The back room broker
Published June 6, 2008. By Anna Richardson
The first thing you see on entering Kit van Tulleken’s Knightsbridge office is her collection of “tombstones”.
Crammed on a table near the door are about 40 perspex blocks, each emblazoned with
publisher logos—mementos of the deals The van Tulleken Company, the merger and
acquisition (M&A) specialist, has advised on over the last few years. It’s a roll call of some of
publishing’s biggest players, including von Holtzbrinck, Pearson, Reed Elsevier, Wolters
Kluwer, Springer and Informa.
In 1999, she even handled the sale of this very organ, brokering the deal between former
owners of The Bookseller, J Whitaker and Sons, and BPI Communications [now Nielsen].
Yet her clients are not just the big boys. Van Tulleken has particularly strong links with
independent and SME (small to medium enterprise) publishers, and recently advised on the
Piatkus deal with Little, Brown, and Haynes Publishing’s disposal of Sutton to NPI.
Clients are perhaps attracted to the company’s legendary discretion. Van Tulleken explains:
“We tend to do small, discreet auctions. We don’t do mailings—you wouldn’t just find a
document from us asking if this would be something that would appeal to you. We would have
a discussion with the decision maker. If you go to the top of the company, they are going to tell
you right away.” Her discretion continues even decades after deals have been done, as she
deftly avoids discussing specifics, either on or off the record.
“Our first driver is quality,” van Tulleken says, pointing to last July’s Piatkus deal as an
example. “Piatkus was a wonderful publishing house. The quality was there, it was very well
run, very clean. [Founder Judy Piatkus] is an amazing entrepreneur and was a fantastic client.
When she decided to sell, she was committed to it, and very pragmatic about it.”
Recently van Tulleken also had to be committed and pragmatic. In April she agreed to sell the
company to merchant bank Quayle Munro Holdings. Van Tulleken was not looking to sell,
but she had a long standing relationship
with Quayle Monro chief executive Peter Norris.
“It wasn’t a formal approach. It was an unusually good cultural fit. They have different
strengths to us, but we are both defined by the building of relationships,” she says.
Van Tulleken says the sale will allow her company to compete for larger assignments, while
Quayle Munro will benefit from establishing an American presence through van Tulleken’s
Stateside office. The sale includes the transfer of the 15-strong van Tulleken team in its
London and New York offices to Quayle Munro. Both London groups will soon move to shared
office space, and eventually the van Tulleken group will be renamed under the Quayle Munro
banner.
Despite the name change, van Tulleken insists she has no plans to move on. “Not only am I
not thinking of leaving but if I sensed that they wanted me to leave, then the deal wouldn’t
have happened,” she says.
Born and raised in Canada, van Tulleken moved to the UK in the late 1960s when her
husband began a course at the Royal College of Art. Her first love was journalism and she
worked at Queen magazine (later renamed Harper’s and Queen), as a freelance broadcaster
for the BBC and for 14 years as European editor for Time-Life Books.
Her entry into the world of M&A was abrupt. “I did the classic thing of waking up one morning
and thinking, ‘I’ll do something else.’ I just thought it was time. I think it was the same reason
people often decide to sell their businesses. It wasn’t necessarily a logical plan.”
She took up an offer from Munroe Pofcher, founder of The Pofcher Company, to work on the
investment bank’s publishing and intellectual property portfolio. “I really did love the deal
business. It was tremendously interesting, and in an industry I had known.”
When Pofcher died in 1995, van Tulleken took over and renamed the business. The van
Tulleken Company’s first deal, the $82m sale of US educational publisher National Textbook
Company to Tribune Publishing, was conducted a short while later. “It was nice for me starting
out,” van Tulleken says. “I think I started with liabilities. A lease in London, a lease in New
York, five people on staff. But we had some very, very supportive clients early on.”
Three years later, Andrew Adams joined van Tulleken and she continued to drive the business
forward, advising on about 10 to 12 deals a year. Van Tulleken concedes that the current
economic downturn has affected the industry, with the difference felt in the larger and mid-cap
players whose share price has been affected by the downturn and who may be “happy to sit
on their hands a bit”. The private equity presence has also changed: “We’re finding they are
still there, but they can’t get the leverage they could have, say, a year ago.”
Van Tulleken itself is “very busy” she says. “We closed some super deals in the first quarter of
this year. They tend to be information businesses, underpinned by technology. If they are highquality, growing subscription businesses, then the appetite is still great.”
The art of the deal, van Tulleken says, is about discretion and building relationships. “There
was a wonderful deal maker named André Meyer who said, ‘the deal business is 10% financial
analysis and 90% psychoanalysis’. And he was right. Even with all the financial analysis and
everything that everyone goes through, if you don’t get the people part right it’s very difficult to
be successful and to enjoy the business.”
Her former clients seem to agree. Cavendish founder Sonny Leong—who sold his business to
Informa in 2006—says: “When you decide to sell or leave the industry, you are going through
an emotional rollercoaster. Van Tulleken is there not just to advise what is best for the
business, but they are also there to offer emotional support and emotional intelligence.
“They are the best. Not the cheapest, but the best.”