My American Mentor, By Nick Ferris

I’ve talked in other articles about the importance of mentorships and helping others and I’d like to share one of my own experiences of someone who did the same to me. Don’t forget to also check out Nick Ferris-Senior Media Executive on Medium.

I first came to the US from the UK in 2001. August 2001 in fact. I know pretty bad timing, but that is another story in itself. I was working at Euromoney Institutional Investor. It’s a financial publishing company effectively, similar to say Bloomberg, but less data driven and more focused on vertical publishing of magazines, newsletters, journals and conferences.

I was running several groups within the company as was typical at the time – after eight years I had quite a large portfolio of products and employees.

One of the divisions I was fortunate enough to be running was the directory publishing unit, which published data on people in the financial markets. I’ve talked about the challenges of that group transitioning from print to online in other articles, but when I came to the USA one of the many things I was looking for was strategic acquisitions.

The Leadership Directories, known as the Yellow Books at the time, were high on my radar. It was a small company I had taken note of for a few years and had a great reputation, especially in the political corridors of Washington. If you wanted to get hold of your representative or his staff or pretty much anyone in politics, you turned to the Yellow Books. You had copies of the Yellow Books on your bookshelf. As Coldplay would say, everything would be Yellow.

I thought this would make an ideal acquisition – it was a growing company, with a great reputation and would complement our existing product line. So as is usual in these situations, I, Nick Ferris reached out to the head of the company, Donald Petrie.At first my calls went unanswered. He had no email at the time (as was often the case back then) and so my opportunities to reach out were somewhat limited. After a number of reach outs when I was about to give up I finally received a communication back, via Fax.

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