John Josephs, Non-executive chairman, Washington Display Ltd

Oct 11 2010 by Karen Dent, The Journal

John Josephs says he always knew he was going to be an accountant but he had no idea he would play an integral part in changing the face of radio. Karen Dent hears how the current North East Non-Executive Director of the Year took a chance with Metro Radio and caught the broadcasting bug.

THE fact he would become an accountant was "drilled into" John Josephs' subconscious from an early age by his parents - and it's a choice he's never regretted.

“My parents had ‘the shop’ – a wholesale fashion warehouse on Westmoreland Road. I think it’s the last old building still standing, it’s got the motif of the Tyne Bridge on the side,” says the 66-year-old, who was born and bred in Newcastle.

“They ran a small business and they encouraged me and my brother not to do their business, but to become accountants. We both did.

“I always knew that I was going to be an accountant – I never thought about any other profession. In those days you did what your parents said.

“So I went to university, I did economics with accounting, and I think that’s been the foundation for everything that’s followed. That’s the great virtue of an accountancy qualification – it equips you for anything afterwards.”

He was working at Robert Miller Tate in Newcastle in the early 1970s when the opportunity came to dip his toe into something completely new and different.

“One of my first clients was what in those days was called a continuity announcer at Tyne Tees TV,” he says.

“A guy called Bruce Lewis came to me one day and said ‘commercial radio’s coming to Britain’. He was setting up a group to apply for the first licence for Tyne and Wear.

“The story I like to tell is that he said ‘I’ve got the North East’s leading industrialist as chairman (Sir John Hunter of Swan Hunter) and I want the North East’s leading accountant to do the numbers’.

“But actually what he said was ‘I need someone to do the numbers for nothing’, so I did the numbers for nothing on the basis that if we won, there’d be something in it for me.”

That something was becoming Metro Radio’s auditor or part-time finance director. He opted for the latter and had parallel careers from 1973 until 1988, when Metro was about to float.

Running what was effectively a new industry in the UK wasn’t always plain sailing.

“We had the BBC and we had commercial television, but in the concept of radio, this kind of format was something new,” he says.

“In the very early days, Metro was a very small business. There were massive problems in the beginning because the climate was not dissimilar to what we’re in now.

“Metro actually launched when we were in the middle of the three-day week. It wasn’t really the right timing and actually we ran out of money after three months. Fortunately, John Hunter was very well connected and he believed in the business, and we were able to get a second and a third round of funding to keep things going.

“The first time we ran out of money, John said to me and the chief executive Neil Robinson: ‘In my experience, it takes five years to establish a business – the goodwill, reputation, something new in the business model – and if you believe in the business, you’ve got to back it’.

“He believed in it and he was able to get it funded. We had fantastic people at Metro Radio and I never really doubted it would be a success, although I’m not sure I imagined at the beginning – especially in the dark days – that it would be the success story that it actually turned out to be.”

Broadcasting finally won out over accountancy in 1988, when Metro was on the eve of flotation and the managing director retired. Josephs agreed to take his place.

“There aren’t many people who get the opportunity at 45 to change career in what I reckoned was a no-risk scenario – if it didn’t work at Metro or I didn’t like it, I could always go back to being a chartered accountant.

“Fortunately, I didn’t have to make that decision,” he says.

“Yes, it changed my life. I famously said to my wife when we were discussing me moving to Metro ‘It won’t be like being in practice, it’ll be much more nine-to-five’, and she said ‘That’s great’.

Of course, nothing could’ve been further from the truth.

“I think I’ve been incredibly lucky in my life. I can almost count on one hand the number of times I’ve woken up and thought ‘****! I’ve got to go to work today’, whereas most people wake up like that every day.”

He says it was inevitable that another media group would come sniffing around Metro and in 1995 the business was sold to Emap.

“It was one of the most attractive businesses in the radio sector – it had a fantastic reputation for sales, creativity and the audiences we were able to develop.

“When Century launched in Newcastle in 1994, that was the first commercial rival to Metro. The programme proposition was quite tightly defined and it was quite different to Metro in that it had to have speech content at certain hours of the day etc. Now, I know it’s changed its name, but you probably can’t tell the difference. Then there’s Galaxy, Smooth ... I don’t listen to any of them any more. I only listen to Radio Five – I’m too old!”

The changes in the industry presented a business opportunity and after Metro’s sale, Josephs set up the Radio Partnership with three colleagues from the Tyneside station.

“I could see what was happening in the radio industry. It went from being tightly regulated to being deregulated, and I knew that the FM spectrum was limited,” he said.

“So the existing licences would have a value, which I thought would only go up, and I thought it was the opportunity to build another business.

“I was very lucky to be able to get the backing from HSBC and 3i for the Radio Partnership.”

The business took over nine UK radio stations and successfully bid for two new licences.

In 1999, while seeking funding for a further acquisition, the team received a £47m offer for the whole business from Kelvin McKenzie’s Wireless Group.

“It was one of those offers that you can’t refuse. I think with the benefit of hindsight, that was the top of the market for radio and we should’ve retired then. But we had a third go, which wasn’t quite as successful.

“The same team, basically, formed a third business called Forever Broadcasting. We floated on the AIM market and raised £15m, just as the tech and media bubble was about to burst.

“The bad news was that things that had gone up so quickly in the late 1990s started to come down again.

“Although we did quite well at the operating level of the businesses that we bought, we were the victim of the general sentiment.”

By then, Josephs was approaching 60 and decided he might retire. But that didn’t last long.

“I would hate to wake up in the mornings and think ‘I don’t know what to do today’. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself,” he says.

He’s certainly not one to sit still for long. He may be in his mid-60s but he runs six days a week. Indeed, he has lifetime membership with the Heaton Harriers, where he has run for more than 30 years.

Running was initially a lifestyle choice – his father died at 54 from his second heart attack – but is now an integral part of his day.

“It’s like getting up in the morning and having your breakfast. Running is just part of my life. I can’t imagine not running,” he says.

“I’ve done about 15 races since the beginning of April and I have a couple more to go. The nice thing about running is there are competitions for a number of age groups.

“Of course, as you get older, the number of competitors in each age group reduces – so when I’m 85, I’ll be the only one!

“It’s very mentally relaxing, a great stress reliever and often you have some of your best ideas when you are running.”

When he “retired”, Josephs wasn’t quite what sure what was round the corner, but he is now as busy as ever with his non-exec directorships.

“I just missed going to work every day,” he says. “One of my former non-executive directors, Dennis Cassidy, said to me ‘If you put yourself about a bit, and it’s something you want to do, it might take you six or nine months to get some appointments, but you can be as busy as you want to be because there’s a need for it’.”

He won the 2009 Journal Non-Executive Director of the Year title for his work with Washington Display and also works with organisations including Mincoffs solicitors, Citri Financial Management, Fighters Only and the North East Regional Investment Fund 3 Ltd. His initial experience of non-executive directorship was while he was still at Metro.

“It was things to do with the radio industry so, for example, I was on the board of Independent Radio News,” he said.

“And Newcastle United – for a very short while. I was brought on to the board after Freddy Shepherd and Douglas Hall were forced to resign and then decided to use their voting power to have themselves re-appointed.”

Josephs himself then resigned on principle, but he is a lifelong Magpies fan.

“I don’t go as often as I used to,” he admits. “I think that football’s been spoilt by the money and the foreign mercenaries, so I don’t feel the same way about football as I used to.

“Ten years ago, if I’d been going to London as often as I do now, I’d have chosen when I went so I didn’t miss any home games.

“Now I just go and if I miss a match, I miss a match.”

His three children – Danny and David are in advertising and Kate is a lawyer – live in London, so he and wife Marion are frequent visitors.

“I’ve lived in Newcastle all my life apart from my three-year training contract when I was studying to be a chartered accountant,” he says.

“I went to university here, I went to London for three years to get my accountancy qualification and came back to Newcastle.

“I hated London and I love Newcastle.”

But he does enjoy travel and of the hit-list he drew up on retiring, he has ticked off the Galapagos Islands, Alaska and New Zealand. In January, he’s off to South America and is currently in Israel.

That trip is the first opportunity to try his new toy – an electronic book reader.

“I’m an avid reader. That’s why I bought an Amazon Kindle because of the storage space.

“I thought I could store them electronically rather than physically,” he says

“I had a big problem when we moved because I must have had a thousand books scattered around my house in various places and I just couldn’t bring them all here.

“I’m about to load up because we’re going away, rather than have six books in my rucksack.

“You are never too old to learn new things. One of the messages that I’ve tried to impart to the people that I’ve got involved with – that I learned very early on – is that you’ve got to be forever a scholar.

“You’re never too old to learn. You can learn something new every day.”