In-Depth: The bard of B,T&D

Multimillionaire publishing maverick Felix Dennis shocked many when he was revealed as the driving force behind the resurrection of Butler and Tanner. In his first interview with a printing magazine, Dennis explains the motives behind creating Butler, Tanner & Dennis.

I guess we should start with the big question – why did you decide to get involved with Butler and Tanner?

Felix Dennis: I’ve been collecting books all my life and I own tens of thousands of them. I’d been seeing ‘Printed by Butler and Tanner, Frome and London’ since I was a boy and so, quite obviously, there was already quite a degree of affection for the company because I’m a book collector. And it did seem to me to be a very sad state of affairs that Britain’s only remaining high-end colour book printer should vanish.

The talent base in Frome would have been lost forever. It’s a town with printing in its blood, in its DNA, which has been printing books for 157 years. It seemed crazy that such talent should be dissipated.

But we didn’t do it for sentiment. No one does business for sentiment if they’re sensible. I do think they have a chance, I honestly do. They have a good management team in place, they have got a superb workforce and I think everybody that could have helped, has helped.

People must have thought I had completely taken leave of my senses when buying Butler and Tanner – I would imagine so anyway. But if the company ever fails again, it will not be for the want of trying.

That’s good to hear. How did the deal come about?

I heard about their troubles when we called them up to print Homeless in My Heart. They had printed a poetry book a year before for us, Island of Dreams, and they did a fabulous job, a beautiful job, and I wanted them to do my new one.

Fortunately, the person who looks after my book production, Caroline, had the B&T sales director’s mobile number and got through to him. He said: ‘We’re all locked out of the factory, we can’t print any books for you.’ We thought, what a pain. When she told me this, I went on the internet, including onto printweek.com, to familiarise myself with what was happening there, and then Caroline began getting more calls from the managers trying to effect a management buyout and I agreed to talk with them. It was a gradual process, a bit like wooing a woman really.

There’s a lot of controversy surrounding companies being bought out of administration in the print industry. Was this the only route open to you?

If you’re asking me if I would have bought Butler and Tanner before it went into the hands of the receivers, the answer is decidedly ‘no’. For a number of reasons, not least the issues with the pension fund, which had become the company’s main focus.

Then, I think, there were issues of investment and management. There were issues of redundancy payments. The whole business was so complex. It had become vitriolic with everyone blaming everybody else. It wasn’t a business that anyone would have invested in as a going concern.


Did you look at the company last summer or earlier this year, then, before it went into administration for the first and second times?

No, I did not. I’m re-engineering the past. Even if I had looked, I would certainly not have gone there. In a sense, the worst had to happen for the chance of a new start. Often people that run companies inherit problems that turn out to be insurmountable, so I don’t want to spend time apportioning blame.

So moving on, what’s your involvement with Butler, Tanner & Dennis on a day-to-day level?
I don’t run any of my companies. I ceased being a managing director in April 1983 and remember walking out of my office, which was in Rathbone Place at the time, and thinking ‘that was an interesting few years’. But I haven’t run a company since and I don’t run Butler, Tanner & Dennis, it is run by Kevin Sarney and his colleagues.

But clearly you’ve already spent a lot of money on the company, so you surely have some involvement?
Yes, we’ve spent money, and I laugh hoarsely when I see ‘Felix Dennis bought the company for half a million’. My dear, that’s what it costs to get into the nightclub – it’s buying the drinks that really knocks the stuffing out of you.

Even at my very first board meeting, the management started to do what all printers do: they started talking about new machinery. To some degree, you have to invest in new machinery as you’re always playing catch-up with the 21st Century and, yes, I agree and the binding line’s done. When will we purchase our next piece of machinery? I don’t know. I know [the management] would like to do it next week and I don’t think I will be agreeing to it for a few months. We have to get a few months of trading under our belts first and we need to be satisfying our customers – really satisfying our customers – which is the name of the game in the end.

We [Dennis and his financial director Ian Leggett] are print novices, you know. Fortunately the management team at Butler, Tanner & Dennis are not novices at all and neither are some of the grey wise heads there. We’re very good with money and cost control. We’re good at revisiting budgets, re-forecasting constantly, keeping a very, very close eye on expenditure and income. But we rely entirely on the Butler, Tanner & Dennis management team for the running of the business and I will not be interfering with it at all. I don’t do it with any of the other companies I own and won’t be interfering there either

What are your long-term goals for the company?
Do I think I will own Butler, Tanner & Dennis forever? I haven’t got a clue. I don’t know what the future will bring, I truly don’t. I’ll be delighted if the company can get back on its feet and start making a profit. One promise I have made to the management and the workforce is that there will be no repetition of secrecy and lack of transparency. Everyone that works at Butler, Tanner & Dennis, whether they want to know or not, is going to know how we’re doing. Now, I’m not trying to burden them – the management is supposed to carry that load – but on the other hand, I would rather the staff were slightly burdened than kept in the dark. I think there will be troughs as well as some peaks and it’s important that everyone knows where we stand.

We are up against the most appalling financial circumstances and there are a lot of other companies in the world that will print books. Obviously, from an environmental point of view, we think that UK publishers should print all their books with Butler, Tanner & Dennis to avoid these millions of book miles on container ships and we are hoping to persuade many authors, many famous authors, to ask their publishers to print books aimed at the UK and Europe at Butler, Tanner & Dennis rather than in Asia or far-flung corners of Europe.

Saying that, as far as the environment is concerned, all of us are hypocrites. If we got an enormous order from a West Coast publisher in the US, I can absolutely assure you we would fulfil that order and shove those books onto container ships. The UK and Europe are a big markets for books and I do think that we have that going in our favour.

Will you try to instil some of your environmental views at Butler, Tanner & Dennis? [One of Dennis’s personal projects is to create a massive native forest, The Forest of Dennis, in Warwickshire.]
Yes, I do think we can do that. I am always very careful to explain to people that don’t know anything about trees, the idiocy of shouting and screaming about the waste of printing ink on paper. If you went to Canada or Finland to see the way the trees are planted to manufacture pulp for paper, you would realise that it is a crop.

They have 12-, 15-, 20-year felling cycles, then they’re replanted. That’s why they’re some of the best-managed forests in the world. And of course, if those trees weren’t going to be used for paper, they wouldn’t have been planted and they wouldn’t be sitting there, millions and millions and millions of them with their woolly little heads for 15 years.

In fact, if we want to see more trees planted, we need to read more books, newspapers and magazines. But people get confused, they think we’re chopping down old oak trees to make wood pulp and it’s difficult sometimes to explain to people that we don’t chop down broadleaf trees to make paper.

Coming from a publishing background, you must have an understanding of the print industry?
I know nothing about the print industry except that I’ve been negotiating with them on the other side all my life. I’ve spent many years of my early working life very happily going around printers all over Britain. Actually in those days I was a very long-haired young man with loon pants and snakeskin boots and there I was climbing up these ladders on to the very first coldset web-offset machines, then on the first heatset, actually pouring ink into the troughs mixing inks, two colours one at each end of the trough, things you would never be allowed to do today.

It is easy to be beguiled by machinery and craft but I think there is a future for this company, although I think it will be very difficult. The recent collapse in financial confidence and this new recession we’re moving into hasn’t helped.

However, fortune favours the brave and from Butler, Tanner & Dennis’s point of view, the pound dropping like a stone against the dollar is like manna from Heaven.

Do you have any regrets about becoming involved with Butler and Tanner?
No question at all. We started with 80 people and that was our biggest regret: that we could only employ 80. I think we’re up to 90 now, but we’ve got to be careful not to grow too quickly if we’re to remain sustainable. It is our intention, of course, and our wish to bring the company back to a position where there will be 100, or even 200 people working back at Butler, Tanner & Dennis. But we must go very slowly and it must be desperately disappointing to the people that we can’t re-employ.

What has been the general response to the new company?
There was residue of goodwill – which I hadn’t quite realised would be there, but which I should have guessed because it is the same as my own – that came from Butler and Tanner’s relationship with its customers: the book publishers and companies for whom it prints its annual reports and fancy brochures. I was frankly astonished how many of them phoned up to say they would do everything they could to support the company. And, to be truthful, most of them have and that is very, very gratifying indeed.

And most of all, from the existing management and workforce, who made it abundantly clear that they were prepared to work until they dropped to try to assist in this rebirth and when we realised this, even though the negotiations were fraught and very difficult, I think it was at that point that there was actually a chance of kicking this off again.

Obviously, we did not expect the suppliers to be as magnanimous as many of them have now been burnt twice. I know what that is like and I know we will have to work hard for a very long time to prove ourselves to our suppliers – or at least Kevin and his team will have to work hard to prove themselves to the suppliers. But at least the company has a chance.

One final question: Clearly it’s difficult to predict the future for just one company, but based on your knowledge of e-zines, for example [Dennis publishing launched Monkey, one of the first true online-only rich-content e-zines] do you think print will be around for another 100 years?
Do I think ink on paper will survive? Yes, I think in certain categories for certain audiences for certain products. Ink on paper has a very bright future. For others, I think the content will migrate to the electronic sea.

But, I’ll give you two very swift examples in the magazine field. In books, I think it’s obvious that people will continue to read books. Many people love books, they love the portability, the tactile feel, the fact they don’t need a battery to replace them. I think books stand a very good chance of continuing for a very considerable period of time.

With magazines, I think if you take two completely different magazines, Vogue and The Week, I think both of those will survive because one, with ladies looking at frocks and accessories, nothing can beat looking at a fantastic photograph or a double-page spread printed in Vogue – it’s unbeatable. The web can’t touch it.

For The Week, it’s so convenient, roaming round the tube or on a plane. It so suits our readership to get through it – it’s a very short magazine, only 35 editorial pages every week. I think that will survive. Do I think many other types of magazines will be as lucky? I’m not so certain. I think that they will migrate to the web.

Dennis’s latest book of poetry, Homeless in my Heart, is available from Amazon.com

..................................................................................

CV Felix dennis

1947 Born in Kingston Upon Thames

1973 Founded his own magazine publishing house

1987 Co-founded Micro Warehouse

November 2002 First collection of poetry, A Glass Half Full, published

October 2003 Appeared with the Royal Shakespeare Company, reading from his work at the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

June 2007 Sold his US magazine operation

July 2008 Butler and Tanner rebranded Butler, Tanner & Dennis following last-minute bid backed by Dennis. The Frome-based printer reopened for business, employing 80 staff, the following month

2 October 2008 Fifth poetry book Homeless in my Heart launched

23 October 2008 Performed in Frome in front of 160 employees of B,T& D and their families as part of his poetry tour, ‘Did I Mention the Free Wine?’