The Global Media Weekly for executives and entrepreneurs

How I do it: Chris Ferrell, Endeavor Business Media

Chris Ferrell is CEO and co-founder of the five-year-old Endeavor Business Media (EBM), based in Nashville, US. He had previously been CEO of SouthComm Business Media for 10 years. He acquired his former employer’s B2B magazines for EBM, formed with the Nashville-based Resolute Capital. That was in 2017. The following year, it acquired seven other companies, including Penwell energy publications, divested by trade show organiser Clarion for an estimated $30m. In 2019, it bought 20 B2B magazines from Informa Plc for almost $60m.

In the last four years, EBM has acquired no fewer than 22 B2B publishing companies including nine so far this year. It has paid some 2-5 x EBITDA for these companies including 86 print magazines. It is expected have $150m of revenue this year – up from $125m in 2021. An estimated 75% of this revenue is accounted by the 40 brands acquired from SouthComm, Clarion and Informa, including: Industry Week, Electronic Design, Buildings, T&D World, Oil & Gas Journal, Firehouse, and Motor Age. About 50% of the EBM revenue comes from digital, 35% from print, and 15% from events. With an estimated 2022 run-rate of some $175m, revenue may exceed $200m next year, with an EBITDA margin of 20%. Even before any further acquisitions, EBM is, therefore, set to make 2023 profit of at least $40m – a 3x multiple for the estimated $125m of debt-funded investment.

It now employs more than 700 people in 12 markets, although the portfolio is heavily concentrated on four sectors: manufacturing, industrial technology, transportation and building. Ferrell’s launch goal for EBM had been to achieve $100m in revenue. When that was achieved after just a few years, he said he was now targeting $100m in EBITDA.

“Our team has become good at acquisitions”

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

I came to Nashville to attend graduate school at Vanderbilt in order to be a college professor, but I never finished my PhD (in Psychology). I stopped pursuing graduate school after I was elected to city council and started a family. I needed a profession and created a career path, first doing internet marketing and later in media.  

What was your first job in media? 

My first media job was with CitySearch in 1997.  I responded to a classified ad in the newspaper. My job largely consisted of explaining to people what the internet was and why their company needed a website.  I have often joked that I’m the only person to go from digital to print. My second job in media was as publisher of the Nashville Scene, an alt-weekly owned by Village Voice at the time. The former publisher sold the paper to Village Voice. He called me and suggested that I apply for his job. He said I knew Nashville and could learn publishing faster than someone who knew publishing could learn Nashville. I loved that paper and what it meant to the city.  That’s when I got hooked on media. 

What were the milestones of your 10 years at SouthComm? 

At one point, SouthComm was the second largest publisher of alt-weeklies in the US, but that business model was increasingly coming under pressure from declining classified revenue. We built a very dynamic event business around those brands, but it wasn’t enough to offset the decline in print revenue. In 2014, as I attempted to pivot that business, we purchased part of Cygnus Business Media and I discover that B2B was all the same skills as niche consumer media, but a much better business. 

How did Endeavor Business Media come about? 

By 2017 I was trying to pivot SouthComm to becoming a pure B2B media company, but some of our investors were ready to cash out and wanted us to sell the assets. With a core team of colleagues from SouthComm and the backing of a few of our investors in that company, we started Endeavor in December 2017 and did our first acquisition a month later. We very quickly had term sheets for additional funding from one of our lenders at SouthComm as well as Resolute Capital Partners, a Nashville-based debt and equity fund. We selected Resolute as our partner and were able to buy the B2B side of SouthComm a few months later.  

In terms of strategy, our observation at the time was that the large US-based aggregators had been rolled up either into Informa or into one of the large event companies. We knew the B2B industry was still very fragmented and that if we could build the infrastructure to support a platform that there would be media assets available to acquire for the foreseeable future.  

We wanted to be diversified without being scattershot. We identified industries where we thought we could build a critical mass of titles that could result in us becoming that industry’s leading source of information.  We also were committed to offering a full range of marketing tactics to our clients so that whatever their marketing goals were, we could be their partner in achieving them. It has worked out well so far. The diversification strategy provides a hedge against downturns and also gives us lots of opportunities to continue growing both organically and through acquisitions.   

What’s special about Endeavor? 

When covid hit, we were still a very young company, just over two years old. Even though we talked a lot about culture up to that point, in many ways we were still a collection of disparate assets. But the silver lining of navigating that challenging year is that it really helped forge a company culture that I think is fairly unique. There is a culture of teamwork and accountability, but also of innovation. A majority of our 715 employees joined us from previous acquisitions, but there is a real sense that we are building an industry leading company together.  

What have been your learnings from the many acquisitions you have made?

Acquiring and integrating businesses is a skillset that a company develops and needs to build processes around. After 22 transactions, I think our team has gotten quite good at it.  We have an acquisition playbook that we regularly evaluate and update.  After we close an acquisition, we rapidly integrate all the systems and processes so that everyone is operating on the same technology in the same way.  

Successful small companies by necessity have competent generalists who are often serving in multiple roles that in a larger company are filled by different specialists. We try to find a spot in one of our departments that both fills our need and fits the aptitude of new people joining us.  I think overall we have been pretty good at finding a home for most people. The flip side of that coin is that we have specialists who can help with parts of a business that didn’t have that expertise in house previously. For example, a new acquisition that was primarily a media company with a small event component will discover we have both event operations and event marketing teams that can help them grow the event. Or a company that previously had limited resources to run webinars, or do research, or provide lead gen programs will discover that we have teams of experts who can help with each of those products.  

Has the pandemic permanently changed your business? 

We had a one-third remote workforce before Covid.  Now we are two thirds remote. I don’t really see us going back.  We hire talent wherever they happen to be and fully integrate them into the company.  

What is your own primary role in the company? 

All of our departments are run by people who are better at their jobs than I would be at their jobs. So really, I’m not all that necessary to the day-to-day functioning of the company. I get to focus on company culture, decisions about resource allocation, and looking down the road to where we are going.  

What are the best lessons you have learned?

Every company has a culture. It is far better to be intentional about it than to let culture just happen.  

  • Transparency goes a long way with stakeholders. 
  • Innovation requires giving people room to make mistakes.  
  • Recognize team members for success, take personal responsibility for any failures. 
  • You only get to move forward.  There is no rewind button in life.    

Which other companies do you most admire?  

I’m a big fan of what Sean Griffey has been able to do with Industry Dive. They developed a great model and built a strong team focused on executing. Our own business model is more like Informa’s in that we are diversified not just across industries but also across a range of products. So I watch Informa’s moves pretty closely.