Andy Baker

Andy Baker has spent the last decade leading the transformation of two B2B brands, the Health Service Journal (HSJ) and The Lawyer. In both cases, as Managing Director, Andy led the teams that turned decline into growth, transformed the brands from being print-centric to digitally-led, and most profoundly, from being over-dependent on advertising and events to being market-leading subscription plays. Andy led the sale of HSJ from Ascential plc to Wilmington plc for £19m in 2017. Andy is a non-executive director at Faversham House which owns leading publishing brands including Utility Week and Edie.

He is passionate about subscriptions and his teams’ successes have come primarily through:

· building enterprise-wide subscriptions businesses from scratch;

· launching new, data-rich intelligence products ('HSJ Intelligence'; The Lawyer’s 'Litigation Tracker' & 'Signal' products);

· securing market-leading renewal rates and price increases to establish the true value of content;

· focussing on digital usage by subscribers, including the launch of 'Horizon by The Lawyer', a 7am daily slice of market intelligence, which gained over 2m opens in its inaugural year.

Andy usually works with Collingwood Advisory https://collingwood-advisory.com/ on assignments for independent and founder-run businesses. He personally leads all assignments at SubsStrategy, working with senior professionals in his network to help deliver on larger engagements.

Andy’s LinkedIn & recommendations:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyrbaker/

Interviews:

https://collingwood-advisory.com/news/andy-baker-the-journey-to-subscriptions/· https://www.inpublishing.co.uk/articles/from-controlled-circ-to-enterprise-subs-17037

https://www.inpublishing.co.uk/articles/andy-baker-interview-966