How to Get Rich

by Felix Dennis

Several large publishers have since implied that they would have invested if I had not. My answer to that is: why didn’t they, then? After all, as Jolyon was the first to point out, he had never heard of me, or Dennis Publishing. The truth is that nobody else offered to invest big money in The Week because nobody else believed it could ever work financially. Not as a major title, anyway. My board of directors at Dennis Publishing certainly didn’t. They were dead against my investing in such a weekly. Weeklies eat up cash, especially weeklies with debts, no advertising, a pitiful number of subscribers, no newsstand sales and a bundle of small investors. Voices were raised in that boardroom. Loud voices. What I hadn’t the courage to tell my fellow directors at that meeting, or, for a day or two, even my financial guru, Ian Leggett, was that I had already invested. I loved the concept. I was going to own a piece of The Week. And to hell with naysayers. That’s easy to say. But it’s not good business. It’s rude and arrogant to invest in a company you intend to bring into your stable without a thorough and honest discussion of the pros and cons with senior colleagues. Like I said, it’s not good business. But it is the only business an entrepreneur has any right to be doing. I am not a manager. I am not even a businessman. I’m an entrepreneur and I go with my gut. After that, managers and bean-counters and financial advisors take over. But only afterwards.