Part IThe Story
The Least Intelligent Defendant
In the summer of 1971, at the Old Bailey in London, a judge named Michael Argyle handed down sentences in what had become the longest obscenity trial in English history. Three young men stood convicted over an issue of an underground magazine called Oz. Richard Neville, the Australian founder, received fifteen months. Jim Anderson, his fellow Australian co-editor, received twelve. The third, a twenty-four-year-old from the Surrey suburbs named Felix Dennis, received nine. The judge explained the difference: Dennis was younger than the other two, he said, and very much less intelligent.
The convictions were quashed on appeal within months. The insult lasted a great deal longer. Dennis would spend the next four decades building one of the largest independent magazine companies in the world, making a fortune from computer titles, a mail-order business, and a men's magazine that at its peak outsold GQ and Esquire combined in America. He would buy David Bowie's house on Mustique, fill a Warwickshire estate with life-size bronze statues of his heroes, publish seven books of poetry, and spend a large share of his money planting a forest. By the time he died in 2014, the Sunday Times Rich List put his worth at £500 million.
He never pretended to be a nice man. "I'm an amoral sod," he told one interviewer, and much of his own writing about business reads like a confession. But he was an unusually clear-eyed one. He had a theory of how ordinary people become rich, he tested it on himself for forty years, and near the end he wrote it down in plain language for anyone who cared to read it. This is the story of how the judge's least intelligent defendant worked out the rules.
By the Numbers
The Dennis Ledger
£100K → £3MWhat Dennis paid for Personal Computer World in 1979, and what he sold it for less than three years later
$20MPrice Ziff-Davis paid for the US edition of MacUser, about 14 months after its 1985 launch
2.5MMonthly US circulation of Maxim by 2001, four years after its American launch
~$250MReported value of the 2007 sale of Maxim, Stuff and Blender in the US
£500MEstimated fortune on the Sunday Times Rich List, 2014
1,000,000Trees planted in his Warwickshire forest by September 2013
A House Without Electricity
Felix Dennis was born on 27 May 1947 in Kingston upon Thames, on the south-western edge of London. His father, a shopkeeper and part-time jazz pianist, left the family when Felix was about three, and later emigrated to Australia. Felix told Vanity Fair in 2001 that his father never sent his mother any money. For several years Felix, his mother Dorothy and his younger brother Julian lived with his grandparents in a small terraced house in Thames Ditton that had no electricity and no indoor lavatory. Light came from gas and candles.
Dorothy Dennis did not accept that start as a verdict. She went to night school, qualified as a chartered accountant, and in her son's later telling hauled the family into the middle class by force of will. Felix admired her for the rest of his life. He also clashed with the stepfather who arrived when he was a teenager, and he left home early.
He passed the eleven-plus exam in 1958 and went to St Nicholas Grammar School in Northwood Hills, Middlesex. He was not a scholar. A former classmate remembered him to Vanity Fair as someone who was not the brightest boy around but had confidence, which counted for more at that age. He left school at fifteen to play drums in rhythm-and-blues bands, rented a bedsit in Harrow, dressed shop windows for department stores, painted signs, mowed lawns and spent a short spell at Harrow College of Art. None of it looked like a career. All of it was paid work, and he got used to earning his rent by his own hustle.
Selling Oz on the King's Road
In 1967, the summer London remembers as the summer of love, Richard Neville launched the English edition of Oz, a psychedelic, satirical, deliberately provocative magazine that had started life in Sydney. Dennis, then twenty, saw an early issue and sent Neville a tape-recorded message of enthusiasm so profane that it later became part of the magazine's folklore. When the tape was played in a radio documentary, Dennis turned up demanding a share of the fee.
Neville, as he later told the story in his memoir Hippie Hippie Shake, found the young drummer broke and gave him bundles of unsold copies to sell on the street and keep the proceeds. Dennis sold the lot on the King's Road in Chelsea and came back for more. The second time, Neville offered him half the cover price. Within a year Dennis had joined the staff full-time as advertising manager, then business manager, and eventually co-editor alongside Neville and Anderson. He also designed pages and wrote music reviews; in 1969 he wrote one of the first reviews of Led Zeppelin's debut album.
He stood out in the office. His colleagues wore kaftans and beads. Dennis wore suits, sometimes three-piece, to meetings with printers, distributors and advertisers, because a chaotic hippie magazine needed someone who looked as if the bills would be paid. Dick Pountain, the magazine's production manager and later Dennis's lifelong business partner and executor, said Dennis had an instinctive head for business. Some of the others used the period slang "bread-head" for him, and did not mean it kindly.
That tension between the counterculture's contempt for money and Dennis's fascination with it would shape the rest of his life. He took from Oz a set of skills that no business school taught in 1968: how to launch a publication with no capital, how to keep a printer on side when you cannot pay him on time, how to sell a product whose appeal is partly that respectable people disapprove of it, and how much attention a well-judged provocation can generate. He later credited the magazine with teaching him to be an entrepreneur.
The Schoolkids Issue
In the spring of 1970, while Neville was away, Anderson and Dennis invited a group of secondary-school pupils to edit an issue of the magazine. The result, Oz number 28, became known as the Schoolkids issue. Among its contents was a collage in which the children's comic character Rupert Bear appeared in a sexually explicit cartoon strip. Scotland Yard's Obscene Publications Squad raided the magazine's offices in Princedale Road, Notting Hill, and the three editors were charged with conspiring to corrupt the morals of children and young persons, along with lesser obscenity offences.
The trial opened on 22 June 1971 and became a public event. John Mortimer, later famous as the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, led the defence. John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded a single, "God Save Oz," to raise money for the legal fund. The jury acquitted all three on the conspiracy charge, the most serious one, but convicted them of the lesser offences. Argyle's sentences, and his remark about Dennis's intelligence, followed.
The three men spent a short time in prison before the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions, finding that Argyle had seriously misdirected the jury. Dennis later told the writer Jonathon Green that the night before the appeal the defendants were taken to a private meeting with the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, and told they would be freed if they gave up working on Oz; the account has never been independently confirmed. Marsha Rowe, who worked on the defence and later wrote Dennis's obituary for The Guardian, believed the judge's comment reflected class bias: Neville and Anderson were university-educated, and Dennis was a grammar-school dropout.
The remark followed him. In 1995 Argyle repeated his view of Dennis in The Spectator. Outside the protection of a courtroom, it was libel, and Dennis sued the magazine, which agreed to pay £10,000 to charity. He chose not to pursue the retired judge personally, remarking that there was no glory in taking an old man's house away.
Bruce Lee and the Poster Magazine
Oz limped on until 1973. Dennis kept publishing underground comics, including Cozmic Comics, through a small company that printed work by American and British cartoonists. It was a shoestring operation and it did not make him money. What changed his life was a queue.
Walking through London in 1974, Dennis noticed a long line of teenagers outside a cinema and asked what they were waiting for. It was a Bruce Lee film. He went inside, watched for a quarter of an hour, and by his own account ran back to the office convinced that martial arts were about to become enormous. The product he and Pountain designed was a hybrid: a thin magazine that folded out into a large wall poster, the kind of thing a teenager could pin above a bed. Kung-Fu Monthly became a hit almost at once, brought in more than £60,000 in its first year according to a 1998 profile in The Times, and was eventually published in around seventeen countries. Dennis followed it with quick paperback biographies such as King of Kung Fu (1974), and he later applied the same poster-magazine format to film stars, pop groups and sharks.
In 1975 he flew to New York with a sample under his arm, hoping to sell his poster magazines in America without giving up control of them. He landed, largely unannounced, at the office of Peter Godfrey, a British expatriate in the distribution business. Godfrey later recalled asking who on earth would want a folded poster, and then noticing the margins: the things cost pennies to print and sold for dollars. Godfrey and his American partner, Robert Bartner, took on the distribution. It was the beginning of a partnership that lasted decades and would make all three men rich.
By the late 1970s Dennis had a small portfolio of special-interest titles, starting with a motorcycle buyer's guide, Which Bike?, and the hi-fi magazine Hi-Fi Choice. His method was forming. He looked for a subject that a growing group of people cared about intensely and that no established publisher was serving well, launched cheaply, found an editor with genuine enthusiasm for the subject, and gave that editor room to prove the idea.
In 1979 Godfrey called from New York to say that a Star Wars poster had sold better than expected and he had overpaid Dennis a couple of thousand dollars. Dennis told him the money was already spent: he had bought a PC newsletter. Godfrey asked what a PC was. The title was Personal Computer World, the first European magazine devoted to personal computers. Dennis had noticed Pountain tinkering with an early machine and listened to friends who understood the technology better than he did. He paid about £100,000. Less than three years later he sold it to the Dutch publisher VNU for about £3 million.
The lesson he drew was about timing, and it became the quality he valued most in himself. Asked by Vanity Fair to name his greatest strength, he answered with the single word "timing." Computing in 1979 was a hobbyists' niche, and hobbyists are ideal magazine readers: they want every scrap of information, they trust a specialist title more than a general one, and the companies trying to sell to them have nowhere else to advertise.
He went back to the well repeatedly. In 1985, less than two years after Apple introduced the Macintosh, Dennis and his American partners launched MacUser in both Britain and the United States. About fourteen months after the American launch, Ziff-Davis bought the US edition for roughly $20 million. Dennis kept the British edition, which he published for decades. In Britain he added Computer Shopper, PC Pro, Computer Buyer, PC Zone and a run of gaming titles, and the computer business became the steady engine of Dennis Publishing.
MicroWarehouse and the Real Fortune
The largest single source of Dennis's wealth was not a magazine at all. In 1987, with Godfrey and Bartner, he co-founded a Connecticut-based mail-order company that sold computers, software and accessories through thick, carefully produced catalogues. It began by selling Macintosh products, then broadened into the wider PC market and took the name MicroWarehouse.
The business was a natural extension of what the partners already knew. Magazine publishers understand catalogues, direct mail and the economics of reaching a specialist buyer. MicroWarehouse listed on the NASDAQ in 1992 and grew into a company with billions of dollars in annual sales and thousands of employees across more than a dozen countries. At the end of 1999, after competition and thinning margins had hit its share price, it agreed to be taken private by an investor group including Freeman Spogli and the former IBM finance chief Jerome York in a deal valued at around $725 million. Vanity Fair reported that MicroWarehouse earned Dennis about $100 million in total.
It is the part of the Dennis story most often left out, and it matters. The flamboyant magazine mogul was also a patient equity holder in an unglamorous logistics business run largely by his partners. He did not need to manage it day to day to profit from it. He only needed to own a piece.
Excess
Money arrived in the 1980s, and Dennis spent it with enthusiasm and very little discretion. He bought Rolls-Royces, a gold Rolex, wine by the cellar and, eventually, five homes, each with its own staff. In 1987 he bought the Old Manor at Dorsington, a village near Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, which became his main home. In the mid-1990s he bought Mandalay, the house on Mustique that David Bowie had built, reportedly furniture and pets included.
He also spent most of the decade, in his own account, on drink, crack cocaine and paid sex. In How to Get Rich and in interviews he put the cost at more than $100 million, and he talked about the period with a candour that made his publicists wince. He never married and had no children, though he had a long partnership with Marie-France Demolis and, according to The Guardian, twenty-two godchildren. He smoked heavily for most of his life.
His appetite for provocation sometimes damaged him. In a 2008 interview with The Times, Dennis claimed that in the early 1980s he had killed a man. He retracted the claim soon afterwards, saying he had been drunk and talking nonsense, and no evidence ever emerged to support it. The episode says more about his relish for shocking an audience than about anything he did. By his own admission, he came close to killing himself through the drugs, and he stopped. In a 2013 profile for The Observer, he said he had lived an unbelievable life, even if he had done his best to kill himself.
Maxim Crosses the Atlantic
Dennis was late to the British "lad mag" boom of the mid-1990s. Loaded and FHM had already defined the market by the time he launched Maxim in London in 1995. The real opportunity, he decided, was the United States, where the men's magazine shelf was dominated by GQ, Esquire and Playboy, titles that treated their readers as aspiring sophisticates or as consumers of nudity. Nobody was publishing for the ordinary young man who wanted jokes, sport, gadgets, advice and pictures of attractive women in roughly equal measure.
American Maxim launched in April 1997. The industry reaction was scornful. GQ's editor Art Cooper told the New York Post that it was a magazine for men who moved their lips when they read. An investment banker told Vanity Fair that anyone would have advised Dennis there was no room for another men's magazine, because men did not read magazines. Four years later Maxim was selling about 2.5 million copies a month in the United States, against roughly 900,000 for GQ and 680,000 for Esquire. In 2000 Advertising Age named it Magazine of the Year, and it sold $115 million of advertising, more than Playboy and Penthouse combined.
Dennis believed the success belonged to the formula, not to any single editor, and he acted on that belief. When Condé Nast hired away Maxim's editor Mark Golin in 1999 to revive Details, Dennis responded with a press release naming a hamster as acting editor-in-chief. The Wall Street Journal ran it on the front of its Marketplace section. He kept a tight grip on editorial direction; Vanity Fair reported that he wrote or rewrote Maxim's cover lines himself, and that at Dennis Publishing there was room for only one star.
— Felix Dennis, Vanity Fair, 2001I adore my readers. I like my advertisers, but I don't adore them. I adore my readers. Everything I publish is for my readers.
He followed Maxim with Stuff, a gadget-heavy men's title, in 1999, and Blender, a music magazine aimed squarely at Rolling Stone, in 2001. Maxim spread to dozens of international editions and was licensed as a brand for events and nightclubs. Its critics found it juvenile and its treatment of women demeaning, and Dennis did not much care. His American partners described his negotiating style in similar terms: he went into every deal prepared to leave the table.
— Robert Bartner, Vanity Fair, 2001Felix negotiates fully prepared to walk away—that's his strength.
The Week and Knowing When to Sell
The title that outlasted Maxim was far quieter. The Week had been launched in Britain in 1995 by the journalist Jolyon Connell as a digest of the best writing from the rest of the press, laid out so that a busy reader could absorb a week of news in an hour. Dennis took a controlling stake in 1996 and later bought out Connell and his co-founder Jeremy O'Grady.
In April 2001 he launched an American edition. The Wall Street Journal asked whether Felix Dennis was mad: the launch was expected to cost about $17 million, advertising was falling across the industry, and Time and Newsweek already owned the market for weekly news. The Week grew steadily anyway, built on subscribers rather than newsstand spikes, and became the most reliable asset Dennis owned. The formula suited the moment. As news multiplied online, a trusted editor's selection became more valuable, not less.
He was equally clear-eyed about selling. In June 2007 Dennis sold the American operations of Maxim, Stuff and Blender to the private-equity firm Quadrangle and the magazine executive Kent Brownridge, who formed Alpha Media Group. The price was never disclosed; reports put it at about $250 million. He kept The Week. Within two years the financial crisis and the shift of young male readers to the web had battered the men's magazine market. Blender stopped printing in 2009, and the British Maxim closed its print edition the same year. Dennis had sold near the top of the market.
In Britain he kept buying and launching. In 2003 he bought I Feel Good, the company founded by Loaded's James Brown, for about £5 million, bringing Viz and Fortean Times into the group. He also built up motoring titles such as Auto Express and launched digital-only magazines when most publishers were still debating whether to try. He retained sole ownership of the company throughout, which meant he never had to explain a decision to outside shareholders.
The Poet and the Rulebook
In 1999, after months of tests for an illness he feared was fatal, Dennis wrote an eight-line poem on a Post-it note, a pastiche of Dorothy Parker. The illness turned out to be a treatable thyroid condition. The poetry stuck. Writing verse became, in Marsha Rowe's phrase, as compelling an obsession for him as making money. His first collection, A Glass Half Full, appeared in 2002, and he promoted it with a touring show called Did I Mention the Free Wine?, in which audiences drank fine wine from his cellar while he read. In 2003 he performed with actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, and he later toured the United States. Six more collections followed. Critics were divided, audiences less so.
In 2006 he published How to Get Rich, the book for which he is now best known outside Britain. It is an odd hybrid: part memoir, part confession, part manual, and it is explicit that the author thinks the pursuit of great wealth is likely to make its reader unhappy. He opened by ranking levels of wealth and warned that the costs, in time, relationships and health, rise with every step. Then he explained, with specific examples, how he had done it. The core of the book is a chapter on ownership. Dennis described how, early in the company's life, four senior staff demanded a combined 20 percent of the business and threatened to leave and start a rival. He refused, they left, their magazine folded, and he later calculated that the stake would have been worth around $80 million.
— Felix Dennis, How to Get Rich, 2006Ownership is not the most important thing. It is the only thing that counts.
The book is harsh in places. It argues that the entrepreneur must be willing to fail publicly, must keep every share he can, must hire people cleverer than himself and pay them very well in cash, must sell before he is forced to, and must not confuse the thrill of the game with a purpose for living. He followed it in 2010 with 88 The Narrow Road, later republished as How to Make Money.
The Forest
In the last two decades of his life, Dennis's largest project was the land around Dorsington. He planted his first small wood there in the mid-1990s and developed the idea of a large native broadleaf forest in the heart of England, open to the public. In 2003 he established a charity, originally called the Forest of Dennis, which was renamed the Heart of England Forest in 2011. He bought farmland year after year and planted it with oak, ash, lime, hornbeam, hazel and other native species, grown where possible from locally collected seed. On 20 September 2013 he planted the project's millionth tree, an oak sapling.
The same estate held his Garden of Heroes and Villains, a collection of more than forty bronze sculptures, some larger than life, depicting figures he admired: scientists, writers and musicians including Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain and Stephen Hawking. He opened it to the public once a year under the National Gardens Scheme. He sponsored an undergraduate history prize at the University of Warwick, supported the National Library for the Blind, and in 2014 funded laptops for every secondary-school pupil in St Vincent and the Grenadines, where he served as honorary consul.
He was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2012 and underwent surgery and radiotherapy. He kept touring. The 2013 Cut-Throat Tour accompanied his last collection, Love, of a Kind. He died at home in Dorsington on 22 June 2014, aged sixty-seven.
He left the bulk of his estate to the forest. In 2018 his executors, led by Dick Pountain, the former Oz production manager who had worked alongside him for more than four decades, sold Dennis Publishing to the private-equity firm Exponent for an undisclosed sum, widely reported at around £150 million, with the proceeds going to the charity. The man once judged too dim to be fully culpable had turned a street-corner magazine hustle into an endowment for a forest meant to last centuries.
Part IIThe Playbook
Felix Dennis wrote his own playbook, bluntly and in detail, and he was the first to warn that following it might make you rich and miserable at the same time. The principles below are drawn from his decisions across forty years of publishing and investing, and from what he said about them in How to Get Rich and in interviews. They reward the reader who is willing to be unfashionable, stubborn about equity, and honest about the price.
The principles
- 1.Keep every share you can.
- 2.Follow the queue, not the forecast.
- 3.Serve the obsessive reader first.
- 4.Look like the person who pays the bills.
- 5.Enter a big market with a format nobody respects.
- 6.Own the formula, not the star.
- 7.Walk into every negotiation ready to leave.
- 8.Let partners run what you only need to own.
- 9.Sell before the market tells you to.
- 10.Pay talent in cash, generously.
- 11.Turn an insult into fuel, then let it go.
- 12.Decide in advance what the money is for.
Dennis's central argument in How to Get Rich is that equity, not salary, talent or effort, is what separates the rich from the comfortable. Income stops when you stop working. A stake in a business keeps compounding when you are asleep, ill or on a beach in Mustique. For that reason, he argued, every percentage point is worth fighting for, and giving shares away should be the last resort rather than the default way to solve a problem.
His own record bears this out. He kept 100 percent of Dennis Publishing for its entire life, so he never answered to outside investors and captured all of the value when titles succeeded. When four key employees demanded 20 percent between them, he refused and accepted the risk that they would compete with him. He later valued that stake at around $80 million. At MicroWarehouse, the stake he held as a co-founder, rather than any role he played, produced most of his fortune.
The principle cuts both ways. Refusing equity to talented people can drive them out, and Dennis was lucky that the rival magazine failed. His answer was to pair stubbornness on ownership with generosity in other forms of pay (see Principle 10).
Tactic: Before offering equity to solve a hiring, funding or retention problem, list every non-equity alternative, such as bonuses, profit share or a later option grant, and price what the shares would be worth if the business succeeds.
Principle 2
Follow the queue, not the forecast.
Dennis's best ideas came from watching what people were already doing rather than from market research. A line of teenagers outside a Bruce Lee film became Kung-Fu Monthly. A colleague tinkering with a home computer became Personal Computer World. A British lad-mag boom, and the absence of anything like it in America, became American Maxim.
In each case the demand was visible before it was measurable. Established publishers wanted proof that the market was large before committing, and by the time the proof arrived Dennis was already selling to it. He described timing as his greatest strength, and his version of timing was mostly a habit of noticing unusual enthusiasm and asking what it wanted to buy.
This approach carries risk. Fads die, and Dennis's poster magazines lived and died with their subjects. He kept the risk small by launching cheaply and moving fast, so a wrong call cost little and a right one could be scaled immediately.
Tactic: Keep a running list of places where you see people queueing, paying over the odds, or improvising a product that does not yet exist, and review it monthly for any group no established company is serving.
Principle 3
Serve the obsessive reader first.
The Dennis portfolio was built on niches: motorcyclists, hi-fi enthusiasts, martial arts fans, early computer users, Macintosh owners, car buyers. Each group cared intensely about its subject, and people who care intensely buy every issue, trust specialist advice, and will pay for depth. Advertisers who need to reach them have few alternatives, which gives the publisher pricing power.
Dennis insisted that the reader, not the advertiser, came first, and said so publicly. The logic was commercial as well as sentimental. An engaged readership is the asset the advertiser is buying; a magazine that bends its content to please advertisers erodes the very thing it is selling.
Even Maxim, a mass-market title, was conceived as a niche product: a magazine for the ordinary young man that the upmarket men's titles had ignored. Its scale came from discovering that the niche was enormous.
Tactic: Define your customer as the most enthusiastic tenth of your market and design for them first; if they would not miss the product, the broader market will not notice it.
Principle 4
Look like the person who pays the bills.
At Oz, surrounded by colleagues in kaftans, Dennis wore suits to meet printers, distributors and advertisers. The magazine was chaotic, frequently late and constantly in legal trouble. His job was to persuade the people it owed money to that it was a going concern, and he dressed for that job rather than for the office.
The point was not conformity. Dennis remained a provocateur for life. It was that credibility with suppliers and customers is itself a business asset, and a small, unconventional venture needs more of it than a large, respectable one. The printer who believes he will be paid extends credit; the distributor who trusts you puts your title on the shelf.
The same instinct showed later in his willingness to spend lavishly on a launch when it mattered, such as the American edition of The Week, so that the product looked established from its first issue.
Tactic: Identify the three outside parties your business most depends on and ask what each needs to see to trust you, then make sure every interaction with them shows it, whatever the culture inside your own office.
Principle 5
Enter a big market with a format nobody respects.
When American Maxim launched in 1997, the editors of GQ and Esquire dismissed it as juvenile, and bankers said men did not read magazines. That contempt was an advantage. The incumbents saw no reason to respond to a magazine they considered beneath them, and by the time Maxim's circulation passed theirs, the market had already moved.
The poster magazines followed the same pattern. Serious publishers did not want to be in the business of folded posters, so Dennis and his partners had it to themselves, at margins that funded everything that came after.
A format that incumbents look down on can serve customers they have chosen to ignore. The risk is that disreputable products attract criticism, and Maxim drew plenty. Dennis accepted that trade knowingly.
Tactic: When an established competitor dismisses a product as beneath them, ask which customers they are ignoring by doing so, and whether you could serve those customers profitably.
Principle 6
Own the formula, not the star.
When Condé Nast poached Maxim's editor Mark Golin in 1999, Dennis replied with a joke press release naming a hamster as acting editor-in-chief. The stunt made the front of the Wall Street Journal's Marketplace section and made his point: Maxim's success belonged to the concept, which he controlled, not to any single employee. Golin's move to Details did not revive that magazine, and Maxim kept growing.
Dennis designed his magazines so that the formula, the voice, the format and the cover lines, were the durable asset. Vanity Fair reported that he refused to let his editors become celebrities and kept the final word on major editorial decisions. This made the company harder to raid and easier to replicate across dozens of international editions.
The cost was a culture in which, as one executive put it, you had to subordinate your ego to work for him. Some talented people would not accept that.
Tactic: Write down the formula that makes your product work, in enough detail that a capable new hire could reproduce it, and treat that document as a core company asset rather than leaving it in the heads of individual stars.
Principle 7
Walk into every negotiation ready to leave.
Both of Dennis's long-time American partners told Vanity Fair the same thing: very few negotiators are genuinely prepared to go to the brink and walk away, and Dennis always was. His refusal to hand over equity to the four executives was one example. His willingness to sell major titles, and his insistence on retaining The Week when he did, was another.
The ability to walk away comes from alternatives and from knowing your own limits in advance. Dennis owned his company outright, carried little outside pressure, and had several businesses generating cash, so no single negotiation was existential. That independence gave his threats credibility.
It also depended on temperament. Dennis enjoyed confrontation and competition, sometimes to excess, and a leader without that appetite may find this principle harder to live by.
Tactic: Before any significant negotiation, write down your walk-away point and your best alternative if the deal fails, and do not enter the room until the alternative is real enough that you would genuinely accept it.
Principle 8
Let partners run what you only need to own.
MicroWarehouse made Dennis more money than any magazine he published, and he did not run it. He co-founded the company with Peter Godfrey and Robert Bartner, relied on them and professional managers to operate it, and held his stake through its NASDAQ listing in 1992 and its sale at the start of 2000.
The same division of labour ran through his career. Dick Pountain was his operational partner from the 1970s; Godfrey and Bartner handled American distribution; editors ran the magazines within the formulas he set. Dennis concentrated on spotting opportunities, making big decisions and protecting ownership.
Owning a stake without controlling day-to-day operations requires trust in partners, which Dennis built over decades with a very small circle. His long partnerships were the exception in a career full of confrontation.
Tactic: For each business you hold a stake in, decide explicitly whether your role is operator or owner, and if it is owner, put your effort into choosing and backing the operators rather than second-guessing them.
Principle 9
Sell before the market tells you to.
Dennis sold Personal Computer World within three years of buying it, for about thirty times the price. He sold the American MacUser barely a year after launch. He sold his American men's titles in 2007, shortly before the financial crisis and the move of young readers to the web hit that market hard. In each case he took a large gain while buyers still believed in the growth story.
He made the point explicitly in How to Get Rich: an owner who waits for a business to peak before selling will usually wait too long, because the peak is only visible in hindsight. Selling while there is still upside left for the buyer is the price of getting out at a good valuation.
He did not sell everything. He kept The Week, the British computer titles and Auto Express, which fitted his long-term interests and threw off steady cash. Selling was a portfolio decision, not a reflex.
Tactic: Once a year, for each major asset, ask what a well-informed buyer would pay today and whether you would buy it back at that price; if the answer is no, begin preparing to sell.
Principle 10
Pay talent in cash, generously.
Dennis's refusal to give away shares was matched by a willingness to pay large bonuses for results. In How to Get Rich he said he rewarded senior managers with very large performance bonuses, amounting to millions over the years, while refusing them equity. He argued that this aligned incentives on the things that mattered, such as profit and growth, without diluting the owner.
He also believed in hiring people cleverer than himself and delegating to them. His method, as Marsha Rowe summarised it, was to spot a good idea, groom the talent a little, and then give staff the freedom to prove what they could do. He expected results and replaced people who did not deliver.
This combination, strong incentives tied to results, wide autonomy and no equity, is not for everyone. It worked for Dennis because he paid well enough that talented people stayed.
Tactic: Design bonus schemes around the two or three metrics that drive the value of your business, pay them promptly and visibly, and review whether top performers feel fairly rewarded before they start asking for shares.
Principle 11
Turn an insult into fuel, then let it go.
Judge Argyle's remark that Dennis was very much less intelligent than his co-defendants stayed with him for decades. Those who knew him said it haunted him. It is hard not to see some of his drive, the fortune, the poetry, the archive of his own life, as an answer to it.
When Argyle repeated the slur in The Spectator in 1995, Dennis sued the magazine and won a payment to charity. But he declined to sue the retired judge personally, saying there was no glory in taking an old man's house. He made his point and stopped there.
Anger can be a powerful motivator, but carried too long it distorts judgement. Dennis channelled his into building things and settled the account when he had the chance.
Tactic: When a slight is motivating you, write down what you intend to build or prove as a result, and set a point at which you will consider the score settled and stop spending energy on the person who caused it.
Principle 12
Decide in advance what the money is for.
How to Get Rich warns repeatedly that great wealth rarely brings happiness and often costs its owner time, health and relationships. Dennis spoke from experience. He spent much of the 1980s, by his own account, on drugs and excess that nearly killed him, and he regretted not having children.
In the last two decades of his life he found a purpose for the money: a native forest in the English Midlands, open to the public and meant to outlive him by centuries. He planted a million trees before his death and left most of his estate to the charity. The sale of Dennis Publishing after his death went to the same cause.
He did not claim that the forest redeemed everything that came before. But it gave the fortune a direction, and he was clear that anyone pursuing wealth should know what they wanted it for before they got it.
Tactic: Write a one-page statement of what you would do with the wealth you are pursuing, revisit it each year, and ask whether the way you are getting there is compatible with the life described on that page.
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Part IIIMaxims
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Disapproval is a distribution channel. Oz sold because respectable people hated it, and Maxim grew while rival editors sneered. A product that offends the right people can reach the right customers faster than a polite one.
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Hobbyists are the best early customers. They read everything, buy every issue, and tell their friends. Dennis built his first fortune by selling information to enthusiasts before the mainstream knew the subject existed.
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A small bet can buy a large option. Personal Computer World cost about £100,000 and opened the door to computer publishing, MacUser and MicroWarehouse. Cheap entries into growing fields can be worth far more than their price.
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Credibility is borrowed from how you behave. The hippie business manager in a three-piece suit got the printer paid and the magazine out. People lend trust to those who act as though they deserve it.
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Defend your company's value like territory. Every concession on price, terms or stake compounds over time. Dennis treated small percentages as if they were large, because in the long run they became large.
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The dismissive rival is a gift. Incumbents who think a newcomer is beneath them rarely respond in time. Their contempt buys the challenger years of unopposed growth.
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Confession can be a strategy. Dennis's frankness about his excesses made his business advice more believable. Readers trusted a rich man who admitted what it had cost him.
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Excess has a bill, and it arrives late. The drugs, the smoking and the drinking all came due. The money that paid for them could not buy back the years.
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Plant for people you will never meet. The forest was designed to mature long after its founder died. Some of the best uses of a fortune pay off only after the owner is gone.
In Their Own Words
We weren't trying to change the world. We were just trying to have fun and maybe make enough money to eat.— Felix Dennis
Maxim wasn't trying to be clever or sophisticated. It was trying to be entertaining. Sometimes that's exactly what people want.— Felix Dennis
Money doesn't make you happy, but it does make you unhappy in more interesting ways.— Felix Dennis
Getting rich is a knack, a knack that can be acquired. And if they can acquire it, so can you.— Felix Dennis
The key, I think, is to make money your servant, not your master. And never, ever, let it become your god.— Felix Dennis
Wealth is not about having a lot of money; it's about having a lot of options.— Felix Dennis
If you are unwilling to fail, sometimes publicly and even catastrophically, you will never be rich.— Felix Dennis
The belief that you can do something is more important than the knowledge of how to do it.— Felix Dennis
Ownership is not a game, nor is it a social activity. Ownership is a compulsion, an obsession, and unless you are obsessed with the idea of owning something, you probably won't.— Felix Dennis
Never trust a man who doesn't drink, and never trust a man who drinks too much. The first lacks imagination, the second lacks control.— Felix Dennis
Ideas are ten a penny. It's the execution that counts.— Felix Dennis
The enemy of great is not bad, it's good. Good is the enemy because it stops you from being great.— Felix Dennis
A magazine is not a business, it's a license to print money—if you know what you're doing.— Felix Dennis
The secret of successful publishing is to find out what people want to read and then give it to them.— Felix Dennis
In publishing, as in life, timing is everything. Launch too early and you're a pioneer. Launch too late and you're irrelevant.— Felix Dennis
If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never be original.— Felix Dennis
The biggest risk is not taking any risk at all.— Felix Dennis
I've made more money from my failures than from my successes. Failure teaches you what not to do next time.— Felix Dennis
When everyone else is being cautious, that's the time to be bold.— Felix Dennis
Life is short. Do what makes you happy, not what makes you rich. Though if you can do both, that's even better.— Felix Dennis
The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.— Felix Dennis
Success is not about the destination, it's about the journey. And the journey is a lot more interesting when you're not sure where you're going.— Felix Dennis
I've learned that making money is easy. Keeping it is hard. Enjoying it is harder still.— Felix Dennis
The most important thing I've learned is that you can't take it with you. So you might as well enjoy the ride.— Felix Dennis
Controversy sells magazines, but only if it's the right kind of controversy.— Felix Dennis
