THE door flies open, Roger Parry enters stage left in green raincoat and brown fedora.
“God, it’s cold outside,” he says, rubbing his hands.
Off come the hat and coat to reveal a gold brocade waistcoat buttoned tightly over an expanding tum. With his bald pate and puckish nose gleaming red, and beady eyes sparkling behind frameless glasses, he looks like he could be doing a turn as a children’s magician.
But Parry, 52, a bluff talker of famed gregariousness, is a man of many parts. Former TV journalist and ex-bag-carrier for Maurice and Charles Saatchi, he has moved through the management consultant McKinsey, magazines, newspapers and the poster business to sit as chairman of a clutch of media firms and of Shakespeare’s Globe Trust, the body that funds the landmark theatre.
And last week Parry added another role to his repertoire, popping up in private-equity group Permira’s bid to buy HMV, the music-and-books retailer that also owns Waterstone’s. The bid was made at 190p per share, valuing HMV at £762m, with Parry as Permira’s pick to head the group. It was rebuffed the same day and when we met, two cold souls in the Globe’s balcony meeting room overlooking the river, everyone was waiting to see what happens next.
For Parry, soon to stand down as chairman of advertising group Clear Channel International, it was the culmination of six months of secret work with Permira, poring over the HMV business and preparing its attack plan. Well, not quite attack, perhaps. “This is a friendly approach,” he corrects me.
The Permira strategy, if the bid is successful, would be to push HMV more deeply into e-tailing, using the power of the internet to support its shop chains and fight off Amazon, iTunes and others. It would also hope to keep most of the company’s management together, under Parry, while changing the financial structure round them.
Parry doesn’t expect anyone at HMV, which recently announced slumping sales, to feel threatened by the bid, he stresses.
“It is not as if we are a trade rival.” It’s more designed to get the board to start talking. I have to be careful what I say about the mechanics of the bid,” he nods, “but normally a dialogue would now start.”
And if it doesn’t, will the bid be raised? “You’d have to ask Permira,” he smiles. “They’re the offerer.”
Charming, chatty and something of a showman, Parry volleys back the queries with obvious relish. That makes his marriage with press-shy Permira seem an efficient mix of opposites.
So who chose whom? Parry grins. Bit of both, he says. Permira’s interest in HMV chimed with his own. He had long been curious about the company, not least because its former chairman, Robin Miller, who left last year, is an old friend.
“Robin wouldn’t tell me why he left. It just piqued my interest. I was surprised they hadn’t got into e-tailing and downloading. I started talking to Permira, and said I thought there might be a different business model here, and they said, funny, we were thinking that, too.”
But what does Parry know about retail? He has headed the international division of Clear Channel, the world’s biggest outdoor advertiser, for a decade, having bought into the poster business with an investment in More O’Ferrell. He also chairs Johnston Press, owner of the Scotsman newspaper, and Future, the magazine group. No shops there.
He did cover retail for McKinsey, however, and his father, long ago, ran a department store in Epsom, Surrey. “But the reason I’m interested in HMV is that it is a little bit like More O’Ferrell was. The industry it’s in is undergoing radical, technological change, with the arrival of e-tailing and downloading, and the changing nature of high-street shopping.
“And to me HMV and Waterstone’s are demonstrably strong retailing brands — there is opportunity if you can ride the change-wave right.”
The key, he says, is that HMV has been slow to embrace the internet, which is why its sales are slipping away.
“In a way,” he says, “they are victims of their own success because they were and are such good high-street retailers.
“But they should have been first into the internet. They had the brands, the relationships with suppliers, the credibility with customers, but they were slow.”
So what would he and Permira do? “Well, our detailed plan is this thick,” he says, raising his hand a foot off the table, “but broadly our approach is bricks and clicks, shops and internet.”
And the shops would stay? “Yes.”
Will they keep Waterstone’s? “The combination of the two is a very powerful proposition across all the ranges and demographics.”
Slashing costs? “HMV is not a candidate for significant cost-cutting, the management has been tight and careful.”
So what can he and Permira add? “Remember, I haven’t met the HMV management yet but my assumption is that they have strong retail fundamentals and we want to build on those.
“The issue isn’t so much about changing the management as changing the strategic direction.”
Then he expects to run the business for profit, rather than a quick trade sale or flotation. “We haven’t decided what will happen three to five years down the line.”
Parry is a good salesman, as you’d expect from someone who has spent three decades leaping between different arms of the media. Born an only child, brought up in Carshalton, Surrey, he trained initially as a geologist, but with a background in student politics and a yen to get involved in people businesses, he soon looked elsewhere for work.
He took a first job after university with the Saatchi brothers, who were just starting up, so you could say he learnt at the feet of masters.
That seven-month stint — much of it spent paying off the parking tickets of the Saatchis’ then-finance director, Martin Sorrell — was to prove the formative moment of a long media career. “In a way it was really dangerous because, watching them, it led me to think you could do anything.”
And Parry more or less has, working for the BBC and Thames TV as a reporter, joining McKinsey as a consultant, helping to restructure advertising groups WCRS and Aegis, then bidding for and winning the LBC radio franchise, selling it on, re-investing the profit in More O’Ferrell, later sold to Clear Channel in 1998 with Parry at the helm.
He has made money along the way, and appears driven by chirpy, almost naive confidence. “Roger is not racked by self-doubt,” says one ex-colleague.
But is he restless? “Actually,” says Parry, “I don’t think I have been restless enough.”
His success at Clear Channel, where he has spent nearly $2 billion (£1.1 billion) on acquisitions and which now has interests in theatres, concerts, even public lavatories (they come with the poster sites), as well as advertising, has given him profile, but not the top media jobs that others say he craves.
Those who work with Parry describe him an exemplary chairman: authoritative but with few airs and graces. “He’s a great strategic thinker, very organised but very creative, very stimulating, too,” says Tim Bowdler, Johnston’s chief executive.
Greg Ingham, his chief executive at Future, cites his easy way with people and his agility in jumping from sector to sector. “I think he likes fresh things. He wears his authority very lightly.”
Parry certainly networks well, slotting into various social circles — “the Zelig of the media world,” as one dubs him — and hosting an annual summer party that competes with Sir David Frost’s.
That connectivity, boosted by his chairmanship of the Globe Trust, makes Parry a ubiquitous presence for many.
Permira will be hoping some of that rubs off on their HMV bid, especially if other bidders emerge. Parry himself likes the challenge, and the chance to make some serious money. “I want to do something with a higher risk/reward profile.”
To that end, he is likely to put up to £1m of his own money into the bid.
“You get a relatively low salary and if it all works, you make a big capital gain at the end. And if it doesn’t, you don’t. That’s fair.”
He already has a nice house in Kensington and another in Hampshire. His Canadian wife, Johanna Waterous, is a senior partner at McKinsey. They are not, you would think, short of a bob or two.
Waterous, intriguingly, is also one of McKinsey’s top retail experts, but Parry says she didn’t even know about the HMV bid until last week. “The Chinese walls in my house are thick,” he says.
Anyway, he has a stage to be photographed on, and time is running out. He hands me two business books he has written, and exits cheerily, as he came, shouting that he’s shortly off on holiday, skiing in Canada. Shouldn’t he be waiting for more from HMV? He’s gone.
Vital statistics
Born: June 4, 1953
Marital status: married, with one child
School: Sutton Grammar School, south London
University: Bristol and Oxford
First job: personal assistant, Maurice and Charles Saatchi
Salary package: £1m
Car: blue BMW B10 Alpina
Homes: Kensington and Hampshire
Favourite book: Brideshead Revisited
Favourite music: U2
Top film: LA Confidential
Favourite gadget: Blackberry
Last holiday: Bahamas
Interests: skiing, tennis, theatre
Roger Parry's Working Day
THE chairman of Clear Channel International wakes before 7am to the Today programme on Radio 4. Roger Parry then often eats breakfast out, at The Ritz or The Wolseley. “Scrambled eggs and tomatoes if I’m out, muesli if I’m at home,” he reveals.
He walks to work and deals with e-mails and typing his own letters for the first hour. “Then I spend most of my time out, meeting shareholders or bankers in the City, or conducting job interviews at The Globe.
“Occasionally I will have lunch with an advertiser to talk about the magazine or newspaper business.”
He likes to finish work at 6pm. “If someone is around, I will have a drink in the pub, and am usually home by 7pm. My wife is now so senior at McKinsey she can get home by then. She leaves before me in the mornings.”
Working Space
ROGER PARRY works from a top-floor office at Clear Channel’s headquarters in London, a modern five-storey block designed by Lorenzo Apicella off the Cromwell Road in west London.
His office has glass walls and a painting by Roy Freer.
“I collect modern art,” says Parry, “in particular two Canadian artists, Chris Griffin and Scott Steele.”
The room is furnished with a desk, small meeting table and chairs. Pictures of Parry’s wife and son, and a photo of his racehorse, Voicemail, provide a personal touch.
His desk is kept tidy. “That’s from McKinsey, really. They had a clear-desk policy and I have never looked back,” he explains. Three mobile phones sit on his desk. “One is an incredibly fancy 3G phone, given to me by another company I chair, which I find hard to use.”
