The Sunday Times April 3, 2022 7
BUSINESS
streamers?” asks one executive. Another
questions whether consumers will really
pay £19 a month for membership. “That’s
ten times a print-only subscription and
more expensive than Netflix with all it
offers,” he points out.
Lynch concedes the transformation “is
a big retooling” but dismisses the criti-
cism of the new global magazines. “Our
audiences are looking for good content
all over the world, just as they seek out
the best dramas on Netflix. There are no
borders to content anymore. We need to
reorganise around that.”
As for spreading the firm too thin,
Condé Nast is merely diversifying in the
same way that most successful modern
firms do. “Take Microsoft,” Lynch says.
“They’re a leader in gaming with the
Xbox. They also have a massive cloud
business with Azure, as well as a software
business. Look at Amazon. They have
their own direct retailing business, cloud
services with AWS, their third party
stores and a media business, Prime
Video, that is growing nicely.”
What about those pricey member-
ships? Readers will stump up because
they “value the experiences and oppor-
tunities to interact with our editorial
teams,” he insists.
Lynch’s new model sounds a far cry
from classic nose-to-the-ground journal-
ism that made the likes of Vanity Fair an
agenda-setting title. Is Condé Nast now
more of an entertainment company, I
ask. “No. We’re a journalism house first.
What we do in digital, in our video busi-
ness, starts with our journalism.”
In that case, what does he say to theThe chief
executive of
Condé Nast says,
thanks to strong
digital growth,
the firm made its
first profit in
years last year —
but will not put a
figure on itI’m not
good at
statusquo.
I getbored
Sophie Eden was inspired by Sheryl Sandberg’s book to
combine parenthood with her digital recruitment start-upAfter becoming pregnant
with her first child just over a
year into starting Gordon &
Eden, an executive search
firm, Sophie Eden sought
advice from other female
entrepreneurs on how to
juggle her business and a
baby. “Within minutes they’d
emailed back telling me to
forget the mum guilt and to
get as much help and support
as I could — so that’s exactly
what I did,” said Eden, 36.
She also drew inspiration
from Lean In, the bookwritten by Facebook’s global
chief operating officer Sheryl
Sandberg, which Eden said
“genuinely made a real
impact” on her life. It helped
her realise that although
childcare was monstrously
expensive, it was worth the
cost to “keep going” with her
career and business.
Eden’s business and family
have both since flourished.
She and her husband, a
property surveyor, are now
parents to three young
children, and Gordon & Eden
reached turnover of
£3.1 million in 2021, making a
pre-tax profit of £1 million.
The entrepreneur said shegrowing recruitment firm,
and won a management role
in her early 20s while most of
her peers were in their 40s. “I
can’t count the number of
times I was mistaken as the
PA when I went to meetings... or asked to take notes or to
make a cup of tea.”
Instead, it drove her to do
better. “The thing I love about
the industry is it’s very
meritocratic — your numbers
speak for themselves.”
At La Fosse, Eden met Sam
Gordon, and they created La
Fosse’s executive search
division before leaving to
start their own firm, Gordon
& Eden, in February 2014. It
was a daunting move. “We
had successful careers and
mortgages to pay but we
wanted to build our own
brand because we felt there
was a gap in the market.”
I helped other people find jobs — and landed a career for myself
knew from a young age that
she wanted to work in a
“people-focused” industry.
Growing up in north London
as part of a Jewish family, “we
always had Friday night
dinners with my parents and
their friends — so talking to
people never fazed me. I
knew that needed to be part
of my day-to-day life.”
After reading politics at
Birmingham University, Eden
planned to pursue a career in
law, but was uninspired by
work experience placements
in the sector. Feeling “very
lost” she got a job in a
technology-focused
recruitment firm as a stop-
gap. “In my mind it was a
short-term thing... but on
my first day on the job I knew
it was the right place for me.”
After a year and a half, she
joined La Fosse Associates, aEden and Gordon, her
46-year-old co-founder, saw
there was unmet demand for
an agency that recruited
senior leaders in the digital
and technology space.
Traditionally, search firmshave been split by function,
explained Eden. “You’ve got a
CFO practice or a media
practice [but] the reality is
with digital it’s an ecosystem.
We might be calling someone
for [the role of ] CEO of ahealth tech business — but we
might be calling the same
candidate about a chief
digital officer role.”
Getting started with a
combined £50,000 of savings
meant Eden and Gordon
could afford a very small
office in Shoreditch — but it
put them right at the heart of
the action. “There were all
these incredible businesses
emerging in [London’s] Tech
City and none of the firms
that service them were here,
which seemed crazy to us.
The serendipity of going for
lunch or a coffee and
bumping into clients and
candidates was amazing.”
Getting off the starting
blocks was made harder by a
non-compete clause in their
previous employment
contracts. It forced them to
be entrepreneurial. “We tookon a number of searches that
had been failed by other firms
two or three times and every
single time we delivered.”
Since then, Gordon & Eden
has grown to a team of ten
and hired senior leaders for
M&S, Monzo, Ovo Energy and
GlaxoSmithKline. In the early
days of the pandemic it also
helped the NHS recruit
someone to lead the digital
response to Covid. “We were
the only firm they spoke to...
they hired our candidate.”
Eden, who owns the
business equally with
Gordon, said that some of her
best decisions had been in
her choice of partner — both
at home and at work. Of
Gordon, she said she feels
“very fortunate” to have met
him. “It’s rare that you meet
someone where you just see
the world in the same way.”HOW I MADE IT
SOPHIE EDEN CO-FOUNDER, GORDON & EDENHannah Prevett
Deputy Editor, Times
Enterprise Networkhundreds of journalists who have left the
company, voluntarily or not, in the past
two years? “They’re some of the most tal-
ented people in the world who built
incredibly valuable publications — I have
nothing but respect.” But he adds: “I
think it would have been difficult for
them to adjust to the way that we want to
produce content.” So Wintour was right
to say they lacked modern thinking? “I
wouldn’t have said it that way.”
Lynch argues that the latest financials
prove the new strategy is working. Total
digital revenue, including digital sub-Tina
Brown
can takeshots —
but I get itExclusive films, events and podcasts, all for a £19
monthly fee — can ex-banker Roger Lynch rescue
the fabled publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair?
Why I had to
transform
Condé Nast
TOM STOCKILLscriptions, e-commerce and advertising,
grew 38 per cent last year to account for
more than half of overall revenue, he says
— but he won’t reveal the hard figures.
Overall print and digital subscriptions
were up 14 per cent last year. “We’re still
seeing print subscriptions grow, albeit
more slowly than digital subscriptions.”
Put it all together and the firm enjoyed
a double-digit percentage increase in rev-
enue last year compared with 2020 —
reaching, company insiders say, $2 bil-
lion. Lynch also claims the firm made its
first overall profit in years last year but,
again, won’t say what the figure was.
He insists the bloodletting over the
past two years was not designed to save
cash, but rather retool for the digital era.
“We ended 2021 with more employees
than we started the year with — around
6,000. We had to invest to grow digital
and e-commerce. We had to build a
whole new consumer revenue division
and invest in our video division.”T
he numbers and forecasts reveal a
precision that Lynch honed from
his earliest days in business. He
began his career at the Hughes Air-
craft Company in California, where
he researched military missile guidance
systems. After business school, he moved
into investment banking at Morgan Stan-
ley, working in New York, Silicon Valley
and London.
After a stint founding and running
media start-ups in London — Chello
broadband and Video Networks —
he moved back to the US to cre-
ate Sling TV, a slimmed-down
TV service for people ditching
expensive cable packages. “It
went from zero to a billion dollars
in annual revenue in 30 months.”
Next, he took the top job atTHE LIFE OF ROGER LYNCH
VITAL STATISTICS
Born: October 24, 1962
Status: married to Cathleen;
three children
School: Loyola Blakefield,
Baltimore
University: University of
Southern California
(physics); MBA at Tuck
School, Dartmouth College
First job: Mowing lawns in
Florida aged 10
Pay: Undisclosed
Homes: New York City and
Lake Arrowhead, California
Car: Jeep Wrangler
Favourite book: Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson
Film: The Year of Living
DangerouslyMusic: Sweet Child O’ Mine
by Guns N’ Roses. “I got to
play this with an awesome
band at our daughter’s
wedding.”
Gadget: Line 6 Helix electric
guitar effects processor
Charity: Little Kids Rock, that
“brings music education into
public schools in the US.”
Last holiday: skiing in Aspen
Watch: Rolex Datejust “with
a blue face”WORKING DAY
Roger Lynch gets up at 5am
and exercises before
breakfast in his home gym
“because if I don’t do it in the
morning, I don’t do it”. Afterthat, he schedules as many
meetings as he can
“because change on the
scale we’re doing it requires
a lot of communication —
and a lot of listening”. He
urges his senior executives
“to go find the things we got
wrong”.DOWNTIME
Lynch plays lead guitar in a
band with three other CEOs
called — inevitably — The
Merger. They play “mostly
covers” to raise money for
charities: more than
$7 million so far. “But we
work in some of our own
material too.”Guns N’ Roses,
Lynch’s LA alma
mater, a Rolex
Datejust and The
Year of Living
DangerouslyPandora Media, the US’s largest music
streaming service. It doubled its annual
revenue growth rate in 2018 and the
share price grew 68 per cent under his
leadership.
A year later he became the first out-
sider to run Condé Nast when its billion-
aire Newhouse family owners realised it
needed someone “steeped in dealing
with disruption. I’m very analytical but
what really excites me is disruption. I’m
not good at status quo. I get bored.”
Condé Nast’s improving finances are
tempting Lynch to indulge in a little M&A.
He reveals he considered buying The Ath-
letic, the digital sports publisher snapped
up by the New York Times. He’s filling the
gap by launching GQ Sports.
Lynch is also eyeing e-commerce out-
fits to boost digital income: he suggests a
holiday booking portal to bolt on to
Condé Nast Traveller, perhaps. He will
also consider “brands that meet our
high-quality journalism criteria, where
we can apply our new capabilities to cre-
ate more value”.
But there remains a nagging question:
is he too much of a suit — a numbers nerd
who loves flowcharts and diagrams — to
really “get” publishing and drive through
the change he seeks without killing the
firm’s creative lifeblood?
In her interview, Brown dismissed
Lynch as “the king of the reorganisation,
constantly coming up with new titles and
merging departments in the name of
‘global strategy’ because he has no
understanding of creativity”.
He turns steely. “Tina is an incredibly
talented editor but it’s been decades since
she’s worked in the business, in our com-
pany. The industry has changed. She
can sit from afar and take those shots.
Ask the people who know me. Ask our
editors whether they think I get it.”M
agazine magnates are
swashbucklers. Men and
women with big offices,
bigger egos and statement
hair — Tina Brown, Gray-
don Carter, Anna Win-
tour. With his smart white
shirt, plaid blazer and
neatly side-parted hair,
Roger Lynch, chief execu-
tive of Condé Nast, the world’s glossiest
magazine company, looks more like a
banker than a publisher. “I have a back-
ground in physics and an MBA, so I can do
the analytical stuff,” he says as he takes a
seat at a plain white table in his plain
white office in the firm’s London HQ.
It’s just as well he’s more strategist
than showman because he faces the knot-
tiest challenge. Condé Nast, which was
once a licence to print money and spend
it like there was no tomorrow, has been
bleeding so much red ink lately that ana-
lysts and media titans predict there may
be no tomorrow. “I hope I’m wrong but I
fear Condé Nast is going to go down like
the Titanic,” Tina Brown, former editor
of Condé Nast titles Tatler, Vanity Fair
and the New Yorker, said in an interview
with The Sunday Times last year.
The New York-based publisher has
been hit hard by the slump in print adver-
tising and has failed to create a thriving
subscription business or embrace digital.
The private firm does not publish
detailed financial reports, but analysts
estimate it has lost more than $100 mil-
lion (£76 million) a year in recent years.
Lynch has a bold turnaround plan.
He’s taking Condé Nast digital and global.
The dozens of fiercely independent
national versions of the firm’s magazines,
including its flagship, Vogue, have been
replaced by global editions. Their senior
editors, mostly in New York, will commis-
sion articles designed to attract readers
from New York to London to Sydney.
These stories will then be used as plat-
forms to create new assets with worldwide
appeal — films, events hosted by Condé
Nast editors, podcasts, e-commerce, sem-
inars and tickets to velvet-rope events,
such as the screening party for the Met
Gala fashion extravaganza in New York
that Condé Nast organises. These will be
bundled with a traditional magazine sub-
scription in a new “membership” offer
costing around £19 a month.
Lynch predicts that by 2027 a third of
the firm’s total revenue will come from its
video business, Condé Nast Entertain-
ment, with the other two thirds made up
of advertising and print and digital sub-
scriptions, plus income from events and
e-commerce. More than 100 projects,
including feature films based on Condé
Nast articles, are in development, he says.
He will invest 25 per cent more in content,
mainly video, over the next three years.
To drive through the move from print
house to multimedia digital hub, Lynch
has lured senior executives from Silicon
Valley and Los Angeles, notably Disney,
Google and Netflix, and from big events
outfits such as Bloomberg. “We have
almost as many people in our technology
team as we do creating content,” he says.
In London he is mulling a move out of
Vogue House, its inky UK HQ, into a more
modern, digitally-focused office.
The strategy is controversial, to put it
mildly. When the independent national
magazines were axed last year, dozens of
acclaimed editors — notably Dylan Jones
and almost his entire top team at indus-
try-leading British GQ — either quit or
were “exited”. Anna Wintour, Lynch’s
right-hand woman as global chief content
officer, suggested in a New York Times
interview that those leaving lacked “mod-
ern thinking”.
Critics retort that it is Lynch and Win-
tour who do not “get it”. Brown dis-
missed the idea of global magazines.
“Publishers have tried it before and it
always fails,” she said. “Magazines about
culture, in all its forms, work when they
are in tune with local audiences. If you try
to appeal to everyone in the world, you
end up so vanilla you appeal to no one.”
Condé Nast editors and writers who
have kept their jobs worry the firm is
spreading itself too thin. “We’re trying to
be a bit magazine publisher, a bit Netflix,
a bit Spotify, a bit Hollywood, a bit
e-tailer, a bit events business — and we’re
trying to do it all at once,” says one.
The firm faces stiff competition, in par-
ticular in video. “How can we succeed
against YouTube, not to mention all theINTERVIEW
JOHN
ARLIDGE