Brian Barberton was a significant figure in the formation of MRM and his impact pre dates the founding of the business. His influence on Peter's early career was enormous having initially worked together at NCH (Valassis), in later years he invited Peter to join Forefront - a regional Sales Promotion agency in Leicester which was part of the London based WLK Group, who at the time were among the leading SP agencies in the UK. Within 18 months both had returned to Valassis as senior Directors.
In setting up MRM, the vision was clear - offering more services to fewer clients. The inspiration had been seeded during Peter and Brian’s time at Valassis, where the reverse was the business model, offering one service to many clients. Under Brian and Peter’s management Valassis had briefly expanded its services beyond processing coupons but this move into “full services” was not appreciated by Valassis’s American owners who preferred to limit the operation to coupon processing.
Peter explains, “MRM was born out of a sequence of fortunate circumstances. The first was that the facility we still operate in today became available following the winding-up of Alan Wells Publishing Services. The second was that MRM Distribution Services, the market leading door to door company at the time, actually beat us to the purchase of the AWPS business but had no real plans for it other than as a central distribution depot for its D2D operation. The third aspect was that our ambitions were to build a mainstream marketing services business from the available clients who were about to be served notice by Valassis. This embryonic opportunity of the right premises, the right services and the right partnership between Brian, Peter and MRM Distributions created an irresistible opportunity to found the business.
Conceived in June 1993 the business quickly recruited an impressive pool of clients including Rothmans, Esso, Lyons Tetley and IPC Media.
Yet tragically, after just 8 months, Brian died at the tender age of just 40 - a personal loss for Peter and a massive loss for the wider business, all of whom Brian had energised with his passion and vision for the future. Significantly, his blueprint of open services, agility, consultative, can do culture remains every bit a part of our DNA today as it was in the beginning.
In delivering more services to fewer clients, we recognised the need to truly engage with clients in order to build deeper commercial relationships. But it's as true today as it was 25 years ago that once won, those relationships need maintaining. As Peter says, “expect to be measured by the last job, not your first”.
“Right from the start, we were able to attract a heady mixture of mainstream promotional and specialist couponing projects, often on a significant scale. Interesting that even then we were establishing a core service in business process outsourcing (BPO) that we still deliver today.” And significantly, with a mix of existing publishing business clients and business that followed Peter and Brian, MRM was profitable as it entered its first full year of trading.
TO BE CONTINUED...