Capital Business Media founder Richard Alvin on Nourish

Richard Alvin is the founder and group managing director of Capital Business Media, the company behind Business Matters. The group publishes across business, travel, automotive, property, renewable energy and institutional finance, runs three awards programmes and has just launched Nourish, a recipe-led food magazine. He tells Jamie Young what the group is building.

What do you currently do?

I am the founder and group managing director of Capital Business Media (CBM), the company that owns the Business Matters brand of magazine, website and digital output.

The group also publishes Not Ltd for the self-employed, Travelling For Business, the executive lifestyle title Optimum, the property title Property Portfolio Investor, EV Powered, which covers everything electric from e-scooters to electric plant machinery, and Electric Home, our renewable energy title. Our New York office is responsible for Fund Manager Today, which serves the global fund management community, and we have a third office in Florida.

The newest addition is Nourish, our recipe-led food magazine, which will publish quarterly in print from 2027 and runs a website that is updated constantly.

CBM also has a contract publishing division and a live events and awards division that runs the Travelling For Business Awards, the Business Champion Awards and the Rural Business Awards.

I am also chairman of the specialist business research company Trends Research, which started life as a partnership between the Telegraph Media Group and Capital Business Media. We acquired the whole company in 2006 and now specialise in research of the UK SME community for a whole host of clients, from government departments to telecommunications companies and some of the largest PR firms.

I have also been an advisor to entrepreneur Peter Jones on the US business support programme Save Our Business, and subsequently replaced Jones as the on-screen host of the show, broadcast on HBO and TNT.

Like other business owners, I love the actual doing side of the business, so I often find myself involved in all areas of the company. I am also a people person, so you can guarantee I will grab any opportunity to arrange a call with someone, whether a client or an associate. Casual conversations often provide great insight.

What was the inspiration behind your business?

I was lucky enough to sell the two media companies I had founded and grown to large national media groups for large multiples. It was always the intention to stay involved in media, and I saw that the global media group EMAP was selling two of its then underperforming business to business magazines, Business Matters and European Fund Manager. Offers were made, and once accepted a company was needed to purchase the brands. CBM was born.

Through hard work and a dedicated team we took Business Matters, first published in 1986, to be the UK’s leading business title within 10 years, and it was appointed the official business magazine of the London 2012 Olympics, which was a huge honour. The multi-platform approach has kept working. Business Matters, which has just unveiled it’s largest web refresh, now reaches more than 1.5m readers a month, and across the group we reach more than 2.5m digital readers a month with 230,000 newsletter subscribers.

Tell us about Nourish

Nourish is a recipe-led food magazine, quarterly in print with a website that never stands still. There are more than 10,000 tested recipes on it, organised by ingredient, by cuisine and by diet or occasion, alongside skills guides, features and honest product reviews.

There is no paywall and no login. A free weekly email carries the recipes our food team is actually cooking, the seasonal picks and the skills worth learning. At the moment that means autumn.

What is happening with the travel awards?

The Travelling For Business Awards take place on 22 October 2026 at 88 Wood Street in London, as a black-tie gala dinner for around 300 senior guests. There are 24 categories, from Best Long-Haul Airline and Best Business Class Experience to Best MICE Venue UK, the Accessibility Award, the Sustainability Award and Lifetime Achievement, with 231 finalists across 23 of them. Uber for Business is our headline partner.

What matters to me is that the selection is editorially led and independent. This is not another awards night.

Why Race Against Dementia?

Race Against Dementia is our chosen charity for 2026 and 2027, through the CBM Foundation. Sir Jackie Stewart OBE founded it after his wife, Lady Helen, was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, and it funds early-career dementia researchers around the world, applying the discipline of Formula 1 to the science. Having had family members and colleagues in the wider company family suffer from this disease, supporting Sir Jackie was an obvious choice.

The foundation works to a 1-1-1 model: 1 per cent of the group’s time, 1 per cent of its product and 1 per cent of its profit committed to charity every year. I first came across that model at Dreamforce in 2011 and it stuck. The partnership covers all our bends internally as well as the Travelling For Business Awards, and widens to the full live events programme from 2027.

What defines your way of doing business?

I firmly believe that business should be, and is, about relationships. Whether it is a relationship with your clients, suppliers, team members or anyone else, people buy from people. If you employ a team with shared values, that is what makes you stand out, especially in a deadline driven organisation like ours. With the right people, the best technology available and strong processes in place, you cannot go far wrong.

The same applies to the commitments you make. We have held carbon neutral certification for more than a decade because sustainability is a policy we live and breathe, not a statement.

What do you admire?

Determination and hard work. And I am lucky to be surrounded by people who possess those qualities.

Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?

In the past I have invested in a number of start-up and growing businesses. Sometimes those investments were on a business angel basis, others saw me taking a seat on their board. I made an investment in the loss prevention company CrimeDeter through a direct approach, did not do the same level of due diligence that you would normally do, and ended up writing off my whole six figure investment. The moral of that story is that regardless of whatever business you are going to buy, take a role in, or make an investment into, you must do your homework.

What advice would you give to someone starting out?

Collaborate. Do not try to do everything yourself. Be prepared to make mistakes, they are going to happen, just make sure you learn from them, and learn fast.

Reward and recognise your employees, as they are the key to a successful future. Define your values early on so that you can remain true to yourself throughout your entrepreneurial journey, and embrace technology so that your team have the very best weapons at their disposal to carry out their roles.

Richard Alvin writes regularly for Business Matters.