Surf's up | Jim McGinley rides the "lifestyle sports" wave with his Portland-based Podium Venture Group
The trips are business as usual for McGinley, 32, who founded N'East, a glossy "lifestyle sports" magazine, three years ago. Last year, he launched Podium Venture Group, an "apparel, media and publishing holding company" that targets for acquisition businesses in the lifestyle sports industry. "I wear a lot of hats," McGinley says, sitting behind his desk on a recent afternoon. A pair of skis are propped in a corner of his office, and a surfboard resides in another.
Podium grew out of McGinley's experience trying to find funding for N'East, a magazine he had dreamt of creating since he was a kid in New Hampshire, where he grew up rock climbing, surfing and skiing. He spent two years knocking on the doors of angel investors and venture funds looking for capital, to no avail. As the only full-time employee, he often had to scrounge for money to print the next issue. He sold a house and maxed out his credit cards. Eventually, he decided to find another way. "I thought it was easier to launch my own venture group rather than wait for phone calls to be returned by these larger venture funds," he says.
McGinley scraped together $250,000 in savings and investments from friends and family to buy the shell of a formerly publicly traded company called Annapolis Capital Holdings. The deal, called a reverse merger, effectively allowed Podium Venture to become a publicly traded company without the red tape — and due diligence — necessary to stage an initial public offering.
This month, the magazine became a wholly owned subsidiary of Podium Venture — and he began to look at possible acquisitions in the lifestyle sports industry, which he calls an "explosive market," especially in the Northeast. (According to McGinley, the region is the fastest growing market in the $6.5 billion U.S. surfing industry.) Podium made its first acquisition in late December when it purchased Erino Clothing, a surfwear company based on Cape Cod, where McGinley had been based in the U.S. Coast Guard for almost 12 years before he became a full-time publisher and entrepreneur. McGinley says Erino was in the same position N'East had been in: It was a strong company with a well-defined niche and good market penetration, but it had no working capital to help it grow.
N'East, Erino Clothing and Podium Venture Group now collectively employ 13 full-time staffers, with offices on Middle Street in Portland; McGinley plans to open the first Erino retail shop in early May downstairs from his office space. Even McGinley's a little surprised by his expanding holdings. N'East may have been a longtime dream, but if you'd asked him five years ago what he'd be doing in 2007, the concept of Podium wouldn't have registered as a blip on the radar, McGinley says. He's a guy with an English degree from the University of New Hampshire who loves to ski, surf and climb. "But I'm an entrepreneur at heart," he says. Everything he's learned along the way, he says, comes from trial and error or asking questions. "I have no compunction about flying to New York to ask another publisher how he does what he does," he says.
McGinley says he's always looking at acquisition opportunities — he has his eye on a few companies at the moment, but won't say which ones — but for now he wants to focus on growing Erino, along with N'East, which publishes five times a year and has a nationwide circulation of 18,000. "Mergers and acquisitions definitely aren't on the back burner," he says. "But we're treading lightly because we have a full plate."
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