How To Get Featured In Forbes

Over the years, our companies have been featured in Forbes and others closer to home, like the Herald.

Here is the outreach method we’ve used to land our companies in major publications

1. Create newsworthy content.
   
   The media picks up three things:
   
   - Content that is time sensitive
   - Content around a noteworthy person
   - Content that stirs up strong emotions
   
   Here are examples of each of these three themes:
   
   - Strong Emotions: Creating in-house research that surrounds a hot topic that people are talking about - workplace productivity (e.g Xero does this with their State of The Industry Report)

   

   
   - Note Worthy Person + Time Sensitive: If you don’t have 240,000 SMBs on your books to talk about like Xero, you can niche down by targeting a specific individual who has some form of authority and link this to a trending news topic

   

   
   This article was published three weeks after the All Blacks exited the Rugby World Cup semi-finals in 2019 (In the notes, I’ll share how to pitch noteworthy people like Aaron Smith).

2. With newsworthy content in hand, do the following.
   
   - Go to Google and type “publication + category + writer”

   

   
   - Go to the list of journalists
   

   

   
   -Grab their email or X (Twitter) handle
   
   - Do this with a competitor to the publisher you are targeting (e.g If you want to get into the Herald, also grab a journalist email from Stuff)
   

3. Once you’ve got your target - send over your pitch via email or DM:
   
   - The subject headline should contain the key topic
   

   

   
   -The body:
   
   “Kia ora Eduan,
   
   I got your email from the Herald website. We’ve just done a podcast with All-Black Aaron Smith about the recent World Cup exit.
   
   Is this something you’d be interested in covering?”
   
   - If you don’t get a reply, mention a competitor
   

   

   
   This should get a reply, and ideally, from this point forward, you get published.

   

   
   Rinse and repeat the above process with as many newsworthy content ideas as possible until you land an article.
   
   This isn’t guaranteed success, but it has worked for us.
   
   If you want ideas on how to pitch your business, shoot a reply to this email, and we’ll craft something up together.
   
   Notes: As promised, here is the script I used to get in front of famous people.
   
   “Kia ora (first name),
   
   I love what you are doing (whatever it is that they are good at).
   
   I’m working on (an industry XYZ about the work they are good at), which I want to be up by (put in the media outlet you are targeting).
   
   I’d love to quote you on this and will happily pay for your time for 15 minutes.
   
   No stress if not.
   
   Cheers,
   (Your name)”

How The World Works

This is one of those, once you see it the world never looks the same again type things.

But reader discretion advised; this will be boring.

A cost structure is the makeup of a business's costs to operate the way it does. It's everything a company pays for to deliver its product or service continuously. They’re more than line items on a P’n’L because it accounts for both explicit and implicit costs.

When you examine the world through the lens of cost structures, you can see the shaded incentives behind why people and businesses behave as they do.

Take Jack from across the road, the 30-something private equity guy with the latest G-Wagon parked in his driveway. You think he's a wealth advisor because he likes the work, and, of course, it pays well. The last time that was true, John Key was prime minister. No, he's still grinding out 100-hour weeks in private equity because the mortgage on his house is $2,000 a week, he owes $250,000 on that G-Wagon, and he's got two kids under five.

Jack is trapped in a $300,000-per-annum lifestyle. A career change is not a luxury he can afford.

For fifty years, gyms opened from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday and 6 p.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends. Then, in the early 2000s, somebody figured out that if you could keep a gym open 24/7, you'd double your capacity (due to longer open hours) and be able to operate at half the cost (you no longer need boots on the ground to be open).

With lowered operating costs, the new chain gyms offered cheaper memberships and increased convenience; The old-school gyms couldn't compete.

Supermarkets...

Growers hate them because they bully growers into accepting unfair prices for their produce. Governments hate them because they're an easy scapegoat for that dreaded quarterly inflation number. And we hate them because, after housing, they're eating the next biggest hole in our wallets.

Meanwhile, the supermarkets claim they can't do anything about it we're only making a 25% gross margin.

But a kilogram of decent cherries pre-Xmas at New World is $30. Yet growers are only getting paid $12. That's a 60% gross margin, not 25%. What's going on there?

Somewhere along the way, some clever bugger decided supermarkets should only sell fruit of a certain quality... Decided by the supermarket. Based on size, blemishes, sweetness, stemless, shelf age etc..

And anything that doesn't meet that standard should be binned.

So, New World can't change its prices because it has to cover the cost of its tonnes of wasted produce due to a grading system created by someone who went 6 feet under many years ago.

Space X - genius innovators? or low-cost producers?

SpaceX's success is largely explained by its ability to deliver payloads to outer space at considerably lower costs. Of course, it took a lot of innovation to achieve that, but by and large, they've changed the cost structure of space freight.

It took 60 years for someone to look at space a little differently and for us to stop accepting the status quo. That's how Elon Musk's coined term "the idiot index" came to be. NASA, another victim of the military-industrial complex's way of budgeting, was spending exorbitant amounts on components that they never thought could be produced cheaper.

For the most part, cost structures just seem to come to be. Unintentionally embedded into our businesses and lives without us barely noticing.

And they stay that way, locking us into certain ways of living until someone is willing to look at the world a little differently and put forth an almighty effort to change them.

This might be a stretch, but it seems to me that cost structures, in some unobvious way, explains almost everything about why and how our capitalistic system works.