ERIC NEWNHAM

What made you decide to start your own business?

I left school at 15 because I didn’t get enough O Levels to get into the sixth form and a recruitment office sent me to a poster company called Portland where I wrote address labels for posters. Long story short, I went on to be their Central London rep and by my late twenties was Managing Director.

I was then approached to run Poster Publicity, which was a much smaller outfit. It was like going from managing a Premiership Football team to managing a League Two club – on paper it didn’t make sense – but they offered me shares and it seemed like a fun challenge.

In the end WPP approached us to create an Out of Home company and we combined Poster Publicity and Portland to create Kinetic, retaining 51% of the business. We eventually cashed in our chips and two years later – when my non-compete had expired and after 30 days at sea as the only passenger on a cargo ship from France to Brazil reflecting on what to do next – I came back and created Talon.

Have you ever failed?

I have a start-up investment company called Ballpark Ventures – there’s six of us with different angles on the digital media world – and in that respect there’s been some companies that have failed but luckily we’ve recovered our investment before that happened. When it comes to my day job, I’ve been lucky, I’ve not had anything that’s gone too badly wrong. The opposite really, it’s been a good journey.

What’s your next goal and when will you retire?

I don’t really understand the word retirement. Much like I don’t really understand the word working. It’s just my life. I don’t work at Talon every day anymore – I’ve got a full-time team and I’m here for them to ask questions but I’ve got nobody to answer to me which is what I want!

I think running a company today is harder than it’s ever been – we’ve got this circular problem where you can’t get anything right because someone will always be there to complain and running a business in that sort of environment is very difficult.

What would you like your legacy to be?

I just hope I’ve treated people well and fairly and everybody who’s worked with me has had a good experience and a lot of fun. I’ve made a bit of money which is nice but it’s been a by-product not a driving force. Though I know it’s easy to say that when you have money!

What is the most important lesson this journey has taught or reconfirmed for you?

Talon started out as a small company owned by Ptarmigan, a financial agency. It had four or five people and wasn’t doing very well. I approached the owner and asked him to give me his company for nothing (though with him retaining a shareholding) telling him I believed I would make a success of it.

I can’t stress enough how much easier it is to take a vehicle that already exists than to start a business from scratch. It doesn’t matter what that existing business does or what it’s like, but it will have so much of the foundations already in place. A bank account, insurance, premises, computers, someone to do the finances and so on – if you have those basics there you can hit the ground running and build on it much quicker.

I use the analogy of a manual car – it takes a lot of energy to go from stationary, through first gear into second gear, but if you have a moving vehicle, it’s like you’re already in second gear.

What is the most valuable skill you’ve learnt and how does that serve you now?

Awareness. I’ve always kept my eyes and ears open and captured all sorts of things that have cropped up in conversation. I cling onto snippets that come from far and wide because you never know when they might come in useful.

If you could do it all again – what would you focus on?

Nearly 50 years in the business and I wouldn’t change a thing.

What do you think are the biggest challenges our industry will face in the next 5 years?

In OOH the top end of the market is going to be fine and will get better and better. There’s a slight danger we’ll reduce ourselves from being a mass medium to a bespoke one. There’s no cash going into the lower end of the market and as we move from paper to vinyl to digital it’s not affordable at a local level.

There’s also going to be a growing green issue around the need for advertising. A lot of people see OOH as superfluous, a blight on society and a waste of energy, but they miss the point. The sites in question are mostly on Local Authority land and those councils earn the rent and rates on the sites so they’re making money for the community and the economy.

Do you feel like you personally make a difference? How?

I hope so. The fight to create Talon was to prove we could do it without being a corporate, and I have enjoyed that battle and taking the corporates on. I sold my soul to create Kinetic with WPP but the fact that we went and did it all again independently shows there’s a bit of a pirate in me. You have to fall in line – you can’t be completely rebellious – but I’d like to think we have a different attitude to a lot of the corporations.

It’s been fascinating having Private Equity backing because you get financial backing without the corporate ties. That freedom is very nice.