Company spotlight: Whitefox

Whitefox was born with a dilemma in mind: how to help a publishing business operate with a flexible but expert workforce. Established in 2012 by former HarperPress m.d. John Bond and Annabel Wright, his senior editor at HP, it offers a “curated network of publishing specialists” to companies and individuals.

Three years later, Bond says the question that informed the business was sound. “We thought we could solve a problem,” says Bond. “A lot of those people who made a difference to the books were now external freelances and we thought: ‘What would happen if you organised the diaspora of really talented freelances and made them available to anyone who wanted them?’“ Whitefox was to become—in the words of its digital advisor Peter Collingridge—”the refuge for publishing superheroes”.

But while Bond read the market correctly—publishing rationalisations meant projects were under-resourced—progress has not gone to plan. “It has been completely different,” he says, adding that its client list of publishers and agents has built nicely, but much more slowly than they imagined. “We opened up and it was ‘OK, we’re here’.” Instead of waiting for publishers to ring, Whitefox evolved in different directions. “During this time there has been this enormous surge in individuals who are self-publishing, and want guidance and access to the kind of expertise publishers have. We’ve also found that if we make our experts available to companies or brands that are thinking about publishing for different reasons, that is very compelling commercially.” 

The special ones

Whitefox has 1,300 freelances on its database—“we try to grow and curate this all the time, but there is a tension between scale and quality”—and takes a commission from each piece of work, or in some cases a project fee. Within that pool there are 530 “specialisms” (Young Adult, for example) and 200 skills (copy-editing, typesetting etc), not all of them originated from publishing. “It started from publishing, but has bled into other sectors—those wanting to get into publishing who have different skills and others who came with new skills from different sectors, such as newspapers.” 

Unlike other networks that operate online marketplace models, to engage Whitefox you need to speak to them to get access to the freelances, with costs tailored to clients’ needs and required expertise. “We think it is quite difficult to know what somebody wants until we talk to them.” Once employed, Whitefox is hands-off unless a client signals otherwise: “Our skill is knowing who the right people are.”

But the temptation to “Uberise” the platform remains. “What we’ve tried to do is prove the concept. There has been a lot of emphasis on ‘if we build it they will come’, and we’ve tried not to do that, but figure out who the they are in the first place and what they want.” 

Bond says there is now “a distinct possibility” of the platform being opened. “I’m fascinated by the options,” says Bond. “What’s the tipping point where the model doesn’t work because it becomes ‘anybody can do everything’?” 

The argument may be decided by the opportunity that exists around self-publishing. “We’ve never marketed ourselves to this network, but they found us anyway. It makes the conversion rate quite high because it has come via recommendation.”
As a start-up, Whitefox has had a more secure beginning than many. “The first year was profitable—who knew that was supposed to happen?—last year we were unprofitable because we grew massively, and became a proper company with seven people. This year we will double our turnover, and that is a six-figure sum. We hope to make a small profit.” 

Whitefox has had two injections of investment, but it hasn’t gone to venture capitalists or angel investors. “How we scale is more interesting than simply raising large amounts of money. What Annabel and I have said is that we will try and keep the proposition as simple as possible: to grow the network of suppliers and grow the work, and ultimately make it as international as we can. People get what we do: it is access to people.”

Whitefox operates out of a shared office near Euston—deliberately so. “We are quite ambitious. We are aiming for seven figures, and probably need about three more staff. But it would be a massive mistake if we just ended up replicating a publishing company: the whole point was not to do that, but to create something that was fit for purpose now.” Nevertheless, he says, a thousand people “is a very big publishing company”. And the company name: White Fox Publishing Ltd. Watch this space.