The Global Media Weekly for executives and entrepreneurs

How I do it: Charlie Kerr, With Intelligence

Charlie Kerr is CEO and founder of With Intelligence, the private equity-owned, B2B information and events provider in international financial services. The company, which claims more than 3,000 institutional clients including 94 of the world’s 100 largest asset managers, was founded in London 25 years ago as Pageant Media. Its secret sauce is its membership programme under which financial professionals pay up to 10k per year in order to receive news, information and data, and attend invitation-only events. The company was acquired in 2020 by Intermediate Capital Group (ICG) for an estimated £140m (25 x EBITDA).

Kerr had left school without qualifications at 16. It’s an even more surprising self-made story because he is the son and heir of a hereditary Lord (yes) and attended a swanky British boarding school. But he really did build his business career the hard way, selling classified ads for regional newspapers and low-value magazines for a decade before deciding to go it alone.

He and schoolfriend Seb Timpson bootstrapped Pageant with maxed-out credit cards. Their first B2B magazines were Offshore World (failed) and E-Gaming Review (which it still publishes). At the start, it was a classic 20th century B2B publisher of free magazines funded by advertising, but Kerr saw the light. The 2008 banking crisis gifted him experienced, jobless recruits as he shifted his telephone sales teams over from selling low-value advertising to high-value subscriptions, which now account for some 65% of the company’s revenue.

The company offers proprietary data, “actionable insights”, and events across a range of financial sectors. Its major brands include: AltCRedit (for credit professionals), Fund Directions (fund directors and trustees), HFM (hedge funds), Falk Marques (private equity), and Pension Bridge (institutional investors).

In the 12 months ended 28 February 2021, With Intelligence had £10.2m EBITDA (2020: £9.2m) on revenue of £31.1m (£27.6m), despite the loss of live events during the pandemic. Subscriptions revenue was 22% up. More significant than the continuing growth (not least through acquisitions) has been the expansion of US operations which, in 2020-21 accounted for 57% of all revenue; the UK was 22%. Just six years earlier, the then Pageant Media had £8.7m of revenue and employed fewer than 90 people (more than 300 in 2022).

What were your earliest career ambitions and what happened to them?

At school I was very unacademic but quite entrepreneurial. In fact, I started a number of businesses while still a student. Some of those I started with Seb Timpson, with whom I went on to found Pageant Media. I wanted to be successful. I didn’t really know what ‘successful’ meant but, having been pretty terrible academically, I wanted to be successful.

What was your first job in media and what did you learn from it?

After I left school – which I did prematurely – I ended up working as a British Telecom phone service operator in Crawley, Sussex. Having left a smarty-pants boarding school and suddenly arriving to work with a hundred working class, middle aged women, it was the best finishing school ever. It really taught me a lot of what it was like to be in a working environment – getting to places on time and actually knuckling down and doing what you’re supposed to do.

Having done eight months at the telephone exchange, I responded to an ad in the London Evening Standard for a trainee sales negotiator, paying £12,000 a year. It said, ‘good voice required’, and I thought, if nothing else, my school had given me a decent voice. So I responded. It was in Mortimer Street, in Central London, and the job was selling product cards.

What I learned from that experience was, first of all, that product cards are pretty rubbish to sell. But, more importantly, that when you’re selling something – advertising or whatever – you need to differentiate your pitch. It’s not necessarily about having a better pitch. It just has to be differentiated. With everything I’ve gone on to create, I’ve tried to make sure it has a differentiated approach.

How, when and why did you launch Pageant Media?

I started Pageant because I was pretty much unemployable. I always knew I was going to have a business. After a couple of false starts, we started Pageant Media in February 1998 with a magazine called Offshore World focused on offshore financial centres. It was a subscription product coupled with special reports that were ads-funded. Seb and I got on a plane to the Bahamas and sold £40,000 of advertising. Fortunately, a couple of ads were pre-paid and we managed to get the cash to publish the first report. From that moment on, we were profitable. 

We were hand-to-mouth for a very long time, and really the first five years was us running a small business. It could have been any kind of business. We learned how to meet the payroll; we learned how to give our customers what we said we were going to give them. Then we brought on our first non-executive chairman, a chap called Richard Flaye, who was very instrumental in helping us become a small B2B publisher. That’s when we got into events and really started to build the business.

What was your vision for the company and how far has it fulfilled your early plans?

The vision was to be ‘successful’, whatever that meant. And the vision has evolved over time. The vision now is to take a B2B publishing business and transform it into a data and information provider that looks a lot more like a tech business than a publishing business. We’re executing that well, which is really exciting. The success of that has been that our products are now used not so much as news products but as data and insight products. If there’s a disappointment, it’s that it’s taken 24 years for us to work this out. So rather than material disappointments, it’s more around speed.

The strategic side of our business really accelerated in 2016 when we took on Graham Elton as our second chairman. What he brings is extraordinary strategic insight and know-how that we’ve coupled with real entrepreneurial horsepower. I think that’s made us a very potent business. 

Why did you re-brand and how did you come up with “With Intelligence”?

We rebranded because we brought all of our publishing products together onto one platform and coupled them with our data to give the customer a “data and insights” product – as opposed to just a news product.

We hired a brilliant consultancy called Brand and Become to help with the rebranding. The way we got to “With Intelligence” was through the idea of bringing some kind of human element to data. When you look at AI, it really does require human insight to improve it. What we’re able to do is use great technology to automate the collection of data and we’re able to enrich that with a humanness. It’s this kind of collaborative spirit that “With” is all about. It’s also about us transforming ourselves – a part of our company’s DNA is to continually develop and challenge ourselves to become a lot more important to our customers, to get into their workflow.

What’s so special about your company?

The culture is really important. These days, culture is a big differentiator. I want ours to be a business of opportunity. And, perhaps because I was poor academically, we look less at CVs for degrees and where people came from. We really look for people who have fire in their belly and have a real desire to be successful. The culture is exciting. We hire a lot of young people. It’s a very fast culture, and it’s not for everybody. But when it works, it works really well.

Successes over the last two to three years include the rebranding and the transformation of the business from a news provider to a data and insights business. We’ve been successful at building a product that’s used as a data product which creates much more value for the customer and significantly better yields. Hiring people, such as Stephen Lovell, our Chief Product & Technology Officer, has accelerated that. Being private equity-backed gives you a confidence and a sheen that allows you to attract really terrific talent. 

I was really surprised that – when Covid hit – we were able to grow our events business. I was also surprised by the resilience, not just of our business but other businesses, in terms of the way in which we adapted and the speed with which that happened. 

How have things changed since you sold a majority of the company to private equity?

There’s a real spirit of collaboration with ICG. Because we had Graham as our chairman prior to the deal we operated quite similarly to a PE-backed business. We always felt that we were accountable to the board. What’s changed is PE gives you access to a network of people and it gives you a confidence to invest. We don’t need any help having a desire to grow because we are a growth business. There are just more resources to do that now.

What is your primary role in the business?

My primary role is thinking about what our customers need, how to give it to them, and how to get paid for it. That’s what I’m best at: being creative at working out the customer need and how to solve that need – and trying to understand how we can do things in an innovative manner and do it to scale.

I enjoy talking to customers; I enjoy the challenge of working out how best to give them what they need. I also enjoy M&A. And I enjoy working with teams that teach me new things all the time. I’m definitely not a detail-orientated, get-the-trains-running-on-time kind of manager. For that, we have a fantastic CFO, Phil O’Toole, who operates much more like a COO.

What about your company makes you feel most proud?

I think it’s the opportunity that we give people. I’m big on opportunity. It makes me proud that people come into this business and achieve great things – and maybe we’re giving opportunities to people that they wouldn’t have had in a more corporate environment.

Which other business information companies do you most admire?

I look at businesses like Argus Media and Wood Mackenzie. Both have gone through transformations to become mission-critical, versatile workflow tools.

What is the best lesson you have learned in your business career? What advice do you give to aspiring entrepreneurs?

I think the best lesson that I’ve learned is you just have to keep going, don’t take things personally, and hold true to your vision. My advice for aspiring entrepreneurs is to be in love with your business, not your product because you’ve really got to think of your business as a platform from which products can be developed. If you get too excited about an individual product you can become blind. And you have to be thinking about scale. It’s great to have a fantastic idea but if it’s not scaleable you’re going to have trouble making it successful.

It’s really important as an entrepreneur to always want to improve: if you are the worst but you improve everyday you will become the best – if they are not improving. It’s just a matter of time. You always have to be learning. And what’s great about the environment we’re in at the moment is that there’s so much change. If you’re learning, you can harness really great talent and you can transform businesses.

With Intelligence