Mike Soutar has been embroiled in the magazine business from the moment that he left school, aged 17, to work at as beauty editor of DC Thomson’s women’s magazine Secrets, which specialised in romantic stories aimed at elderly women. After that unlikely start for the lad from Dundee, Mr Soutar headed to London and became editor of Emap’s Smash Hits by the time he was 23 – where he won the support of David Arculus, who, now knighted, is the lead backer of Mr Soutar’s latest venture. Mike Soutar spent much of the next decade knee deep in the lads’ mag market; in 1994 he was handed the task of editing For Him magazine, then a little-known style title owned by Emap, with a circulation of around 50,000. Initially, the goal was to overtake GQ, then the market leader, but the market changed dramatically after the rival publisher IPC launched Loaded.

But for all the impact of Loaded – the title that defined the lads’ mag revolution – it was For Him, rebranded as FHM, which ended up the market leader, with sales that peaked at over 800,000.

Brief spells running Kiss FM, the dance music radion station, launch-editing Felix Dennis’s Maxim in the United States and involvement in an unsuccessful bid by a Chris Evans-led consortium to buy the Daily Star, all followed. Mr Souter was to have been editor, but the Evans’ bid, supported by Matthew Freud, collapsed at the last minute.

Instead, the Scot came back to act as editorial director of IPC, brought back by Arculus to work with then chief executive Sly Bailey – where he helped to oversee the launch of Nuts, one of the titles he is setting himself against before leaving after a sharp falling out with Bailey’s successor, Sylvia Auton.

That led him to set up a small magazine development consultancy, whilst looking for new projects to develop.

Despite the focus on men, Mr Soutar has never pretended to live the lads lifestyle. Married to Bev Hillier with two children, a 19-year-old stepson and a son, 16, he used to go home at 5pm on Mondays whilst editing FHM “just so my wife could go to yoga lessons”.