Profile: From pop writer to paper millionaire: Christopher Oakley

IN THE past few weeks Christopher Oakley, Midland Independent Newspapers' chief executive, has virtually lost control of his life.

Once a shaggy-haired, bearded pop columnist on the Yorkshire Evening Post, Oakley has been touring the country, his diary in the hands of his company's public relations advisers. In the old days, he might have called it gigging.

He has been visiting fund managers and institutional investors who might be interested in buying shares in the regional newspaper group he has managed to turn into an attractive investment.

Potential investors, used to the short-haired, clean-shaven faces that are the norm in the City, still see the beard - though the hair is rather tidier now.

In 1991, Oakley led a management buyout team to acquire the company from its financially pressed US owner, Ralph Ingersoll. Now, he says, it is time to repay some of the borrowings the company took on to fund the buyout and to raise new finance for expansion.

'We have reached a point in the company's development where we feel we need to put it on a new financial footing,' he says. 'Since the buyout, we have built up a solid track record and we have also made a number of acquisitions. We have reached a point where we need access to the public markets.'

After nearly 100 presentations, Oakley seems to have got his message across. Response to the offer has been enthusiastic, to say the least, with the shares subscribed seven times over.

'I thought he was remarkably impressive,' says Lorna Tilbian, an analyst at Warburg Securities. 'It shows that some good managers are born, not made at business school.' This weekend he is said to be taking a rest, in the company of his wife, who is also a journalist (and an author). She writes a column that is syndicated to a number of regional newspapers, including MIN.

By next weekend, Oakley will be what is commonly known as a 'paper millionaire'. The shares he bought in the newspaper group when he and five colleagues mounted the buyout in November 1991 will be worth around pounds 2m once the company has been floated on the stock market.

The fact that he is in this position surprises some who knew him in the early 1970s in Yorkshire. 'He was seen as a marginal figure in those days,' says a colleague who worked with him at the time, 'one of the last of the hippies with his long hair and shaggy beard.

'When he put in to be deputy editor of the Yorkshire Post, we nearly fell on the floor laughing - but he got the job.'

In those days, Oakley did not just write about pop music - he ran a concert promotions business that staged concerts for bands such as 10cc. It appears that a prescient management chose Oakley as an unlikely star and, despite being a quiet personality, his leadership qualities have rarely been in doubt since.

His first editorship came in Preston, on the Lancashire Evening Post, before he moved on to Liverpool and made his reputation. He edited the Liverpool Echo during the years when Derek Hatton headed the council and the city faced enormous social problems during a period of economic decline.

His paper highlighted Militant's activities and gained awards, local praise and commercial rewards for doing so. Oakley, during his time in Liverpool, gained a fine reputation for taking on issues of importance to the community he served. 'I think the Echo, though a popular newspaper, was part of the cement that held the fabric of the city together,' says Oakley now.

Typically, he chose a Porsche as his company car at Liverpool while others had Austin Rovers. By this stage, Oakley had a good idea of his worth - or at least what he perceived his worth to be.

After eight years in Liverpool, he was attracted to Birmingham where Ralph Ingersoll, the first American publisher to move into the British regional press, recruited him to help restore the fortunes of an ailing newspaper group, publisher of titles including the Birmingham Post, a quality daily newspaper with a reputation way above its sales figures (circulation around 25,000), and the Evening Mail, the city's evening newspaper.

Initially recruited as deputy managing director in 1989, he assumed the managing director's job soon afterwards. He was welcomed by many of the staff who would often see him on the editorial floor. 'First impressions were very good,' says one journalist, 'though as time has gone on, he's become more of a boss than a fellow journalist.'

By late 1991, with Ingersoll facing financial problems, Oakley and five colleagues raised money to buy the company from its proprietor. Already there had been strains in the relationship with Ingersoll, as the American proprietor had squabbled with Oakley on ways to relaunch the struggling Post, and the period leading up to the management buyout became debilitating for all concerned.

The company only became Oakley's after his team, backed by Candover, the venture capitalists, bid pounds 125m - more than a counter offer from a group of American investors led by James Plugh, the chief executive of Ingersoll Publications. The contest became bloody, and Oakley and his team would certainly have been cleared out if they had lost.

In two and a half years, Oakley's team has - through acquisition, cost cutting and revenue growth - increased the value of the group to almost pounds 200m. This has allowed some of the original venture capitalists to redeem their loans and to retain equity holdings of considerable value.

Savings have been made through re-evaluating jobs, restructuring distribution and cutting some salaries. In 1992, the prospectus boasts, operating costs were cut by pounds 4.5m. Oakley now stresses, however, that while cost cutting was tremendously important during the first year of the buyout, the 'majority of improvement has come from a genuine growth in revenues'.

Partly because of his journalist's background, no doubt, Oakley appears to place great importance on editorial quality - as much in the group's freesheets as in its paid-for titles. 'It's easy to reduce costs and have little editorial input in freesheets, but that probably means they won't be read. But if you produce a high-quality product and deal with community issues, people will hopefully want to read them.' The policy appears to have worked. 'We bought some free newspapers in the north part of the East Midlands and have grown advertising revenues by 25 per cent,' he adds. Since the buyout, operating profits at MIN have gone from pounds 5.6m to pounds 16m on turnover up from pounds 63m to pounds 79m.

Some employees, however, are concerned about the future. They cite Oakley's apparent reluctance to brief the in-house union on likely developments after the flotation. 'The workload has increased dramatically with the launch of supplements and extra editions in the drive to boost the circulation of our titles,' says one.

Meanwhile, Oakley shows no signs of cashing in his shares to take life easy. Instead he speaks of further expansion. 'Our name does not preclude us going outside the region. We are always thinking of pushing those boundaries further out. And if a publishing group came up in another part of the country, we would be interested in acquiring it.'

(Photograph omitted)