For years we both held a secret dream on our hearts to one day launch a real keepsake magazine. One with thick pages, beautiful cover stock and stories and photos that would inspire for years to come (just like the stack we coveted on our own book shelves). After launching a successful directory profiling rural women and their businesses in 2020 – we knew that the time was right to go for it. Our dream came true when we bootstrapped our way to launching the first issue of Trailblazher – a beautifully curated collection of stories, wisdom and inspiration from modern, rural women. We’ve helped connect our readers with hundreds of incredible rural women and we feel really proud of that.

As a mother and daughter team, we’ve been working together in business for over 25 years (you can hear our journey here), riding the ebbs and flows of entrepreneurship, new businesses, and failed businesses – but none without the big life lessons along the way, and with Trailblazher magazine, it’s been no exception. If anything, our learning has been expedited as our brand has grown through many economic landscapes.

When we launched Trailblazher we had very little publishing experience apart from the custom journals and mini booklets that we self-published through our various businesses. The last 4+ years have been some of the biggest learning curves we’ve ever experienced in business as we’ve tried to navigate not only the demands of a quarterly magazine, but the costs as well. You could definitely say we were ‘bright-eyed and bushy tailed’ at the idea of launching a print publication and had we known what it would demand from us, we probably wouldn’t have ventured down this road. But hindsight is lost on passionate hearts, and here we are today with 17 issues under our belts (and a couple more wrinkles to show for it)!

For years we have always said that nothing has tested or expanded us more than being an entrepreneur. The ‘calling’ to pursue passion and purpose while simultaneously having a deep desire to make an impact in the world, thrust us into a journey of constant becoming, evolving, and pivoting. We want to be clear that when we use the word passion, what we really mean is the deep fortitude in our bellies, the resilience and grit to overcome, and the blind ambition to keep going. We don’t use the word passion lightly as for us it has been the life force to carry us through the last 4 years. For any of us, passion can be the wind to lift our businesses to new heights or it can be an anchor. And for the past year or so, for us it has felt like an anchor. Let’s get into it….

We all know that getting a business off the ground requires a ton of heart and hustle, sacrifice and self-preservation. We’ve done it many times before and did what we had to do to launch Trailblazher. Hundreds of late nights, working on files till 1 in the morning before a deadline. Never having time to celebrate another issue because the quarterly frequency demanded that we start the next issue as we launch the current. Working on weekends and missing out on precious family time. Stress taking a toll on our bodies and mental health. We did it all and we did what we had to do to launch, until this way of working become our norm. Somewhere along the way we forgot to come up for air and transition into ‘maintenance’, or rather, we were working so hard to grow the magazine to the point where we could grow our team to be able to allow some breathing room for ourselves, but it never seemed to happen. You see, we’ve been perpetually stuck in a cycle of work overload – putting out a new issue every 3 months, as a team of 3, (and sometimes 2 people), doing everything a business requires – emails, newsletters, blogs, content planning, financials, social media, writing and designing, order fulfillment etc. –barely getting by to get the next issue off to print, being burnout to properly promote each issue and actually grow our distribution. And it has seemed that the harder we worked, the further away that breath of air seemed to get.

COST. We want to take a moment to chat about what it costs to print a magazine like Trailblazher. It’s important for you to know to understand why we are making a big pivot this year. Any guesses? $4000? $6000? Did you know that on average it costs us $11,000 to print each print run (and going up with the rising costs of paper). Now take that and multiply it by 4 times a year and you’ve got the starting base cost of Trailblazher. That’s with no one getting paid yet, no apps and programs and software’s to run a magazine with a small team. And when you do the math, selling a $23 magazine, one by one, or via a subscription with limited distribution, it makes for a tough go to pay for a $11,000 print run with a 2-3 month selling period for a 2/3 person team feeling overwhelmed, burnt out and stressed. Not to mention, if our ‘guesstimate’ for quantities for an issue is off and we are sitting with stock, we can so quickly get behind! It’s been a lot. And please don’t take this as a ‘poor us’ post. Our intention is to be transparent with what it actually takes to run a print magazine and why we haven’t had any moments to pause, as the content beast doesn’t stop for anyone, until it has to.

STRESS. Yes we all know it too well. Entrepreneurship comes hand in hand with enormous amounts of pressure and stress. What can start out as twinges of anxiety, worry and fear can compound very quickly without being addressed, and can grow into physical ailments, and mental health struggles. The accumulation of stress finally caught up with us in 2024 (with our pivot this year, we will be able to bring our Podcast back and will dive deeper into the hell of a year that 2024 was). We believe that our bodies speak to us when we ignore the subtle signals to let go of beliefs and commitments that no longer serve our highest good. Other years we’ve been able to push through the stress of running a quarterly magazine and keep going, but 2024 was the turning point for us. With multiple health and mental wellbeing challenges, it all hit me  (Erin) like a ton of bricks in August. Complete burnout, fear and feeling quite hopeless to be honest with the future of our business. And if you’ve ever experienced burnout, it’s not just feeling exhausted. It’s a complete physical, mental and spiritual numbness from pushing too hard, for too long. I knew my body was trying to tell me that we both needed to change the way we approached our business, we just didn’t know how (coupled with this intense time, Erin realized she was in the throws of perimenopause, which is a totally different conversation, but an important one as no doubt hormones were also compounding her poor mental health).

From September to December for the first time ever, as business partners we were at odds with each other. For Erin, the only way out she could see was to sell the magazine, pay off our debts and walk away to start over, doing what she didn’t know. And for Jan, the pushback energy coming from Erin was palatable, not knowing what our solution was. We both really had to come to terms with the fact that this may not work out in the end. A completely devastating thought, as we have sacrificed and poured so much of ourselves into the dream of Trailblazher. And the thought of not being able to give recognition and celebrate the rural women who deserve to be celebrated in every way possible, really broke our hearts.

So in between further sickness and what felt like pending doom, in January we had our eureka moment. We didn’t need to sell, we didn’t need to walk away, we just needed to release the pressure….

It was a beautiful sunny morning in January, we hadn’t been able to have a connected conversation about our business for weeks. But we committed to make a plan, to give it one last go and call it. We knew we had to make a radical change to not only our business structure, but also our lifestyle. Our priorities needed a desperate reboot, and we longed for less stress and more freedom to actually enjoy our beautiful life instead of holding ‘the business’ as the weight of the world. One of us blurted out the idea of moving to 2 issues per year. Afterall, half of our fellow publishers that we converse with on a regular basis are biannual. And at first this felt horrible and scary and to be honest, like we were failures. But the more we talked about it, we knew it was exactly the right move we needed to make for ourselves first and foremost, and for the future of Trailblazher. You could see the light return to our eyes and hearts as we imagined what a future would look like without the immense pressure of a quarterly publication. The freedom of time to reconnect with our passion and say yes to opportunities that in the past we had to say no to. We are reimaging all of the ways that we can serve our community through various platforms. To bring back our podcast which we all miss dearly. To start to regain some balance into our life and work and start living a whole lot more. And to take the extreme financial pressure and frequency off of us and give us more time to actually grow our distribution and properly promote each issue to really GROW and be sustainable. We will have the bandwidth to properly pre-sell our issues to help pay for each print run… and so much more!

Ahhhh. That breath that we’ve been working so hard to take. We had found our solution and have since emailed each and everyone of our magazine subscribers to let them know of the big changes and we have received nothing but complete support and understanding. It has meant the absolute world. There are many other changes we are making this year to simplify and welcome ease back into our work life. But for now, this is our big news.

Moving forward, Trailblazher will be released end of April, and end of October in print. It will be getting a fresh design update with a couple new sections that we can’t wait to share. We will no longer offer a 2 or 3 year subscription and have instead moved to a 1 year (2 issues) that will not auto-renew (the amount of subscribers that we lost to expired credit cards were tough). If you aren’t a subscriber, please know that it really does count towards the sustainability and success of Trailblazher, it gives us the ability to keep going. You can become a subscriber here.

We want to thank you if you’ve made it this far with us. Trailblazher was born from our hearts and we appreciate each and every one of you for being here. Onwards and upwards.

Jan and Erin

Photos by Shelby Simmonds of Twisted Tree Photography