Marjorie Suddard
Hi, and welcome to my bio. Please note that I find the very fact that you’re reading this extremely weird, but then I, too, have found myself idle and looking for something, anything, to read. My personal nadir is reading everything on the back of a toothpaste tube. Several times. Thank God smart phones have rescued me from that particular purgatory.
I’m Tim’s wife and partner, which means I’m the one he talked into starting a magazine more than 40 years ago. I still can’t fully explain how he did that, but I’m pretty sure it involved his extraordinary sales talent–not to mention the fact that we were just out of college, so I needed something that looked good on a resumé. I was right: It still does. Of course, now I don’t need a resumé, so I guess it wasn’t such a great idea after all.
I don’t do a lot of the public stuff for the magazines, preferring instead to stay closer to home and handle the details of running a publishing company. I do enjoy talking to our readers and advertisers on the phone, but I sound pretty nondescript, so if I’m the one who answers your call, you probably won’t realize I’m one of the owners or seek out a lengthy chat. (Since one of my jobs here is to call people and ask them to pay their bills, most people don't really want to talk to me anyway.) It works great for phone solicitors selling long distance and office products, though.
Other things I do include a bunch of things you probably never knew went into making magazines, including production schedules, circulation distributions, renewal series, and HR. I admit I’m more a square peg for that last fit. I also help plan our tours, which enables me to put to good use the wine skills I honed during the pandemic.
I spend most of my time running the business end of the business, which involves a thing called double-entry accounting. This enables me to produce more things called financial statements, which the government uses to extract money from me. If you get a check from Motorsport Marketing, I signed it. If you don’t, you call me. And I use my best nondescript voice.
Personally, I’m the proud mom of two of our staffers, Tom and Katie. They have each brought quality spouses into the family, including Tom’s wife, Nicole, who is our marketing director. We have a couple other family members on staff, which helps make up for the fact that I came late to the realization of why farmers have so many children. Fortunately, our entire team really does function like a big, weird family, so it’s all good. Just know that I pity the servers who wait on us when we all go out.
