Adventures Group merges with Hema Maps to form new business
Adventures Group Holdings, founded by former Bauer staffer Rob Gallagher, has merged with Brisbane-based mapping and publishing business, Hema Maps.
The new agreement will see the two companies operate under the name ‘Emprise Group’.
Robert Gallagher bought Bauer Trader Media’s adventure titles in 2016
Hema Maps has been producing maps, atlases, guides and digital navigation products for more than 30 years, while Adventures Group was established when Gallagher – the former general manager of adventures at Bauer Xcel Media – acquired Bauer Media’s adventure titles, in 2016. Adventures Group now owns Caravan World, Campertrailer Australia, Motorhome and Caravan Trader, Travelin, Turu and Trade-A-Boat. The publisher also produces Outdoor – formerly known as Australian Geographic Outdoor.
Emprise Group will be led by Gallagher, who will assume the role of CEO, while Hema’s managing director, Rob Beogheim, will become CXO. Gallagher’s business partner, Matthew O’Meara, will become chief operating officer for Emprise Group.
Gallagher told Mumbrella the merger created a “complementary business”, helping it to become channel agnostic.
“We started working with Hema four years ago, which was really around trying to leverage their mapping content onto what we were doing with the Tourism bodies,” Gallagher said.
“We’ve been interacting and partnering for a number of years. The merger is obvious when you start looking at the operations.
“The core asset within each of them is content, but quite different content so there’s is spatial content and ours is rich content.”
Gallagher said a lot of advertising partners his business was working with, required “geo-located content” as well as “rich content”. The merger allows for both, Gallagher explained.
But a number of roles have been made redundant, as a result of the merger.
“We’ve reset the business. In the 55 people we will retain the two main offices, Brisbane and Melbourne, and we have staff in Sydney and Perth. What we’ve done is re-looked at all the corporate systems and with its the same thing we did with Adventures, we were able to look at the business that had been built around legacy systems and introduce new ones. We are in the process of doing that for the Emprise Group. That’s allowed us to relook at the admin, the overhead part of the business. We have probably had a net five people reduction in terms of the whole business,” he explained.
“The turnover has probably been 15 people. We’ve created new opportunities and it really is an investment in the value areas, so more people in the content team, more people in the marketing team, more people in the spatial content team.”
On the future of the business, Gallagher said: “Our core aim is to become the best publisher of adventure-based content or regional based content in Australia. That’s a clear vision in terms of where that goes. And again, really being able to scale out our data and content capability is a core area of focus.”
Emprise Group’s Rob Gallagher will be speaking at Mumbrella’s Publish conference on September 20. To find out more click here.
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