As it works towards its 30th birthday, the group is branching out again, this time into engineering and manufacturing. But all of this is a long way, notes chief executive officer Ben Allen, from the two-title operation the company began with.
The group was launched by Ben’s father, Mark, who was running Thomson Medical at the time the parent company decided to pull out of medical publishing. Mark Allen acquired two titles from International Thomson - the British Journal of Hospital Medicine, and The Physician – and launched a publishing house of his own.
“He had no capital to run a business,” says the younger Allen. “The British Journal of Hospital Medicine was a free-circulation title going out to about 35,000 hospital doctors. He didn’t really have the cash to fulfil that circulation so he wrote to every reader and said that it was now going to be subscription only. He got about 6,000 subscriptions back on that, and with that he had the cash flow to run the business. I think that one decision was probably the best decision he made, and without going forward like that, we may not be around today.”
Expanding gradually into other medical titles, the business took a large growth step in 1993, when it opened an office in Wiltshire and moved into business-to-business publishing. At that time, the subscription fulfilment operation and design work – both of which had previously been outsourced – were brought in house and moved to Wiltshire as well. Mark Allen bought a house in Wiltshire to be close to the business, and the grounds of his home are still the setting for an annual staff party and presentation event. The timing of the Wiltshire move was a result of the sale of a magazine called The Probe, which had been snapped up for a bargain price and sold at a significant profit after just a few years. The capital generated by the sale funded the move into B2B; titles now include HR and Recycling & Waste World.
Later came opportunities to acquire some leisure titles, and Mark Allen Group now publishes Wiltshire Life and Jazzwise. “A few years ago I set out a plan - that we’d launch a couple of titles a year and acquire at least one major title, and that’s what we’ve done for the last three or four years,” Allen says. About half of the current stable have been acquisitions.
Sharp focus
New launches and takeover targets are determined by a mixture of business potential and personal interest. “We acquired Jazzwise last year and Mark’s a huge jazz fan. There are others that are absolutely fantastic brands and it just makes sense for us to have them within our portfolio. On the one hand, we publish fairly academic, scholarly titles … and on the other hand we publish very consumery titles like Gramophone and Carriage Driving. But if there’s anything that meshes those interests together it’s that we operate in well-defined niche markets and that’s what we’ve always been strong at – identifying niche areas where perhaps there isn’t strong competition and maximising potential in those niches.”
From the beginning, content sales and subscriptions have been the focus of the business. “We’ve always concentrated on content sales, so at the moment, probably about 46 per cent of our business is around various content sales, whether that’s selling subscriptions or licensing royalties, people attending our events or reprints.” Classical music title Gramophone has a high circulation, others are more targeted. “Some of our titles are very small niche titles … but they really target the thought leaders in those niches, so even though the circulations may not be high, we’re going to the most influential people in those markets.” There is significant variation by title in the contribution made by advertising sales.
Acquiring Findlay Media
Many of the company’s more recent acquisitions have been in the area of controlled circulation; in April this year, Mark Allen Group acquired Findlay Media, publishers of titles such as Machinery, Eureka and New Electronics. The combined group is forecast to achieve annual turnover of £30 million.
Allen explains why Findlay is a good match for the group. “Firstly it’s a profitable and growing business. Launched in 1974, it was very successful, but then, for various reasons, it went into administration about five or six years ago. At that point, the management team went back and looked at the basics and did a fantastic job looking at the core of the business and they put in place some really strong systems. They’re also the leading communication company in the UK for manufacturing and engineering, which is a sector that we hadn’t been in and which is a very attractive area for us.”
As well as strong products - Machinery is number one in its market – and a strong events schedule, Findlay also has work management systems in place that can now be applied across the Mark Allen Group. “Publishers are much more aware now of data services and the need to have information about their audience,” says Allen, conceding that, with its focus on subscriptions, this was an area Mark Allen Group had overlooked. “But as we’ve acquired more controlled circulation titles, we’ve absolutely realised that this is an imperative, and Findlay started their business based on the strength of their data services; they have a world class data services team and we’ve migrated our existing controlled titles down to Findlay. That’s really helped us understand more about the opportunities available and the strength of our data lists.”
Mixed media
There is a digital offering linked to all Mark Allen Group titles, but the business model depends on each title. Only one so far has gone digital only – the International Journal of Ophthalmic Practice – and Allen says the jury is still out on whether that is a success. Most of the health and education titles are entirely paid-for online; some of the more newsy titles provide breaking news free of charge, and then gated access to other content online. Often, Allen says, web traffic drives reader interest in the print products. The digital part of the business is highly profitable, he says, and growing, though sometimes now it’s difficult to distinguish what’s digital and what is a traditional offering. Allen is convinced, however, of the continued need for print products.
“We don’t have a one-size-fits-all strategy towards digital. We look at what’s appropriate for the particular product and certainly over the past few years we’ve made significant investments, as a lot of other publishers have, in our digital products. My personal opinion is that you need a good printed product to support all the activities around your brand. I do think some publishers get very concerned about this topic; my view is it’s not how you’re delivering content, it’s what content you’re delivering and as a business, for the most part, we sell our content so it’s absolutely imperative that our content has to be fantastic quality. I don’t necessarily think that the platform it’s delivered on is all that important, because readers will engage in different ways and we leave it to their choice as to how they like to engage with content, but what we must do is ensure our content is the best possible quality and provide the platforms to enable readers to engage with our content in any way that they wish to.”
Maintaining momentum
Expansion and unity are the watch words for the future of the Mark Allen Group. Allen says the pace of recent growth will be a challenge to maintain, along with linking new and older parts of the business and sharing knowledge across titles and divisions. “Our plan is to continue expanding and acquiring. That’s not easy. We were fortunate around the time of the recession whereby we didn’t have any borrowings. So, when other publishers in 2008-9 felt the pressure of bank financing, we didn’t have that pressure, and that did enable us to acquire very good brands that some of the large publishers were divesting as single assets that perhaps didn’t fit in with the rest of their portfolio. Our challenge is to continue to find products at good value.
“Alongside that, we do have a diverse portfolio … and the difficultly is, when you have as many different products as we have, is ensuring that knowledge in one market can be transferred to another market. As we grow, we need to stay nimble. The ability to react quickly to our environment has been one of our advantages; as we grow bigger, that becomes harder.”
The Mark Allen Group now has about 230 staff but Allen says there’s still a family feel to it. “That’s easy for me to say, but Mark still works in the business seven months of the year, he’s very personable and still walks the floors and knows everyone by name; I’m the same.” Ben’s sister works part-time in the conference part of the business and her partner is director of data and digital development. “I wouldn’t like to think we’d ever lose that personal touch,” he says. “It becomes more difficult as you grow, but we’re a very personable business; our door is always open.”
Allen is coy about what the next title on the launch or acquisition list might be: “There are things that we’re looking at, at the moment. I can’t give too much away … but we are pursuing interests.”
