An interview with the CEO of Whittle Communications, who has kept his partnership thriving for years.
How Chris Whittle has used an innovative approach to partnership to build one of the hottest media companies around
Though you may not recognize the name, you undoubtedly know who Chris Whittle is. He's the man who created an uproar this spring with his idea for Channel One, a television program for high-school students that will carry news -- and commercials -- into classrooms across America. Or you may have seen a copy of Special Reports, a glossy Whittle magazine that is distributed free to doctors for their waiting rooms, so long as they limit the number of periodicals they display. Or perhaps you've heard about the new line of business books his company has commissioned -- the ones that will carry advertising.
Whittle has been stirring up controversy, and raising journalists' hackles, ever since 1979, when he and Phillip Moffitt, his partner at the time, breezed into New York City from Knoxville, Tenn., to perform the business equivalent of open-heart surgery on Esquire magazine. To some people, it was like turning over your beloved grandmother to a couple of kids with rusty penknives. Whatever implements they used, the kids did the job, saving the doyen of general-interest magazines and earning the grudging respect of their publishing peers.
Then in 1986 the partners parted. Moffitt got Esquire, which he later sold to the Hearst Group. Whittle wound up with 13-30 Corp., the Knoxville-based publishing company the pair had cofounded with three other college buddies in 1970. The word on the street was that Moffitt got the better deal. Since then, however, it's Whittle Communications, the successor to 13-30, that has emerged as a force to be reckoned with, growing from $70 million in sales in 1986 to an expected $185 million this year. Meanwhile, Whittle himself has continued to make news with his controversial media projects and bold deals. Last year he sold 50% of his company to Time Inc. for $185 million. This year he started testing Channel One.
Lost in the controversy has been another story -- the story not of a publisher, but of a company builder, one of the most innovative we know. Like others who've appeared in these pages, he seems to challenge his industry's most sacred rules and conventions. What we find most interesting, however, is his strikingly original concept of partnership, a concept that lies at the core of his approach to business. For Whittle, partnership is an attitude, a philosophy, and a code of behavior. It governs his relationships with fellow executives, investors, joint-venture partners, even customers. It is through partnerships that Whittle, 42, aims to build what he unabashedly says will be "one of the largest media companies in America in the coming decades."
He talked about partnership and other matters with Inc.'s editor-in-chief, George Gendron, and senior writer Paul B. Brown.
INC.: We are constantly running across companies that have done pretty well with one or two products, but damned if they can come up with another. You don't seem to have that problem.
WHITTLE: Actually, we have the opposite problem. We have vaults of ideas. We have ideas stacked up around here in holding patterns, and I'm talking about major concepts. Our problem is finding the people to execute the concepts we have.
INC.: Are you saying that you can't find enough good managers?
WHITTLE: No, a company like ours doesn't need managers; we really need entrepreneurs -- a word that has been beaten to death in America, as you know better than I. I'm talking about people who can take a concept from a standing start and make it live and breathe. We have an incredible appetite for people with those skills and talents, and they're very hard to identify. Once we've identified them, they're rather easy to attract, because we have wonderful things to offer here, but identifying them is the number-one challenge in our business.
INC.: What makes those people so hard to find? Why can't you develop them internally?
WHITTLE: Because we're looking for a particular characteristic that someone may or may not have. We've noticed there's no rheostat on success in our company. If we send people out on a mission, they either come back victorious or they don't return at all. No one comes back wounded. Now that's not what you'd expect. Theory says you should have a bell curve of results, but it doesn't happen that way. If there are 20 units to be sold, we've found that a certain group of people will go out and sell 18, 19, 20. Another group will sell nothing. There's not much in between. We've been through this over and over again in the past 20 years. The variable is this entrepreneurial skill. Either people have it or they don't, although they may have it in different ways.
INC.: I have to say I get nervous when I hear people talking about entrepreneurial skill as if it's something you're born with.
WHITTLE: I don't know if people are born with it, but I know it's real. Let me tell you a story. We launched Special Reports last year. This is a magazine we distribute only in waiting rooms, which gives us something like 50 readers per copy, as opposed to, say, 7 or 8 for a conventional magazine. Among other things, that changes the whole way we approach advertising. We decided we would sell 30 different advertising units for $1.25 million per unit. Alan Greenberg, the vice-chairman here, was in charge of Special Reports. In the beginning, he was the only salesperson. He sold all the units alone in six weeks -- almost $40 million in revenues. To put that in perspective, the most successful conventional magazine ever launched was People, which did $8 million in its first year of business. So Special Reports was five times the largest magazine launch in the history of publishing, and the sales were all made by one person. A standard magazine has 20 people working for years to sell $40 million worth of space. If we had taken people from a conventional industry background and sent them on this mission, not only wouldn't they have come back with 30 units, 9 out of 10 would have come back with zip.
INC.: So when you talk about needing entrepreneurs to execute concepts, you mean high-level people in your company.
WHITTLE: Absolutely. We need high-level people who are willing to roll up their sleeves and engage customers and go right out on the point. Alan is the vice-chairman of a company with 1,000 people, and he was right out there making it happen. That's the way we function around here. The highest players in the company are the first ones out of the trenches. That includes me.
