Tony Elliott, founder and chairman of the Time Out empire, is not a man used to begging. But in 2008, his company, which had already been battered by the digital revolution, was in dire straits thanks to the recession. So Elliott went to his lender, Lloyds Banking Group, hat in hand. The meeting was tense, unpleasant.
“They said, ‘Tony, you keep on never getting the finances sorted out. Why don’t you look at what you really need?’” Elliott says.
Ultimately, Lloyds agreed to lend him about 6 million pounds, or about $12 million at the time—on the condition that he would sell the business. “It was a ghastly, ghastly, ghastly period; it was incredibly depressing,” Elliott adds.
Unable to find a buyer, he was forced to repay the debt himself, borrowing against his house in London suburb St. John’s Wood. He’s still bitter about the incident: “I put everything at risk.…What they were saying was, ‘We’ll let Time Out have up to 6.2 million, we’ll whack them for a fee, and we’ll have Tony sell the business!’”
It was quite a contrast from Elliott’s heyday. Now 64, he’d started Time Out on a shoestring—birthday money from his aunt—in 1968. But back then London had a vibrant underground music scene, and those were carefree days. The ads started flowing in, and when Elliott, who wasn’t so much in it for the money, ran into cash flow problems, he borrowed from his distributor. He hung with fellow independent publisher Felix Dennis and briefly dated Anna Wintour. Time Out started as a one-sheet pamphlet that he handed out himself and dedicated itself to the issues of the day: racial equality, police harassment. Over the years it shed its radical roots and swelled to a 110,000-circulation weekly at its peak, but it remained the trendy voice of London. There were troubles, sometimes, the kind that came with so many counterculture magazines—he ran it as a cooperative until 1981, and when he decided to give that up, his employees went on strike. Some split off to form their own publications based on the Time Out model. But they couldn’t compete; Elliott had the formula down.
