Man of Many founder Frank Arthur on turning a passion project into a global success story

Ghana-born Dubbo local, Frank Arthur, is the co-founder of one of the world’s most successful men’s lifestyle digital platforms, Man of Many. He joined the First Act podcast to share what it took to turn a passion project with his best mate into a global success.

Frank Arthur’s journey from country kid to leader of a successful men’s lifestyle juggernaut with an engaged audience of millions is nothing short of inspiring. Frank’s working life began as many an Aussie teens’ have – behind the counter at his local Macca’s in the east-central NSW city of Dubbo.

“That was a great first job because you can see behind one of the most successful businesses ever – how it operates, and how they facilitate and make things happen in a planned and structured way,” he told editors Cec Busby and Adam Bub. “It’s incredible that you can take someone who’s never worked a day in their life at 15 years old, and they can be a productive member of the team very quickly.”

Before founding Man of Many in 2012, Frank studied product design and completed his Masters degrees in both Commerce and Marketing. It was a love of design and invention as well as marketing that led Frank and his finance-savvy best mate, Scott Purcell, to kick off their own website, sharing the fun, innovative and trending men’s lifestyle products they loved – a passion project they both worked on between their regular jobs.

“Initially, we were just looking at cool products that were being released and we’d write a short write-up on each product. There were no grand plans to make any kind of business empire out of it – it was just a passion project, in efforts to hopefully get some freebies,” he laughs.

From passion project to beloved brand

As it turns out, Frank and Scott gained far more than a few freebies from their passion project, growing the Man of Many website into a viral platform with a huge, highly-engaged audience. But Frank admits that theirs wasn’t an overnight success story and that consistency and focus were key to their eventual global domination.

“It was four years before we quit our jobs to work on Man of Many full-time,” Frank reveals. “The big key for us was realising that consistency was important. When we first started, we were publishing stories ad hoc, but we set the goal of one story a day and that’s when the momentum began building and we realised we could potentially monetise this.

“We looked at other digital media platforms, both small and large, and how they’ve been able to create their businesses. And we thought to ourselves, there’s no reason why we can’t become like them.

“As it was our side gig and we both had full-time jobs, we had to find ways that we could make things easy. We set up processes and automated things to make it run efficiently,” he says. “Initially we thought we would quit our jobs once the business made enough money to fund our salaries, but what we naively didn’t realise was that it would never happen until we worked on it full-time. The more effort we put into Man of Many, the faster it would grow and the sooner we would see whether it would become a legitimate business or not.

“We had seen other blogs and websites in our space and in other categories who had done similar things, and we’d seen how they’d grown. We had gained quite a large audience, and we were catching up to people who were working on it full-time. We were confident that we could get to the same level, so we felt it was the ideal time for us to take the plunge.”

Listen to Frank Arthur on the First Act podcast:

Learning curves aplenty

Frank admits that the path to success wasn’t a straight line and that he and business partner Scott have learned a great deal since focusing solely on their business.

“The steepest learning curve was understanding an industry that we had no knowledge of. We didn’t know a huge deal about the media industry or about advertising, so getting up to speed on that was probably the steepest learning curve. Also learning about digital publishing, how to build a website, and learning how social media integrates – these were all new things that we had no experience with, but we had to learn. We had to research and look at what others were doing – then think about ways that we could do things differently.”

In fact, according to Frank, learning never stops no matter how well your business is doing, and nor should your big ideas.

“Every decision we make is all about balance. Cash flow is the most important thing, but we have so many big ideas and you have to execute on those ideas when the time is right. There are always things we need to do just to keep the lights on – the fundamental parts of our business – but then we have these other projects that we work on in the background. It’s important to have those big-picture goals. It’s also important to make sure you are working towards them so that they’re not just goals that never get actioned.”

Inclusion and diversity matters

As an immigrant Australian, you may think that inclusion and diversity are important to Frank – and you’d be right. However, he admits that regardless of your background, diversity is simply good for business and it starts with building a team with the same values.

“It’s personally important for both Scott and me, and the people that we hire, that diversity is something they value. We also recognise that we’re labelled as a ‘men’s lifestyle publication’, and there are a lot of those old-school men’s publications that are a bit on the nose and they’re not what we want to be.

“Earlier this year we went through a brand rediscovery to establish our values, our purpose and to look at what is important to us. Because we do write about things that could be labelled as quite ‘superficial’ – things like watches and cars and fashion – but we also have this big, engaged audience, and we know that our readers value more than those material things. So, we want to make sure that we instil those positive elements into everything that we do.

“As an example, this year we became the first digital publication to be 100 per cent carbon neutral-certified under the Federal Government’s climate active standard. We recently surveyed our readers, and close to 80 per cent said that they’re taking actionable steps to live more sustainably. It’s something that’s very important to both our readers and us.

“One of our core values is ‘diversity connects us’,” says Frank. “I think diversity is one of those things you hear thrown around, but it’s not about people being different, it’s about people with varying backgrounds and attributes and the richness that brings to the tapestry of a business.”

Frank Arthur shared lots of amazing tidbits from his journey from Macca’s employee to successful entrepreneur. Listen to the full First Act ep now.

Join us each Tuesday for a brand new episode of First Act, because every story has a beginning.

Listen and subscribe now: