Andy started by covering the last 40 years of his life. At the age of 16 he had career guidance, and it was suggested that he may like to become a journalist. 26 years later he is now doing media work as a publisher, publishing 2500 magazines per month.
There then followed a resume of his career and life. In 2006 he was made redundant and reached for a magazine “Prima” and he bought the rights. He then bought BS9 and 17 years on it is still going strong. He showed us copies of the original BS9 and the current version. After running BS9 for a few years he bought BS6 and BS8 which he then merged.
BS9 is a monthly magazine on a four-week cycle and a Welsh company does the print run as there are only a few companies with the specialised equipment. Two thirds of the magazine is advertising which pays for the copy and he then adds pieces of interest and particularly enjoys helping local businesses. He delivers boxes to a team of 55 deliverers who must be over 13 years of age.
Andy works from home and he says it is a joy. The other bonus is that he doesn’t have to do sales as the work is paid for by the advertising space and the magazine itself is free. However, the cost of production has gone up dramatically, the print being the biggest cost but he has managed to adapt to this.
He ended his talk with some funny stories about his work and also described how sometimes the deliverers don’t do the job properly!
The icing on the cake was his free raffle and some members were lucky enough to win a bunch of flowers. He also said that we can contact him to advertise our not-for-profit organisation and would be happy to publish articles about the work that we do.
Thank you, Andy, for an interesting and fun talk.