Tom Bureau is CEO of Burda International and executive chair of its UK subsidiary Immediate Media. He created Immediate in 2011 – with Exponent private equity – from the former BBC Magazines, Origin Publishing and Magicalia. He brought to magazines a distinctive blend of experience in print publishing and pureplay digital. He had been co-founder and CEO of Silicon Media Group in 1998, which was sold to CNET Networks, after which he became CEO of CNET’s UK and European business. Immediate – whose major brands include BBC Good Food, Radio Times, BBC Gardeners’ World, Cycling Plus, and Top Gear – was acquired by the family-owned Hubert Burda Media in 2016. Last year, it had a record EBITDA of £46.1m – 10% ahead of the previous peak in 2019, having doubled revenue in its first decade. The Munich-based Burda has revenue of €2.8bn and employs almost 11,000 people in 17 countries. Tom Bureau graduated from Nottingham University in classics with philosophy.
What was your first media job and what did it teach you?
I landed in media as a means to an end. After university, I decided to defer a life of responsibility by going travelling, but I needed cash. A friend had landed a job at Reed Business Information selling ads, so I got a media sales job at a small company Capital Publishing in their first graduate employee scheme. I learnt a lot as a rookie: the fundamentals of phone-based selling; that putting yourself in other people’s shoes is the key to sales; that I was pretty competitive. And that actually you have to provide real value to your customers to build a strong business (which Capital actually didn’t get).
What were your proudest achievements before Immediate?
There were some highs and a few lows, taking every opportunity I could and learning on the job. After travelling, I became Commercial Director at a start-up, Cromwell Media, working with Rob Lewis, who I’d met at Capital. We published Business & Technology Magazine, sold it to Dennis Publishing – and having met a colleague of Tim Berners Lee – launched one of the first digital publishing operations in 1995, with Business & Technology Online. I was 26 at the time.
Soon after, I was invited to relaunch The Modern Review as managing director. Although ultimately a failed investment, it was a critical success and an exciting, chaotic time working with Julie Burchill, Charlotte Raven, and board member Derek Draper, then adviser to adman-turned-politician Peter Mandelson. It was 1997, the exciting time of Tony Blair’s New Labour government and Britpop. Another big learning experience.
Co-founding silicon.com with Rob was an exciting period. It was a high profile UK dotcom start-up, with bluechip VC money, at a crazy time where a bunch of 30-year-olds could take on the world. Perhaps the biggest disappointment was turning down a very large offer to exit that business just before the dotcom crash. In the end, I took over from Rob as CEO, and successfully sold the business to CNET Networks, where I ran their European business for a while.
Meeting Richard Lenane at Exponent private equity in 2007 was definitely a ‘sliding doors’ moment. He asked me to work on Exponent’s ultimately failed bid for EMAP’s consumer magazines. It was super exciting being in the deal bunker on a £800m bid – a real eye opener. It was disappointing when we lost out to Bauer, of course, but that paved the way for the successful acquisition of BBC Magazines, which enabled the creation of Immediate.
What were the challenges in putting together Immediate Media?
It was merging three companies (including BBC Magazines) and building a business powered by strong heritage brands and talented people. The BBC has always had a powerful culture around public service and, for many, we must have seemed like “The Barbarians at the Gate!” To the BBC team, we were an unknown quantity. There were definitely some negative perceptions around private equity and how we’d run the business: Was the legendary Radio Times in safe hands? Was there a long term strategy? Was there a commitment to quality? How would we treat people?
We set out a strategy which required careful planning, migrating from the old organisations, building tech platforms with new infrastructure and systems. We invested a huge amount of energy and commitment into winning hearts as well as minds. It was about winning trust from the staff and creating an emotional connection between them and the new Immediate Media. We had a clear vision for the kind of people and skills we wanted. Of the 750 people we inherited, 300 left within 18 months and we hired 200 new people.
What was it like managing a private equity-owned business?
Private equity is focused on delivering great returns to investors, and it’s a results business. You need be prepared to move at great pace, execute against investment strategies – and deliver your plan. It’s clearly about increasing the value of the business by building profits and improving the quality of earnings, in order to get a higher price for the business when it is sold. We managed to do that successfully.
It can be lucrative, if you engineer a successful exit, and if you are allied to the right partner. My experience with Exponent was extremely positive. But it wasn’t easy to begin with. In 2010, private equity firms tended to de-risk investments by looking for very established CEO’s with a track record of managing much bigger businesses. So younger managers often didn’t fit the profile, and it took a while for me to build real trust with them. These days, digital transformation frequently dictates the need for younger managers with modern skills.
In my case, it helped that Immediate Media got off to a flier, and we managed to refinance the business in 18 months, allowing Exponent to get their investment back quickly, so it was all upside from there – which, of course, was helpful. Private equity is a high intensity, high calibre, high challenge environment, and you get to work with some brilliant investors, and great brains. It was demanding but a lot of fun.
What changed when Immediate was acquired by Burda in 2016?
We had expected that the buyer of the business would be another private equity firm but Hubert Burda Media made a decisive move.
We really liked the Burda philosophy, which is a highly decentralised home for entrepreneurs who are encouraged to feel like owners, and are trusted to develop their businesses, while having access to the global network of wholly-owned and early-stage media / tech investments in the portfolio. In fact (dare I say it) we probably had a little too much freedom in the early days, and perhaps we needed a bit more challenge, although that came in time. It’s been a good fit. Our key leadership and most of our people are still with the company five years later.
What’s so special about Immediate Media?
I guess one of the things we are known for is our approach to culture, that it’s a great place to work, that we retain our talent, that we’re pretty good at what we do, and we have a purpose and a mission that matters to people. And we focus on creating great products. We were delighted that we recently came 4th in the Glassdoor “Best places to Work in the UK”.
Immediate has a clear purpose: To create more happiness each day by helping everyone do what they love.
Our strategy of building truly multi-platform businesses in special interest markets, developing world class content and services with a variety of business models is delivering. We just had our biggest year ever in 2021.
What is your primary role in the business? What are you best at?
I am now Executive Chair of Immediate, having stepped into that role from Group CEO when I took over Burda International. We have divisional CEOs and I stay out of the day-to-day, and focus on group strategy, investment and culture. Immediate is the biggest part of Burda International, and I spend about 50% of my time on it now.
What am I best at? I think my team would say I’m good at seeing the bigger picture and developing strategy. I tend to be restless, which must be super annoying, and so I push quite hard to get better (sometimes I need to stop and recognise when we’ve hit a milestone). I really enjoy building teams, and culture, working with great people who are talented and challenge me and who share my broad values and want to continue to learn and grow.
What (if any) will be the role of print in your business in, say, five years? What’s your vision for Immediate in 2027?
We have a major focus on digital growth and a number of our scaled businesses are digital first. But I’m pretty sure print will remain an important part of the Immediate mix, even in 2027. Will it be a smaller contributor to profits? Almost certainly. But people have been writing off print prematurely for decades. I would say that the important thing is you have to be #1 in your space; no longer can you make good profits as #2 or #3.
There is also a big change in the revenue mix towards circulation, and within that, a major shift to subscriptions in the UK. Immediate currently has over 1m print subscribers (an all-time high) and approaching 200k digital subs, while print advertising has always been a small share of revenue for us. There are signs that investors are re-rating subscription-based print businesses which have strong cash generation. Dennis Publishing and New Scientist – both print subs based businesses – changed hands in 2021 for c15x ebitda multiples, which looks very much like digital multiples.
The UK newsstand has its challenges. But, even there, you can be successful. For example, our Youth & Children’s division – exclusively on the newsstand – has just posted record profits in 2021.
There is a point here about being customer centric: there are millions of slightly older customers who continue to want print, or a print / digital bundle. In a truly multi-platform strategy, it would be strategic madness not to recognise that, and give it to them, alongside digital, events, audio, and video. Our latest ABC figures will show our print portfolio growing at c5% year-on-year – similar to the previous year.
You have managed media companies for corporates, for private equity, and for yourself. Do different types of ownership affect the way you manage, or feel about your job?
For me, the key is to feel ownership, and to have the right level of autonomy. Although I like to be running the business and to have the right level of control, I have never felt I had to own the company. And, when I think about different ownership structures, the emotion is sometimes counter-intuitive. I often felt much less control as a part-owner of a VC-backed business, in terms of the politics and the minority controls, than I did in the private equity environment where I was a very small shareholder.
Burda has been very sympathetic to the way that we have managed Immediate. Martin Weiss, who did the deal and is now Group CEO of Burda, knew that our leadership team needed to feel a continued sense of ownership.
What is the best lesson you have learned?
I’ve learned that leaders have to accept they are important role models. Like it or not, culture comes from the top.
As CEO, you are always being watched, observed and people are making a judgement, either positive or negative. The best description I heard on this subject was from the former BBC chief Greg Dyke, soon after the mass walk-out when he had been effectively sacked by the UK government in 2004. I remember thinking he must have had a big impact as a leader for his people to respond in that way.
When I asked Dyke himself about it, he talked about a ‘virtual scorebook’ kept by organisations on their CEOs. In every situation, he said, people will observe and then tell a story about you, either positive or negative. If you have more positives then negatives, then you can take your organisation with you; if your net score is negative, you can’t.
One of the most powerful development models I’ve used is called Johari Window and it’s about understanding yourself and being open with other people about who you are and where you’re vulnerable. It’s one of life’s great counter-intuitive lessons – the more open and vulnerable you make yourself, the more permission you have to build trust. It’s a great way to coach people and to create psychological safety.
Which company do you most admire?
I tend to admire companies whose leaders who focus on authenticity and empathy. A few on my radar at the moment would be Satya Nadella, at Microsoft for the incredible turnround after Steve Ballmer. He has a very interesting back story about his children and how he learnt empathy. Tim Cook at Apple: no one gave him a chance but just look at the results. I also like the way Jeremy Darroch led Europe’s Sky TV prior to its acquisition by Comcast, with a real focus on building EQ across the business. And, for the comedy, Logan Roy from Waystar Royco (in TV’s Succession).
