Felix Dennis is very rich. Exactly how rich is open to debate, but he’s not going to quibble over the odd million here or there. Dennis has been building his publishing empire for the best part of 40 years. He’s squandered more cash in a single year than many of us will earn in a lifetime. He has the houses, the cars, the boats and planes, the wine cellar, the library of first edition novels, the fine art, the sprawling Soho pied à terre—and the brash, thunderous voice of a man who is used to getting things done his way.
The door to Dennis’s office is wide open, allowing his words to boom out into reception and beyond. One of his managers appears to be on the receiving end of both barrels: “I don’t want to hear it can’t be done, because they’re already doing it!” he cries.
Dennis appears shortly afterwards, ushering me upstairs to the flat above his office. He grabs a bottle of “beautiful” Pinot Gris from the fridge—“I get 40 cases sent over from France every year: straight to ‘the mad rosbif’”—and plonks himself down at the kitchen table, immediately lighting the first of many cigarettes he’ll smoke during the interview.
Dennis wants to talk about his new book, How to Get Rich. What he doesn’t want to talk about is his 1971 spell in jail for “conspiracy to corrupt public morals” as co-editor of Oz, the legendary underground satirical magazine.
Unfortunately for Dennis, the subject is unavoidable, partly because he has the front pages of the newspapers reporting the trial framed on his kitchen wall, and partly because Dennis’s early run-in with the law became the driving force behind his subsequent quest for riches. Almost certainly a factor was the decision of the judge, Justice Michael Argyle, to give Dennis a shorter sentence than his co-defendants on the grounds that he was “very much less intelligent” than they were, and therefore couldn’t be apportioned as much blame.
Dennis sees it differently. “We had no ability to defend ourselves because we were poor,” he says. “We could march elephants through the streets of London, we could get thousands of demonstrators out to support us, and we could persuade John Lennon to release a single [which he did—it was called God Save Oz] “but we couldn’t defend ourselves. It was then that I decided the only way to protect myself in the future was to have a ridiculous amount of money at my disposal.”
Dennis set about building his publishing empire, throwing money at risky ventures with a healthy insouciance that years of experience have done little to temper. How to Get Rich is full of business anecdotes in which Dennis ignores his directors, his accountants, his lawyers—and plumps for good old gut instinct. Even now he encourages his managers to spend money and make mistakes. “If the worst happens and they spend a few million and only get half of it back, it’s not the end of the world—at least they’ll have learnt a lesson,” he says.
Dennis has always run businesses by the seat of his pants. Fellow publisher Lord Heseltine says he’s one of a kind. “I don’t know if there’s room for another Felix in Britain—he’s a one-off: an energetic, imaginative publisher with a good track record of creating successful enterprises. How to get rich?” chuckles Heseltine. “Well, he’d certainly know.”
Dennis is a little intimidating at first. “Aren’t you a little young to be doing an interview this big?” he booms. He follows this with a puzzling tribute to manners: “You do meet a lot of aggressive entrepreneurs who have forgotten any semblance of courtesy and politeness. They’d be far richer if they learnt to become polite.”
So, he’s rich, but is he happy? “Who have you ever met, apart from a bride on her wedding day, who has said, ‘I’m happy’?” he fires back. “My point in the book is that wealth doesn’t confer automatic happiness, whereas people who are not wealthy but very much want to be, believe it will confer almost automatic and unrelieved happiness,” he says. “This is not true. Part of the reason is that to get the wealth you have to behave in a way that will definitely not make you happy.” He finds this hysterical—a punchy, hacking laugh threatens to overwhelm him. “It’s a beautiful circularity,” he adds, recovering his composure.
In one memorable chapter of the book he introduces a fictional brother, asking for a share of the business in return for his support. “There’s only one way to be rich,” says Dennis. “You’ve got to abuse your brother, shout at him, browbeat him and have temper tantrums—anything so that you own the company and he works for it.” He’s equally Thatcherite with suppliers, claiming he’d put them all out of business if it meant getting richer himself. “Yes I would,” he confirms. “I wouldn’t be happy about it, but I would do it in a heartbeat. I’m in the business to get rich by any legitimate means whatsoever. And if that means stiffing my brother, then I’m going to stiff him.”
Dennis makes no apologies for avarice—he regularly gives vast chunks of his fortune away to friends and charities—but more importantly, he doesn’t try to hide anything. His book is a warts-and-all guide to riches, and he’s happy to share his numerous errors. A middle-aged wobble, when he managed to blow over £50m in seven years on booze, drugs and prostitutes, is a painful case in point. In the end, intense paranoia—the result of a £1,000-a-day crack cocaine habit—forced him onto the straight and narrow. It’s a period of his life he deeply regrets and he wants his book to dissuade others from falling into the same trap. “As a result of my [business] obsession I have no family,” he says. “I didn’t create one.” And as for other outside interests: “If I can enjoy writing and performing poetry now, why the hell did I only start in 2000? What was the matter with me? I must have been mad.”
He’s still writing, and in 2002 released a poetry collection called A Glass Half Full, which, barring a couple of snooty reviews, has been well received: American novelist and critic Tom Wolfe called him “a 21st century Kipling”.
Wealth has also afforded Dennis the luxury of choosing not-for-profit projects, such as plans to plant the UK’s largest broadleaf forest. Although he won’t say where it is, the “Forest of Dennis”, as it will be known, could stretch to 30,000 acres. He rejects the suggestion that philanthropy is about legacy—the desire to leave a footprint. “I don’t think mega-rich people give a damn what society thinks,” he says. “I certainly don’t. Politicians become obsessed with legacy, but I don’t think very rich people do.” When he’s not adding acres to his forest, Dennis will be keeping a close—but not too close—eye on his publishing company, which owns IT, lifestyle, motoring and gambling titles. He sounds like a fun boss to work for, not least for his laissez faire attitude and novel take on management speak. Companies, he says, should foster a spirit of entrepreneurialism, not team spirit. They should be “ruthless meritocracies”. Team spirit, he says, “is the glue that binds losers together. We’re not in this together. Either one or many bastards own the company you work for. Do you think for a moment that those owners give a monkey’s about you? If you wish to become wealthy, you have to see [team spirit] for the hypocritical balm that it is. Why are we talking about team spirit, you know, what about me?”
As chairman of the board, he gives himself certain vetoes over his directors: they can’t buy or sell a substantial asset, move headquarters, vote anyone on or off the board, or pay themselves bonuses or a salary increase—without consulting him first. “Outside of those vetoes, you must permit your senior managers to do whatever they want,” he says. “I may desperately disagree with what they’re doing, but because they don’t fall within the very few vetoes I have, they can prove to me I’m wrong. That’s why we have the lowest manager turnover in the industry—to get rid of them you’ve got to get the crowbars in at Dennis publishing.”
How to Get Rich might discourage as many new millionaires as it helps to create—his anecdotes are painful and his caveats numerous—but there’s no doubt in Dennis’s mind that the more millionaires there are, the better things will be. “If you took all the guys that have got £2bn, and you chopped ‘em up and said they could only have £100m each—well we’ve got another 40 of them haven’t we? How many more Bentleys are we going to sell then?”
The key to creating more wealth, he reckons, is simplification of the tax laws. “If we had a flat tax we could massively increase the amount of money in the public purse because everyone would pay all of their taxes straight away. And we’d have loads more multi-millionaires. Having a tax code that is incomprehensible to intelligent people tells you everything you need to know about the brand of capitalism practised in this country—it is foolish, self-defeating and cowardly.”
Dennis doesn’t hold out much hope of change, but he feels there is one thing budding entrepreneurs can do to improve their chances of making it to the top—address their fear of public failure.
“The fear of failure—that you will let somebody down with potentially catastrophic results—is understandable, but misguided,” he says. “But the second, most common, fear is that your sins will be exhibited to the world—not that you’ve done what you’ve done, but that everyone else will know. That’s far more powerful. If you give a damn what the neighbours think, you’ll never be rich.”
