A law unto herself
Businesswoman Lucy Barker shares the secrets of her success
From building her own publishing empire to overcoming cancer, businesswoman Lucy Barker has never been afraid of a challenge
LUCY BARKER was having a drink in her local pub one evening when she happened to overhear the man at the next table having a conversation with his wife. The man was local public relations figure Paul Sowerby and he was talking about how he planned to set up a publishing division of his company. Barker says: “The following day I knocked on his door and told him I was the answer to his prayers. Fortunately he thought it was very funny and offered me a job.”
Born and brought up in West Yorkshire, Barker was privately educated but did not enjoy school and, at 16, left to go to sixth form college. Within two months, however, she realised that her heart was not in that either: “The headmaster called me in and told me I should get out there into the big wide world.”
She got a job in London as an office junior in a public relations company and then became a production assistant for music producer Tim Rice, who was putting on his musical Chess. From there, she went on to help two friends start up a student magazine called Rasp. “The name doesn’t mean anything at all,” she explains, “but we told people that rasping was American slang for chatting. Or if we were talking to somebody from education, we would say that “rasp” stands for Real Answers to Student Prospects.” The magazine was fairly successful and made enough for the three friends to live on modestly for five years until they sold it for £36,000.
Barker, by now 25, then went on holiday to Egypt, where she met and fell in love with a Frenchman. She went to live in Paris with him, where they got married and had a child. When they moved back to Yorkshire, however, the marriage fell apart and Barker was left to bring up her daughter on her own. She supported the two of them by doing sales jobs, but it was a struggle. They lived in a hut on a farm with no heating or hot water.
It was then that she met Paul Sowerby in the local pub. He took her on to help him publish a small weekly newsletter for the Law Society in Leeds, his fledgling publishing company’s only project. Just six months later in 1999, however, Sowerby was offered a job elsewhere and he closed the company down. But Barker, then 29, was convinced that she had found her niche and decided to set up a publishing company of her own, starting with the newsletter. “It was just a four-page stapled thing which was typed by the Law Society secretary,” she recalls, “but I thought it should be a proper magazine. My brother is a lawyer and I thought the legal profession might need it.”
Sowerby agreed to let her keep the newsletter provided that Barker bought the furniture and computers from him. So she borrowed £10,000 from her bank and got to work. It was perhaps inevitable she would end up starting up her own business. Both her parents were entrepreneurial – her father designed and produced greetings cards and her mother ran her own successful modelling agency.
Indeed, her great-uncle, who also owned his own business, once wrote a book called How To Make a Million.
“I have always wanted to start up my own business,” explains Barker. “I think you are born with it. Some people are just not suited to working for other people.”
The Law Society in Leeds agreed to let Barker keep any money she made from advertising, providing that adverts accounted for no more than 40% of the publication. “In the beginning, the profit was tiny,” she recalls with a smile. “But as we got better at producing a quality professional publication, suddenly the advertising revenue was there. It was amazing.”
Barker hired an editor to help her and incorporated the editor’s surname, Brooks, into the name of the company, Barker Brooks Media. It was a generous but misguided move – within six months the editor had left. By that time, though, the name had stuck.
She also started making several visits to the Law Society headquarters in London to discuss the possibility of producing more magazines for them: “I thought: ‘hang on a minute, there is a market here and there is absolutely no point in me sitting up in Yorkshire producing one regional title when there is a lot to be gained from this relationship.’”
The Law Society agreed and soon she was publishing several magazines for them as well. She also started up magazines for other professional bodies in fields that had an existing membership base, such as accountancy and banking.
“I saw a huge gap in the market. I did a lot of research and I knew that if I produced a magazine for an organisation that already had members then I wouldn’t need to find them myself,” she says. “It would be a huge short-cut.”
She also toyed with the idea of starting up a music magazine similar to NME but was talked out of it. “I had loads of dreadful ideas which I talked to family about, and I got reactions ranging from hysterical laughter to people telling me I must be mad.”
Instead, she started organising awards ceremonies linked to the magazines she produced, starting with the Yorkshire Lawyer Awards. But after two years, things started to become unstuck. “We made the classic mistake of expanding too quickly and taking on projects which weren’t profitable,” Barker admits.
Their offices were flooded four times in a year, which destroyed the computers and forced the company to relocate to temporary offices. Then Barker found a lump in her breast while on a business trip to Brazil. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and told it was a particularly aggressive grade three tumour. She was 34. She simply says: “The bottom dropped out of my world.”
The discovery marked an unexpected turning point in her life. With both she and her business fighting for their lives, she decided the only way forward was to beat them both. “The day after I was diagnosed, I decided that not only was I going to beat this thing and turn my health around, but I was also going to use this as a massive opportunity to turn the business around. It was nothing to do with being brave. I needed to have something else to think about other than the possibility of dying.”
Barker began by promoting two employees to be directors so they could run the business while she was having chemotherapy. Then she ruthlessly axed the projects which were not making enough profit. “Just as the chemotherapy was there to stamp out all of the cancer, I decided to stamp out all of the negative aspects of the company,” she explains.
Halfway through her treatment she also realised that the business needed a big injection of cash. So she remortgaged her house for £100,000. In addition, she put every penny of a £40,000 critical illness insurance payout straight into the business. “My mother said: ‘Aren’t you even going to take out enough to go on holiday?’ I told her I hadn’t got time.”
Her determination on both fronts paid off. After undergoing eight months of chemotherapy, the cancer is now in remission and the business is thriving. Barker has launched several new, profitable magazines and events to replace the ones she culled, notably Etc, a magazine for A level students. She also produces a magazine for the British Racing Drivers’ Club and recently bought the modelling agency and production company owned by her mother. Turnover is expected to be £5.5m in 2006.
Now 38, Barker says: “Getting cancer was the turning point in my life and for the business. It has made me more successful. I am unbelievably proud of what I’ve achieved, but I still have a long way to go.”
She is clear about what motivates her. “At the end of the day I am driven by the idea of making money because I know what it is like to have nothing and I never want to go back to that. For me, profit is the most important thing.”
She thinks the secret of her success has been to ask for help. “My big turning point was realising that there are other people that I could talk to. I realised that I couldn’t be good at everything so I should concentrate on the things that I am good at – and let other people do the things I am not good at.”
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Words: Rachel Bridge
