond Canada for doing really the most creative, the most exquisite limited edition book publishing, private book publishing in the world. [That] we do, we do that now already on a fairly substantial scale where many of our projects like I said they take a year and when looking at that budgets usually have an excess of 100,000 dollars but I’d like to see what we could do with double those budgets and double our team and if we had two years to sink our teeth into a project you know what we could come up with because we’re just…we’re just chomping it a bit to just keep pushing the ceiling on our creativity and its an interesting time with companies and families seem to be I don’t know if they’re attracted to story telling because of the climate in the world today and if there’s stress with global warming and you know I don’t know what are the contributing factors to this seeming acute desire for people to get their stories down but it just…from my perspective it seems to be getting easier and easier to inspire people to take the time and do these stories. And you know honor their legacy and those that cane before them. And so we just wanna keep doing more exciting work.

Tracy: Great well thanks so much for joining me today. My name is Tracy Matthewman and I’m the editor for WomenCanDoAnything.com. I’ve been talking with Samantha Reynolds founder of Echo Memoirs Samantha, thanks a lot.

Samantha: My pleasure thanks so much for having me.

You can find more information on Echo Memoirs on their website:

www.echomemoirs.com

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Interviewer: Tracy Matthewman

Transcription by Outsource2India.com