The business best-known to those outside the medical profession as publisher of the weekly title formerly known as the British Medical Journal has transformed in recent years. Now clearly positioned as 'healthcare knowledge provider', BMJ's education and professional support services division is expanding rapidly while its medical journals operation continues to grow. Both of which made a compelling proposition for former Guardian News & Media MD Tim Brooks who took up his role as BMJ's CEO just over a year ago.
"I didn't really know the organisation before a brief stint consulting for the BMJ journal, but found a lot of nice, smart commercial people committed to what they do," he says.
"Cut to when I was rung out of the blue by someone senior to apply (for the CEO role) and I thought of those people, the trajectory of the business, its brand strength and the size of the opportunity. And it was clear the trajectory was strong and the size of the brand and the opportunity too large to ignore."
Brooks values the global market for medical information at more than £5bn a year of which BMJ's share is "miniscule": "So there is plenty of room for growth - even if we doubled our business, no one apart from us would notice."
Today's BMJ is a business with more than 300,000 customers worldwide and revenue on an upward path - to £72m in 2012, with 52% of this coming from digital products - built around the strengths and values of its flagship title.
First published in 1840, the BMJ is an open-access, peer-reviewed medical journal and long-standing champion of evidence-based medicine. It's the UK's market-leading medical publication with a combined weekly circulation for its three weekly editions of 122,000 (bmj.com attracts 1.2m unique visitors each month). And it shares a stable with almost 50 other specialist journals, such as Gut and Thorax.
Another important - and fast-growing - area of BMJ's business, however, is its ten year-old Clinical Improvement division with its wide range of professional development products which include modular learning programme, BMJ Learning, and professional services including Best Practice - a 'point of care tool' providing doctors with reliable and up to date information to help them make a diagnosis and treatment decisions.
Clear vision - to help healthcare professionals deliver better healthcare outcomes – and, in the British Medical Association (BMA), an owner willing to invest in growth, are two factors driving this growth, Brooks believes.
"If anything, it was in an impeccably brilliant state when I got here," he admits. "And especially exciting was that significant recent growth had come from outside the UK." For 2012 was a milestone year with international revenues accounting for 55% of total revenue, exceeding national revenue for the very first time. Yet a number of immediate priorities soon became apparent, including a need to refresh the corporate brand formerly known as The BMJ Group.
"Any company not looking at their brand every ten years or so is probably asleep," Brooks explains. "And the brand was tired. So we decided to drop the 'Group' which served little purpose because our lead title is what we are famous for and when people talk to us, they want to talk to us because of BMJ."
The re-branding, which went live in April 2013, was followed by a cultural initiative to counter-balance the top-down positioning work with a bottom-up effort to encourage greater cross-departmental collaboration and understanding.
Tackling a silo culture
"When I joined, I did a staff survey and found the business in good heart," he says. But lowest scores related to feelings that people work in silos, know little of what people in other departments do, and would like to know more about what else is going on within the organisation. So a number of things have since been put in place to counter this.
For example, a recent Showcase event in BMJ's Great Hall with each department taking a table to 'sell' their department to the rest of the company which almost every UK-based member of BMJ's 450 staff visited. Then, in autumn 2013, work was completed on a new innovation space within the main BMJ building.
"The company has done a fantastic job in the past developing new product but what's tended to happen - which reinforces the theme of silos - is that one part of the business has an idea and goes off and does it without necessarily telling any of the others," Brooks adds.
"Now there will be a dedicated space with one person running the innovation process and that person will come to the exec (the fortnightly senior management meeting) where we will decide what to focus on for the next few weeks."
The strategy will involve cross-departmental teams brought together for short yet intense periods to re-imagine various BMJ products, he adds: "Because in my experience, you get the best chemistry when people who are good at what they do are confronted by something they've not done before and people from outside asking dumb questions."
Another imminent change will be the appointment of a marketing director "to frame a compelling narrative for why an organisation should deal with this company" - a move intended to strengthen both the organisation's hand in journals and education and support services.
International growth: journals
How BMJ grows the journals side of its business internationally is to bring out new titles in specialist subject areas it does not already service, rather than look to break into new national or regional markets - it launched six new titles this year. This is because as its journals are edited and written by world experts and deal in best practice they are, by definition, international, Brooks explains.
But even more significant growth potential lies in the Clinical Improvement market. And to exploit this, Brooks has challenged the business to think beyond its traditional focus on building relationships with healthcare organisation customers (the associations, universities and hospitals who make up the bulk of those subscribing to its titles on behalf of the medical professionals in their employ) to respond more directly to its users' needs.
"An important challenge is to make sure all of the digital products we produce are easy to use, slick, two way and so on - to make sure everything in our portfolio is consistent in quality and usability, because not everything we do currently is," he explains.
"Increasingly clients treat us as a shelf of goods and want to be able to put them all in one bag to take away. But not all our (digital) products interact quite as smoothly as they should as they were developed at different times. Yet our users expect whatever digital product they use to be as good as popular consumer apps, like Spotify."
International growth: education and support services
Another priority in recent months has been to strengthen the foundations for further growing education and professional support services internationally. So in July 2013, two new MD posts were created for further expansion in North America and India.
Around the same time, BMJ signed an agreement with the American Association of Medical Colleges for the Clinical Improvement division to launch co-branded learning modules for the US market. It also agreed a license with the Brazilian Ministry of Health to supply its BMJ Learning and Best Practice products to Brazilian GPs country-wide. And then in September, it announced a five year deal to work with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on workforce development which includes further national licences to provide BMJ Learning and Best Practice.
Finding the talent
Critical to further growing both sides of its business will be recruiting the right people - especially those with cutting edge digital and mobile expertise. It's a challenge, Brooks admits, as rising demand from a wider array of businesses stoke salary inflation.
"What you might call display advertising is less than 5% of our revenues, so we are sublimely relaxed about advertising and analytics - a key concern for many publishers in the digital marketplace," he explains.
"But when it comes to people, we've moved from a position where media companies had to compete with tech companies for the best talent to a position where we must now compete with the likes of M&S and HSBC."
Mindset is another important issue, though one Brooks suggests is more likely to affect more traditional publishing organisations than his.
"Those who live by the sword will be shot by those who don't," he says, quoting a phrase a colleague picked up during a recent management course at Stanford. "And that's the predicament traditional publishing services face at the moment." Because while some organisations are ready to embrace change, many others are not.
"I remember saying at a recent breakfast discussion that one of the issues in the magazine market is that it peaked in 2008 and would never hit that level again, so you are dealing with a business in decline and investing while managing decline is very, very challenging," he recalls.
"And one of the other people - quite a senior person in a magazine publishing company - said: 'What do you mean, peaked?' Not only did he not know - and it is a simple matter of fact - but he wasn't prepared to hear it, yet that is how he earns his living."
It's not about digital vs print, he insists: "There will always be print. It's a bit like sail power. And a sailing ship is a beautiful thing, but if you want to get from here to New York you don't take a sailing ship." Rather, it's about understanding users' needs.
In India, for example, BMJ has found demand for print is still high - not for lack of smartphones, but because the wireless infrastructure there does not yet work well. So a doctor catching the bus home from work knowing he or she will be offline for an hour wants a rolled-up copy of the BMJ to read rather than look out of the window.
"Our business is not to tell our users what format to take our products," Brooks smiles, pointing to the key driver he hopes will ensure BMJ hits its goal of doubling its present size by 2020 with 80% of revenue generated outside the UK. "We just need to make sure we are listening."
