The 10th anniversary of a well-run small business might be an occasion for reflection and planning among the owners and staff, or a least a little party. We’re very pleased to share some thoughts about one particular 10-year-old San Diego corporation that enjoys tens of thousands of client/readers and scores of client/advertisers. We’ll reflect a little here and hope you accept this invitation to our Seventh Annual 40 Under 40 Awards and Second 10th Anniversary Luncheon Sept. 19. Just in case you accept, we’ve booked the San Diego Convention Center. Tickets are $65 each, with a generous portion of proceeds benefiting the YWCA and its important programs, including Becky’s House for battered women and their children. For reservations, please call Cyndi Meeves at (619) 398-8926 before Sept. 15.

We’ll be especially proud to acknowledge at the luncheon our 183 cover boys and cover girls who’ve graced the San Diego Metropolitan Magazine in 121 editions. Please join us. (Can you name them?)

Metro San Diego Communications Inc. has survived a decade as a team of owners, managers, researchers, writers, editors, designers, marketers, printers and distributors. Editor Tim McClain’s resourceful crew looks even smarter thanks to talented contributors, advertisers and vendors who’ve stuck with us for years. We incorporated in 1996 to buy the assets of what is still our core product, the San Diego Metropolitan Magazine, which actually completes its 21st year of publication this month. (So this is our first 10th anniversary as a corporation and ownership team, but is the second time the magazine has surpassed a 10th anniversary milestone. Get it? The Second 10th Anniversary Luncheon?)

Along the way, we acquired the legally adjudicated twice-weekly San Diego Metropolitan/Uptown Examiner newspaper (for legal advertising), established in 1937; and bought the North Park News community newspaper, now nearly 14 years old. We launched sandiegometro.com immediately after buying the Metropolitan Magazine in 1996 and established its Daily Business Report. For a decade, sandiegometro.com has built the deepest database of San Diego business information available to the public at no charge. It’s a great news and research tool, as the users behind those 100,000 unique visits per edition can attest. That’s something like 6 million page-views per year. Not bad for a small band of San Diego business reporters-turned-business owners.

The Metropolitan Magazine itself emerged long ago as San Diego’s largest circulation-business publication at 45,000 copies, audited by BPA Worldwide. That’s three times the circulation of the Business Journal and six or seven times the routine circulation of our alma mater, the Daily Transcript. We estimate our readership at about 1.5 times the readership of the Union-Tribune’s business pages.

It’s been challenging and rewarding. Owning a small business, which we’ve touted as righteous as often as we’ve promoted San Diego’s Central Business District, is not always all it’s cracked up to be. Like managing people for a larger company or bureaucracy, managing your own employees and contributors is fraught with difficulties. Whether or not all personnel are healthy and getting along well at home, each day brings the demands of producing in the workplace. The weight is especially heavy on small-business owners who have no supervisors or corporate parent to turn to for help. It’s a good thing when our hard work yields enough compensation to get through another day or another year. But to get started, and to survive after the World Trade Center attack, we’ve had to finance and finesse our way. We’re grateful for the U.S. Small Business Administration’s lending programs, but wish commercial banks would do a better job of promoting their less-expensive non-SBA alternatives.

At the Sept. 19 luncheon, you can witness the video burning of our SBA loan docs; the first 10-year loan was paid off on schedule and the second was fully prepaid, both last month.

We feel we’ve only modestly grown the Metropolitan. We grew the circulation about 15 percent from what we bought from founder Sean Reilly, and didn’t need to grow that much more, considering the penetration compared to the competition. We’ve tripled revenue; but, surprise, expenses tripled too. The energy crisis of 2000 hurt our hospitality advertisers, the dot.com bust shriveled our intellectual property service providers, and Sept. 11, 2001, knocked the feet from what we thought would be growth years. But we survived, while others did not. The following years, 2002 through ‘04, taught us that hard-working, under-compensated San Diegans could survive sustained 20 percent pay cuts and still lead healthy, productive lives in one of America’s most beautiful cities. And they’re still balking at well-paid City Hall about absorbing a 1 or 2 percent pay cut? The Municipal Employees Association should put some hair on its chest and become a part of the solution.

Our greatest pride has been our journalism, our altruistic mission, which we’ve used to educate tens of thousands of San Diego’s most productive citizens, keeping them abreast and often ahead of developing news and trends, offering leadership occasionally, especially in readers’ thinking about land-use. We love San Diego real estate and we’re learning to love Baja California’s real estate. We love our waters, mountains and canyons, inner-city economic development, banking, cross-border commerce, maritime affairs, the law, telecommunications, software, education, biosciences, health care, food, hospitality, the arts and everything else that makes San Diegans and Tijuanenses tick. We love writing about productive people.

We’re not namby pamby. But if one of the definitions of news is the unusual, we think reporting the current affairs of what’s going right is grossly under-reported elsewhere, making the Metropolitan unusually newsy.

We think it’s extraordinarily important to cover private enterprise. Private business, a big part of just living, is often very difficult, belying the success stories published to inspire and to educate. But whether successful, just surviving or failing, private enterprise generates more than 83 percent of the jobs in San Diego, according to Sandag economist Cheryl Mason, and virtually all of the cash flow and wealth in San Diego and throughout the country. So it is incongruous that most general-circulation newspapers and most news broadcasters devote a scant 10 percent or less of their editorial effort toward the workings of private business. Worse, many reporters elsewhere are clueless, uncomfortable or antagonistic when covering business, a phenomenon that starts with the void of business education in journalism schools.

Covering public enterprise is very important. Governments provide our most essential services, from military defense to sheltering the poor, from cleaning the beaches to catching the crooks.

But private enterprise by far provides most of what we need and want. That’s what we’re here to report upon most, to applaud, to criticize, to learn and teach about successes and failures.

Sometimes we celebrate the most productive in our midst, and that’s what we do in this edition, starting on Page 58, with our Seventh Annual 40 Under 40 Awards, honoring the 40 brightest entrepreneurs, business owners, professionals and civic leaders in San Diego younger than age 40. We’re amazed by Jason Hughes, age 39, the most productive real estate broker in Downtown San Diego since Malin Burnham was in his heyday, the first and only 40 Under 40 honoree to be recognized by the independent judges a second time, and the guy who saved the San Diego Children’s Museum/Museo de los Ninos from a threat worse than government condemnation: Government seizure for $10. His story starts on Page 56.

We’ve been especially enthralled with the rise of cross-border commerce in the past decade and we’ve been equally pleased with the growth of the Hispanic community in San Diego. Whether spent by Mexican-Mexicans or Mexican-Americans, dollars and pesos earned and changing hands anywhere within 60 miles of Downtown San Diego or 100 kilometers of Centro de Tijuana is a very good thing. San Diego as a general center of commerce may be listed anywhere from 15th to 25th largest in the United States in various studies. As a population, San Diego has grown and ranked seventh or eighth largest in the country over the past decade. But add the contiguous population from Tijuana to Ensenada, and all of a sudden San Diego would rank in the top 10 commercial markets in the U.S., top five in population and top two in Spanish speakers, gracias. We’re very grateful Patrick Osio has made “The Connection” to Baja California business so interesting to watch for so many Metropolitan readers over the past decade. His column starts on Page 46. He inspires us to rename San Diego/Baja as Latin America’s Finest City. The Best of Baja Business begins on Page 34.

We’re most grateful to our advertisers, who pay the bills. And lest a cynic complain, we note that 99 percent of our editorial content has nothing to do with our advertisers. Business-to-business advertisers, like Rick Engineering Co. and Irving Hughes, who’ve been with us since Day One, have found an uncommon marketing tool in the Metropolitan. Consumer advertisers like Pardee Homes and Reginald of London similarly have been well served. At 45,000 copies, plus pass-along readers, there is no denying the Metropolitan is a consumer publication, and is so audited by BPA Worldwide. But with most of our copies delivered to business owners, professionals and top managers, and most of the content about business and professional activities, the Metropolitan is solidly positioned as a business-to-business publication. Unlike the readers of our favorite San Diego glamour magazine, or the big alternative weekly aimed at youngsters, or our favorite general-circulation newspaper most popular for its sports coverage, there’s no denying the San Diego Metropolitan provides advertisers with the region’s largest, most productive, most intelligent business and professional audience. Plus our ad rates are less expensive. We are not only a journalistic service in the mass media fulfilling our first mission, we are an effective advertising bargain, and that’s our second mission, although the first doesn’t happen without the second. Small-business banker Craig Francis, who’s enlarged the size of his typical quarter-page ads for Francis Financial only once in all his years in these pages, attests, “I get more leads in one month from the Metropolitan than an entire year of advertising in the Business Journal.” So he dumped the BJ.

In addition to charging more for their advertising on its face or way more per thousand readers, our most vigorous competitors will not easily disclose that profit from your advertising is directed to its Kansas City owner in the case of the Business Journal, to its Malibu/New York corporate controllers in the case of San Diego Magazine, or to Detroit and Chicago in the case of the Daily Transcript. Clear Channel, which controls most of the radio advertising in San Diego, sends its profit to San Antonio. TV stations, too, are mostly owned by distant corporations and charge a fortune for mere seconds of visibility before local audiences that are almost always smaller and less intellectually endowed than Metropolitan readers. (But those glowing, moving images of themselves just dazzle the car dealers, like moths with marketing budgets.) At least the Union-Tribune is San Diego-owned, and we commend it as part of your marketing mix if you can afford to pay for another ad tomorrow; the U-T’s shelf life is one day.

There is great marketing merit to a longer shelf life.

Our dual missions of being a valuable journalistic resource and a cost-effective marketing vehicle have served San Diego business well enough to help us both survive in a tumultuous decade. We won’t buy the fanciest media kits in town, but we hope those who are advertising elsewhere and have read this far will come to understand the merit of using a vigorous, hard-working, locally owned small-business publisher with the biggest B2B reach and longest shelf life in San Diego.

We’re enormously grateful to our readers and advertisers. Thank you. We wish you good health and smart progress in the decade ahead; we’ll work hard to encourage, enlighten and earn your attention. Hope to see you Sept. 19 at the San Diego Convention Center.