• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, Yesterday

Sherry Phillips was 24 years old, hqppily working in ad sales at Travel & Leisure magazine. But Forbes was trying to hire her and she kept saying no even after they upped the offer. 

“Now’s not a good time,” she told Bill Flatley, then the ad director. “I’m going to get married, then we’re going on our honeymoon.”

”Are you always going to listen to what your new husband told you to do?” Flatley asked.

That did it. “I am a confident female,” Phillips says. She took the job. Of course, she had to interview with several Forbes brothers--Robert (Bob) Forbes, Christopher (Kip) Forbes and Tim Forbes--while marveling at the “incredible pieces of artwork” in their offices in the old Forbes building in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

Thus began a long career at the iconic publishing brand. Forbes now reaches more than 192 million people per month through its journalism, live events and local editions. And it still puts out a very imposing print magazine that provides intensive reporting and good writing. But what is its mission?

“While we prize great journalism and factual rigor, we don’t pretend to lack a world-view," wrote the hat-wearing chief content officer Randall Lane in a recent editorial. “We champion entrepreneurial capitalism and free enterprise, growth and innovation, the promise of opportunity and self-determination. In a word: success.”

The new CEO heartily agrees with that. “Since 1917, we’ve been championing entrepreneurs to help them find success and learn from others,” she says. 

Phillips, who has lived her entire life in the Philadelphia area except for her time at the University of Michigan, prizes tradition. And Forbes has plenty of that. She went on to serve in a number of roles, starting with sales. She worked on supplements like Forbes ASAP and for the then-fledgling conference division. ''

She did take a three-year detour at The Philadelphia Inquirer, but thought, “This does not look like Forbes at all.” Meredith Levien, who was then at Forbes but leaving for the New York Times, wanted Phillips to return and take over Forbes Lite (formerly known as Forbes FYI) and the luxury category. 

So Phillips went back to her true professional home, and was duly promoted, becoming chief marketing and sales officer, then chief revenue officer. And something bigger was in the offing.

Last November, the team was headed for an executive meeting. CEO Mike Federle had been “making reveals that he might consider retiring,” but nobody knew when. “I was at the hotel, and he called and said, ‘I’m going to retire. I’d like to name you CEO if you want the job,” Phillips recalls.

This time there was no hesitation. Phillips had long been a manager, and having raised four children, she felt she could handle anything.

And so Phillips became the first female CEO of Forbes and joined the coterie of women who have taken the top jobs in publishing — Levien, her one-time colleague at Forbes, now CEO of the New York Times; Jessica Sibley, CEO of Time; Anastasia Nyrkovskaya , CEO of Fortune; and Karen Saltser, CEO of Bloomberg Media.

“There’s a nice trend there,” Phillips observes.  

But her elation was short-lived. “There was a lot I didn’t know,” Phillips now admits. “There were headwinds. It felt like whiplash.” 

The biggest shock was the launch of Google’s AI Overviews. Readers could get the sense of a story without clicking through to it. Traffic plummeted at 37 of the 50 top news domains, but nobody was hit harder than Forbes, which like HuffPost, saw its traffic slide by 40%, Similarweb reports. 

“The traffic decline wasn’t something any of us saw coming so drastically,” Phillips confesses. But it was clear that Forbes had to “ramp up its businesses not dependent on traffic,” as Phillips put it. 

Quite a challenge for someone who was just then trying to get her footing. 

One of her first chores, independent of the traffic decline, was to right-size the ship.” It started with a round of layoffs — 5% of staff. This was Phillips’ decision, not that she was a newcomer in this area -- she had in her prior role presided over some cuts. Still, it was a rough way to start her tenure. 

“It’s not an easy decision to make,” she says “But I need to retain the talent to run the business and keep it steady and accelerated for growth.”

There were hires, too. And Phillips had a key advantage for a new CEO: she knew everyone on the team. 

We are sitting in a small but comfortable meeting room at Forbes On Fifth where Forbes runs events and company meetings, operations having been moved to Jersey City. You walk into the facility and see a portrait of founder Bertie Charles Forbes, better known as B.C. Forbes. Phillips, attired in a houndstooth sports jacket and jeans, had already presided over an executive meeting on this autumn day. And she had just hosted one of its many lucrative events — the CMO Summit, which had drawn 152 CMOs. (The takeaway from that conference? “Humanity is at the center of everything,” Phillips says.)

The space is a tribute to Forbes’ diversification strategy. When Phillips started at Forbes, “it was really just print.”

But Forbes is now a true multimedia organization — digital, print, events, licensing. To start with, Forbes has 145 listings and brand extensions. It started with its Forbes 400 list — literally, the billionaire’s list, one in March, one in October. Then there are the women’s list, the 30 under 30 list and the recently launched Creators list. “This subset of creators is getting a lot of traction in media,” Phillips observes. These types of products all have events attached to them.

Indeed, events now bring in an estimated 30% of revenue. The international and licensing category, which serves 67 countries with 43 local language editions, pulls almost 20%. The biggest single category -- integrated media -- is producing 50% this year, compared to 51% in the prior year. But it is down from around 70% a few years ago.

“The pie has changed,” Phillips says.

The CMO event, which brought 252 CMOs, was held in Aspen, Colorado in September. (The takeaway from that conference -- “Humanity is at the center of everything,” Phillips says.)

The events calendar sure is packed. Other recent conferences include:

• Forbes Power Women’s Summit September 10, NYC 
• Forbes Sustainability Summit September 22, NYC  
• Forbes Impact Summit September 25-26, NYC
• Forbes BLK Summit October 8-10, Atlanta

Another recent development was the cancellation of a pending $800 million sale of Forbes to Luminar Technologies, an electric vehicle company founded by Austin Russell, in 2023. The reasons are murky, but reports say Luminar couldn’t pull in the right investors 

So it was back to work. Forbes remains owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments, an investment firm based in Hong Kong, which acquired it in 2024. But that raises the question: will Phillips’ main job as CEO be to arrange the sale of the company?

“We are not pursuing a sale or being pursued,” she answers. “The sales sign is not out now.” Of course, it might be different “if someone came with over $10 billion,” she wryly notes.

What is left of the Forbes that Philips once knew? The brand survives, and there are still some family members involved. Steve Forbes, a.k.a. Malcolm Forbes, Jr., is editor in chief and former chairman, president and CEO of the company. His daughter Moira is president and publisher of ForbesWoman.  

As a new CEO, Phillips also had editorial reporting to her for the first time in her career. She went to a meeting with this wild crew and was amazed at how they strive to make a story ‘Forbesian.’ “I saw how they make a story, and how they will coach someone new. I was blown away by how passionate they are, and how funny and competitive.”

Outsiders may wonder whether the business side crosses the line into editorial — say, in a product like the Forbes Brand Voice supplement, which features sponsored content. 

Those sponsored stories are written by outsiders, not the staff, she answers. And Phillips learned early to respect the church-state line. “You would be fired if you crossed that line,” she says. 

Meanwhile, realizing that brand extensions won’t work without infrastructure, Phillips formed the AI & Strategic Platforms Group this past summer. “I reorganized the company to create this division that sits in the middle and will weave through the organization and have efficiencies and partnerships internally,” she says. It is headed by Kyle Vinansky, who was promoted to chief business and strategy officer.

How does Phillips handle the stress and the information overload? Phillips arises early at her home in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, which she shares with her husband Chris and 17-year-old daughter Tess. Often, she makes a cup of coffee and sits down with a book before anyone else is up. She also works out. Then she travels by Amtrak to Newark, and proceeds to the Forbes office in Jersey City. Or she takes the train into New York, most likely to turn up at Forbes on 5. She likes traveling by train — she will use the time to write.

Forbes still allows people to work at home when they need—a welcome relief to the team that often labors at night and on weekends.

Despite Bill Flatley’s impertinent question 30 years before, Phillips’ husband, a career homicide prosecutor, has never tried to run her career. All he will say is, “Don’t worry.” Phillips admits that she sometimes feels “penalized for sleeping” because of all that is going on in media and the need to make sound, almost clairvoyant decisions. This reporter jokes that Harry Truman could fall asleep like a baby no matter what decisions he had made. 

“He wasn’t a woman,” Phillips laughs.