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Given his promotion to vice president after only 17 months as Business Week's director of circulation marketing and sales, we expected to find a fast-track, red-suspender-wearing marketer when we visited Steve Aster in his office high up in the McGraw-Hill building last month. What did we find? An accountant.

Not only an accountant, but one from Queens, a blue-collar borough of New York City. So while Aster can talk until your eyes glaze over about matrixes, source mixes and efficiencies, he also uses expressions like "so on and so forth" and "lo and behold," which makes it easier to take.

And that's good, because there are signs that financial types like Aster may be the wave of the future on magazines, despite consultant Gordon Grossman's comment that "You're doomed if you run circulation as an accounting department."

Take Business Week, where the domestic rate base has hovered around 870,000 for years (real growth coming from overseas). That number is being delivered more efficiently than ever, with a budget so tight it squeaks, by a circulation department that makes a fairly hefty (and much welcome) contribution to the bottom line.

At the same time, the magazine boasts what experts call an immaculate circulation statement. "Business Week delivers rate base on just about every issue, and it's pretty unheard for a weekly to do that," says Dan Capell, of Vos, Gruppo Capell. "And it's an expensive magazine."

In any event, Aster doesn't concede that his background puts him at a disadvantage. "I never wanted to write copy," he says. "I never could. But I certainly know where we spend the dollars, and can look at a package and tell you if it's going to work relative to our audience."

But is Business Week reaching the year 2000, or merely 19857 And how did an accountant get to this exalted position?

Aster first tried his hand at circulation while working in the financial department of Times Mirror Magazines 15 years ago. Called upon to help out, he struggled his way through a circulation model, and found be had a taste for the work.

In 1988, after expanding his marketing and circ skills at Scholastic, he joined the New York Times magazine group, which eventually named him group circulation director, responsible for publications like Family Circle and McCall's.

These books were priced so low that the only way to enhance the bottom line was to find "efficiencies," which he did, diverting resources mail into other channels. It was this performance, among other things, that impressed Robert Montemayor, vice president-consumer marketing/circulation for Business Week, who hired him in October '94.

Though hardly a basket case, Business Week needed help in terms of its bottom-line contribution. For starters, it was spending an ever-spiraling amount on direct mail just to make rate base.

Does that imply the circulation effort was strictly to service the advertisers?

"Yes, the magazine was heavily dominated by advertising," Aster says.

Then too, morale was low and there was a "lack of direction," in the circ area, in part thanks to executive turnover. The new-business people rarely talked to the renewal collection people, and neither talked to fulfillment.

But they did have an asset that circulation marketers at other companies didn't have - Business Week itself, an award-winning business periodical marketed as if to consumers. "It speaks to me," Aster says. "I'm its core audience."

Aster started by shuffling a few positions around, making sure that "job alignments matched responsibilities." Then he began looking at "all our different sources to see how we could fund some additional sources."

The result was a 30% reduction in mail volume to prospects. And yet, he says, mail produces a higher number of subscribers than before, with better payup due to the weeding out of marginal names from prospect lists.

Some of the resulting savings were diverted into insert cards, gift promotions, subscription agents. Some went into telemarketing, the logic being that "the same purchased list doesn't always have to be used for direct mail," Aster says.

The magazine started calling not only former subscribers, but prospects - at home and the workplace. Because of that tactic, Aster says, "We're already ahead of a two-year plan to bring in an acceptable cost per order."

And what's that mean?

"It's more efficient than the mail we've cut out."

On the other hand, Business Week's TV commercials, which served the added function of building brand image, were put on hold because escalating media costs had rendered them inefficient.

The one-year subscription price was upped from $46.95 to $49.95 last November in the belief that "as long as we don't cross that $50 barrier abruptly, we'll maintain our volume-which we've been able to do," Aster says. To sustain up-front response in the face of the hike, he and his team started pushing six-month sub offers.

That, of course, put more pressure on the back end. But with the help of better segmentation and promotional materials that "incentivized longer-term renewals," the magazine was able to lessen file churn.

"When we step them up, those people renew every bit as well as the people that we initially bring in for one year," Aster boasts of the six-month subs. And he adds that "We've almost doubled the amount of three-year business that we get from our renewals compared to a year ago."

Aster wouldn't reveal mail volume (outsiders guess that it's over 10 million pieces per year). When asked how much his department contributes to the bottom line, he says, "Let's pass on that." Then he confides, "We've managed to keep the same promotional budget for years, without even factoring inflation."

But what about Grossman's comment that "you cannot leave the creative element out of the circulation equation"? Even Aster admits that Business Week's control, a snap-back designed by the Colligan Group, "looks like water hit it."

The package, which offers four free issues, still beats all test packages, but that doesn't seem like a good enough reason for mailing it to the entire universe. "I've been getting the same goddamned package from Business Week for years," says Grossman. "The same offer every time. It looks like it was designed by an accountant."

Late in 1994, Aster commissioned research to determine what readers thought of the magazine. The demographic was pretty much the same as always - mid- and senior-level managers, and satisfaction levels were high. But there was one new finding: though people rarely stop subscribing because they dislike the publication, some discontinue when they no longer have time to read it.

That revelation has led to changes in everything from the way readers are targeted to the way they are serviced and renewed. For example, the magazine now makes sure its 800 number is used on almost all promotional materials so as to cut cycle and fulfillment time. It also pushes credit cards, giving the consumer "many more options other than just filling out the form and sending it back," Aster says. (Of course, these enhancements have not yet hit the control, nor many of the test packages.)

Business Week has also tightened up the copy on the "antiquated" billing and renewal pieces.

"You can't sell someone with a soft offer and call him a deadbeat on the second bill," Aster says. "Business Week readers don't stop paying their bills because they can't afford it."

To support this effort, the magazine has had to revamp the fulfillment operation in Hightstown, NJ, outsourcing some functions, placing far more emphasis on customer service and trying to make up for labor cuts over the past few years.

But what about the front end? Are prospects doomed to forever receive the waterlogged control?

Hardly. Business Week is testing not only new packages, but some rudimentary segmentation based on the idea that "a small-business person is going to have very different interests from someone who works for a Fortune 500 company," Aster says.

The message in these packages may sound like heresy to ad salesmen who sell the notion that readers devour every square inch in a magazine. Essentially, it is that you don't have to read the whole magazine. "We're trying to remove the guilt factor from people," Aster explains.

The first guilt-free mailing went out in June. One of the four variations tested was to financial professionals, promising them "business intelligence" essential to their work. It states, "We save you time with our comprehensive Table of Contents, providing brief topic statements for each item listed. You can go directly to what interests you most and save the rest for later."

The package for readers interested in technology carries a similar message.

To investors, Business Week sent a No. 10 envelope containing a letter from publisher David G. Ferm, promising "a better perspective on your own investments." And the fourth package, to general business readers, invites involvement with a four-question "business and economic survey."