At the Ultra 4 Nationals in October the team of Dave Schneider and Aaron Robinson drove Herrick’s CRAWLmerica Trent Fabrication Top Shelf race car to the Legends national championship.
SPARKS (Jan. 5)- Northern Nevada with hundreds of miles of trails and dirt roads is a Mecca for off roading. And it’s also home to Crawl Magazine, a publication dedicated to the hard core off road enthusiast.
John Herrick with his Ultra 4 Legends racer in the Sparks, Nevada shop of Trent Fabrication.
As the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Crawl Magazine John Herrick is always checking the issues. Here he finds something funny in the January/February edition.
Standing by his Legends Ultra 4 rig, John Herrick is almost ready to go for the 2015 King of the Hammers event.
Oddly enough wanting to improve the Jeep he was using for commuting led the current owner, John Herrick, into the off road world.
“In September 2000 I needed something to drive back and forth to work,” he said. “I was living up in Washington and had a 110-mile commute through downtown Seattle. I wanted something other than a car so I decided to buy a Jeep Cherokee.”
Wanting to improve and modify the Jeep led him to many Internet forums and modifying the vehicle.
“It went from being 99% street to being about 99% trail,” he said.
He ran the rig for 10 years then cut it apart so it could be parted out.
“That’s when I started Project Jeep Wrangler. We saved the axels, other things and I built another rig from it,” he said.
Herrick added that he started late at age 38 as most of the people he was meeting were 10 to 15 years younger. He also started a Jeep club that’s been around for 14 years and does a lot of charity projects.
For Herrick that first Jeep led to a complete change in his lifestyle.
“That was my start from this humble desire to have a rig I knew I could get to work everyday to essentially selling my boat, golf clubs and doing nothing but off-roading. It truly is a lifestyle,” he said.
He spent 28 years in the world of mortgage banking where he sold loans to Wall Street for a major sub prime bank. When that fell apart he, like man others, was out of a job.
Then needing a change, a phone call started him on a new vocation.
“I got called by the guys that started Crawl; they had a great idea but didn’t execute on it very well,” he said. “It started in late 2005 but had a lot of delivery issues in 2007 and 2008 as they just weren’t fulfilling their customer’s expectations.”
Over the next nine months he figured out the major problem were the founders so Herrick made an offer to buy the company.
“The product was OK when it came out but it wasn’t coming out on a regular basis,” he said.
After taking care of the legal issues he acquired the assets of the company and in September of 2009 he re-launched the magazine. That was issue 18 and ever since it’s been published on a 60-day timetable.
Now the January/February 2015 issue is number 50, the circulation is strong and international with the biggest non-North American country being Australia.
“We’re in every major bookstore in North America and we’ve got a strong subscriber base,” he said. “It’s a niche publication in that it’s focused on hard core off-road.”
While he’s always been a fan of magazines Herrick admitted he didn’t know anything about running one until he acquired Crawl.
“But business is business. You have customers you need to take care of, bills to pay, have to figure out economical ways to create the product and get it to the user,” he said. “So I figured that can’t be too different than anything else I’ve done.
“So what I learned is to make a product I would enjoy and that’s the first thing I think about when putting the magazine together.”
Several things set Crawl apart from its competition and one of them is the length and depth of feature articles.
“Everyone is eight pages and there’s a point where it has a spec sheet that has every single aspect of the vehicle covered. Most of my competitors will say, ‘this is the kind of engine, axels and tire size,’ but we’ve got 50 to 60 data points,” he said. “A guy could almost build another rig using our spec sheets.”
His goal is to show the why and how concerning how a rig was built and to leave the reader with a real base of knowledge about the vehicle.
Another difference is the amount of space advertising takes up. For many of its competitors it’s 50% of the issue but only 15% for Crawl.
“That leaves a lot of pages for content,” he said. “So you can have eight pages on a feature that is completely uninterrupted. So you have ads in the front and some in the back but when you get into the meat and potatoes of the articles they start and run eight pages.”
A subscriber gets an issue that is 100-pages long, perfectly bound with a nice spine and archival quality paper. According to Herrick many of his subscribers collect the issues and he doesn’t think many of his competitors can make that claim.
Unlike other magazines he doesn’t offer discounts to his customers so they are paying for what they are getting. As a result the magazine’s readers expect in depth articles and if one is shortened he hears about it so feedback is used to keep the quality to a high standard.
He added that subscribing for six issues a year gives the reader more content than other competitors have in 12 months.
However getting Crawl to where it is today took a bit of effort and Herrick had to stick his financial neck out.
“I knew the brand had value, I knew that simply from the number of people that were complaining about not getting their magazines,” he said. “So I thought if the brand still has value and I can satisfy that the first thing is to give everybody who was on the subscriber list a subscription for a year just to make up for what they’ve already paid.”
The effort cost Herrick around $97,000.00 out of his own pocket to take care the 7,300 people that had subscriptions and prove he was legitimate.
His efforts paid off when most of them renewed and those checks kept the magazine going.
“Its worked out pretty well but it was touch and go that first year as the only revenue I had was a small amount of advertising,” he said.
He finds social media interesting because the magazine’s Face Book page has over 400,000 followers. And this week he’ll launch a digital version for purchase.
“But the vast, vast majority want print. The Internet is there to remain in touch in that 60-day window between issues,” he said.
His subscriber’s demographics show the audience is a bit skewed to older readers. Most are over 35-years old, homeowners, have families and are settled in their careers.
“All of that comes around to having some money to spend on the sport they enjoy. If you don’t have that you can’t do this,” he said. “Most of these guys will come to Trent Fabrication to have one built or go to the Jeep dealer then drop it off and have another $30,000 of work done on it.
“We’re going to feed the digital but at the end of the day a guy wants to sit down, have a beer and read Crawl Magazine.”
Herrick is a Washington native but three years ago, after he got sick of the rain, he moved to Northwestern Nevada. Now he’s closer to the places like the Rubicon and Johnson Valley where the King of the Hammers is run.
“I love it here,” he said.
Due to its excellent reputation Crawl has been attracting more advertisers but there is still the need to maintain the ratio between content and ads. The solution will be to add pages when necessary.
“We always have enough content but we don’t have room to print it all. So when all those advertisers come, help pay for ink, paper and bandwidth then we can share more content with the reader,” he said.
Fortunately the economic downturn really didn’t hurt the magazine and Herrick feels he knows why.
“One thing about the economic downturn is that people didn’t lose sight of the things they really enjoy, the places and things they wanted to do or accomplish,” he said. “I think Crawl at a very low cost continued to feed those dreams.”
So while people worked to keep things on an even keel they were always looking to the day when things would turn around.
“That was part of what got us out of this mess, a lot of hard work, taking care of business but remembering as soon as there was some free dough they were going to spend it on their rig and start going places,” he said.
But there still was a downside and that was with advertisers.
“For us the economic downturn was a little harder with advertisers because, even though the first rule of marketing was, ‘don’t ever stop marketing,’ that impacted us somewhat,” he said. “But it wasn’t as bad as my competitors who rely so heavily on advertising because my customer pays for what he gets. And that’s a lot of content and not a lot of advertising.”
Now he feels things are improving and the annual Easter Jeep Rally in Moab, Utah the magazine sponsors is just one example. Over the past few years he’s seen the numbers of participants increase.
Another gathering seeing increasing numbers is Jeep Beach held at Daytona Beach, Florida. This year it runs from April 22nd through the 26th.
“It’s just a 5-day party and the people are nuts,” he said.
With the New Year here it’s time to look ahead and Herrick has gotten a head start on that.
Currently he’s having Trent Fabrication preparing his rig for year’s King of the Hammers. Over the past weekend it was taken down to Johnson Valley, California for a test run.
The Hammers is an annual event, run this year from January 30th through February 7th, and features a marathon of Ultra 4 races. And it draws thousands of competitors and spectators to the desert for an entire week.
The event itself started in 2007 and it was to determine if somebody could go fast in the desert, crawl rocks and who could do it the fastest.
“So now we have these hybrid cars that go fast but also crawl rocks really well,” he said. “I think last year’s winner may have covered 190- to 200-mile racecourse in eight hours. Which when you figure out the average speed maybe isn’t so fast until you think that in the desert they’re doing 115 to 120 miles an hour and in the rocks they’re doing 3 miles an hour.”
He added that many of the rocks are the size of a Volkswagen Golf and some of the fastest drivers do it solo so they don’t have a co-driver to help if it necessary to winch a car off or over a rock.
For Herrick and his crew the Hammers is a very busy time as the magazine goes to print a week after the event. And they beat the competition by weeks or months as
Crawl Magazine is the first publication to come out with a report on the event as its part of the March/April edition.
While down in Johnson Valley, he also hopes to document the effort of Bill Baird to duplicate a run across the desert where, according to the GPS, he was going 150 miles an hour. Not bad for an unlimited Ultra 4 racer.
Asked about the future, Herrick simply said, “I’m optimistic.”
Those wishing further information on the magazine can check its website at, www.crawlmag.com.
