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& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip FINANCE Investing: Europe Annual Reports Bloomberg BW50 SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth Companies: 2008 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs Rankings & Profiles | | MAY 13, 2003 NEWSMAKER Q&A Coliseum Books' Fighting Spirit After closing in 2002, the renowned Big Apple bookstore is reopening. Owner George Leibson tells how he plans to beat Amazon and Borders
Even aficionados recognized that Coliseum was an unlikely object for such regrets. It was an ugly, austere store -- no potted palms or designer coffee counters, none of the sofas and overstuffed chairs that Barnes & Noble have made fixtures of its flagship Manhattan stores. Rather than quiet music tinkling in the background, browsing was done to the accompaniment of honking horns and traffic noise. But to anyone hunting for a hard-to-get book, Coliseum was the place to begin the quest. Not that Coliseum was elitist, since manager and co-owner George Leibson made sure his 80-member staff also stocked the standard titles, from bodice rippers to the latest egomaniacal autobiographies of Corporate America's high-flying titans. Well, times change. Commercial rents in New York are softening with the local economy, and while civic boosters talk confidently of the city coming back from its current budgetary crisis, Leibson and partner Irwin Hersch are leading the way by example. Within the next month -- less if his truckloads of undelivered fixtures turn up -- the veteran bookseller will reopen on West 42nd Street. Last week, Leibson took time away from supervising carpenters to talk with BusinessWeek Online Small Business Editor Roger Franklin about his plans and to explain why, even as other independent bookstores are going to the wall, he hopes to beat the chains at their own game. The key to Leibson's strategy: An entrepreneur's intuitive command of what customers want, preferably before they know it themselves. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow: Q: You're reopening an independent bookstore with the benefit of a revered name and reputation, but you're doing it when the industry is increasingly dominated by chains. What's the reasoning at work here? What makes you think you can win against Borders and Barnes & Noble? A: Well, it's a question I've been asked incessantly in the last few weeks and months. Personally, my motive is very basic: Selling books is the only thing I've ever done in my life. We were at Broadway and 57th Street for 27 years, and we lost the lease because the new landlord needed to make a certain amount of money, and we couldn't pay anywhere near that sum. So we closed, sold off all our books, and put our fixtures into storage. Most of the people who worked for me found other jobs or collected unemployment, and I devoted myself to tying up the paperwork while still looking for other locations because, as I said, I'm 58, and I've never done anything else in my life. Q: It must have been hard after 27 years of an entrepreneurial existence to even contemplate doing something else. A: It would have been wise financially for me to try to find a job in the industry somewhere. But I don't know very many people from the industry, surprisingly, after all these years, because I basically kept to myself and kept my nose to the grindstone at the old store. Anyway, it's certainly not the right time to be looking for a job, as many of the people who worked for me found out. So we had an exclusive agent, and...we eventually found this location on 42nd Street, opposite Bryant Park and the New York Public Library. Q: Sounds like a good location for a bookstore. A: Well, we're going to find out. Until the day we open the doors with a load of books in the store, we won't have a clue as to what we can do. I had intended to be open by now, because we signed the lease on Feb. 1, and the free rent is running out. But we had a very late start getting construction under way. We're hoping to be open by Memorial Day. Q: Did you have to do very much construction? A: A bookstore requires more work than you might suppose. But here, a lot of things were in place -- air-conditioning, a fire alarm, and sprinkler system. It had floors in, didn't need a ceiling, and part of the lighting was in as well. So, to prepare this 10,500 square feet of space, instead of costing $1.5 million, which would be a low-ball estimate, we're going to do it for less than $300,000. We have all the old fixtures, of course, and that helps. Q: How did you pitch the business plan to investors? I'm intrigued because, in an industry dominated by chains, how did you begin to persuade them? A: I don't have a formal business plan, but we have people who know us, and we pitched to them. Our investors aren't from out of the blue -- my accountant, my real estate agent, a publisher, a friend of mine who was in the construction business, and a neighbor of my accountant. The pitch was simple...projections to show that we should be able to make a profit, based on figures from the old place. Q: Are your investors book buffs, or were they primarily impressed by the business side of the deal? A: Obviously, the publisher's a bibliophile. My accountants I don't think are bibliophiles. Right now, though, it's a time when it's hard for people to find places to put their money. You can put it in the bank, you get 1%. Invest it somewhere else [like mutual funds], you get to watch it shrink, a little if you're lucky, a lot if you aren't. So we're offering a little more than that. Q: Your old store was a great place for browsing. If you wanted a particular book, more often than not a reader could find it there. That reputation is going to be a big plus, right? A: Actually, that could be a problem. The first store grew organically from 3,500 square feet to 11,500 square feet of selling space, and there was a hell of a lot of back space, about 4,500 square feet. So I don't think the old store can be replicated. What we can do here, I hope, is concentrate on creating pretty much the same feel as the other place. I'm hoping we will. Oh, and we're going to have a café because the investors insist on it.
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