Annex Business Media Made a Massive Bet on Itself; The Innovations Are Just Beginning

By: Christiana Sciaudone

Annex Business Media is going into 2025 almost fully leveraged after an employee-management buyout earlier this year. It’s a whole new scenario for the 27-year-old B2B publisher, which is counting on a raft of innovations to boost growth and thrive in a very lukewarm business environment with ever-declining print revenue, which currently represents 40% of sales.

“Our growth is coming out of innovation and new things. It’s not coming out of more people buying the same widgets that they bought in 2015,” Scott Jamieson, chief executive officer at Canada-based Annex, told AMO. “We did an offsite, one that we call the growth fest, because it was all about revenue, top line growth, not about efficiencies, not about new ways to do things with more optimization.”

Innovation includes working on greater client retention, new events and the use of fresh data to boost the business. Before the employee buyout, Annex had been in talks to sell to private equity. Jamieson got the sense that the fund managers didn’t really understand the business and weren’t being forthright about their intentions post-purchase. Annex’s brands, after all, range from pulp and paper to pizza, poultry and plumbing.

So while the loan wasn’t an ideal scenario to move forward, and it will hinder acquisitions in the near-term for an otherwise highly-acquisitive company, the executives at Annex are looking ahead with ambition. Jamieson, who was chief operating officer prior to the takeover, is happy to report that within months of the buyout, they’ve already paid back over $1 million of debt plus interest on the “significantly” more than $30 million in loans used to buy the company. Toronto-Dominion Bank provided 50% of the debt and the previous owners the rest.

Annex, which has acquired more than two dozen companies over the years to reach around 140 employees today, plans to spend another year or so paying off debt before taking on new financing or deals.

Things Are Better Than They Appear

Management, which has high expectations for results, said that despite a flat year for sales, margins were strong. The company’s paying out dividends and it will profit-share with employees following the closing of the fiscal year on October 31.

To keep margins strong, Annex got rid of their printing press and will rely on third-parties to handle their magazines for the foreseeable future. It also let staff go that weren’t a good fit and fully committed to the future.

Given global economic uncertainty, Jamieson has no real idea of the outlook for 2025. He is, however, preparing to be aggressive in finding the right investments.

Retention of advertising partners is high for big clients, but low for smaller ones. As such, a senior executive has been tasked with rolling out a program to retain customers who might otherwise cancel. “If you can retain 5% more of your revenue, that’s the print we’re going to lose. And then everything else is growth,” Jamieson said. Annex is also reinvigorating its newsletters to increase engagement and find a more winning formula.

It’s also adding new events across its portfolio of brands—unlike Americans, Canadians are less likely to travel for meetings or conferences so Annex will try to go to them. And when it comes to events, Annex has big expectations. They have to reach a minimum of 50% margin after all expenses, and that’s for an initial launch event.

They are counting on refreshed data to bring new opportunities to light, both in events and in content.

“We’re investing in some AI technology for tagging all of our sites’ content,” Jamieson said. Because they are an amalgamation of so many different websites, they have hired Hum to help tag content appropriately and add to their Omeda customer data platform and get a better sense of new coverage areas. Jamieson gave hand safety as a possible future niche.

“People in the safety, occupational health and safety brand market who are interested in hand safety, we have a whole category of hand protection advertisers, some of whom we do business with,” Jamieson said. “If we could come up with a hand safety summit and say we have 500 people that are just crazy about this topic. That’s really, really marketable. So those are the sorts of things that we’re going to do so that next year we actually grow.”