Adam Goldstein, Publisher, Business Management Daily, Falls Church, Va.

SIPA: Describe Business Management Daily.

ADAM: We are becoming less and less a publisher and more a training company. We still have a dozen newsletters, but we now do more than 200 webinars, have CD and video sales, and publish books and special reports. We have four verticals: HR, leadership, office administration and office technology—technology was a direct offshoot of office administration and has grown wildly.

Many SIPA members seem to be becoming other things.

Yes, the title of publisher is becoming more and more a misnomer. We have evolved from two webinars a month when I started to now doing four a week. It’s almost as big a revenue stream as the publishing side.

Do you bundle those with the newsletters?

No, usually it’s with access to the membership website. Sign up for a webinar and get 30 days free of our HR website. And on the 31st day we have their credit card and it’s payment time. It has been extraordinarily successful, tripling the size of the websites—especially the office technology website. We do sell a season pass for everything that we bundle with membership.

Have you had to make changes staff-wise?

Not really. We do our webinars by committee; myself and the editors get together on content issues. I’ll write marketing copy. We all get speakers. We do have one live event in Las Vegas every year—where I pretty much live. But more of my job is devoted to webinars, building partnerships and creative marketing. Phil [Ash, the company CEO] has his side and I have mine. Then there’s a centralized marketing, production and monitoring.

You mentioned Las Vegas. You are the Conference Co-Chair for the SIPA Marketing Conference, Dec. 11-13. That’s exciting.

Yes, it is. The reason we were able to get the Cosmopolitan [for the hotel] is because I looked at it for my own conference and there were deals to be had. Turns out they were eager to work with us. It may cost a little more to fly out there [than to Miami, site of the past couple Marketing Conferences], but the hotel rooms are vastly lower priced.

And it’s a buzz-worthy place, I’ve heard.

It’s a hot place—but a little more subtle than most Vegas hotels. It has a sleek design. Most conference sleeping rooms in Las Vegas tend to involve a 10-mile walk to the exhibit space and session rooms, of course through the casino. But the Cosmopolitan has two towers, one for vacationers and gamblers and one for business clients. So our elevators go right into our exhibit space.

And you also secured the keynote speaker, I believe, Joel Rothstein.

Yes, I’ve known Joel on a personal level for a while, and now he is vice president, technology strategy and innovation, Global Information Resources at Marriott . He was with Reuters and then Netscape in the early days. After a job as a journalist, he got into e-commerce with Marriott and helped to develop a new gaming app that they developed to attract brand loyalty of Millennials.

You have some other great speakers lined up as well.

We tried to pair up some of the lions of the industry with up-and-coming folks. David Foster has agreed to speak so that’s a big coup for us. Jenny Fukumoto of Ragan will be on that panel. This association has been a best-kept secret for 25 years. It took me that long to become an overnight sensation. I think the key was I left the room when they chose the Conference chairs.

I think you’re being pretty modest. What is your background?

Marketing. I first worked with KCI in 1985. That was my first real job in publishing. I have owned my own business, did consulting, and then Phil asked me to come here full-time. I still have that entrepreneurial bent. But there are few people better to work for than Phil and Allie Ash.

Back to the webinars for a second. Can you tell when they’re good?

Definitely. We can tell if someone has done well or poorly simply if people “leave the room,” or stay for the whole 75 minutes. Or ask for their money back. On the whole, we have very good speakers though. The worst thing is when it’s a 75-minute commercial about themselves. There’s always a Q&A after. Sometimes, if it’s an evergreen topic—say dealing with difficult people at work—we’ll play the recording of the individual webinar. Then have 20 minutes of Q&A with the speaker joining us. Usually we’ll tell people 45-50 minutes of presentation and 20 minutes of questions. When we have lawyers, we do the opposite; people have a lot of questions.

What keeps you up at night?

The continual transition to digital. We still have a healthy print business that I’m tired of being defensive about. ‘Ignore the future at your peril.’ There is a concern that online customers are less loyal than print—the economy of digital vs. the loyalty of print. We’ll see.

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Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @SIPAOnline