He has always had an affinity with numbers he says but no formal business training

He has always had an affinity with numbers, he says, but no formal business training. The plans he showed to the bank were based on playing around with spreadsheets."It was fairly easy to model the business, albeit all completely self- invented," he observes.A few months after the launch, Anderson noticed that the magazine was running at below the death-scenario level. It stood him in good stead when he visited his local bank manager."One of the joys of being in Somerset was that I don't think my bank manager had ever seen a presentation with spreadsheets before. Usually he had farmers asking for money, scratching their heads and saying: `What do you think then?'" he says.Anderson, who wears his 42 years very lightly, presented the bank with three scenarios "including the death one" in which Anderson would lose his house In the early days, Future did almost die At the time it seemed reasonable. Anderson has always been a bit of a nerd, interested in games, spreadsheets and generally fiddling with technology. I was so happy to be free to do the thing I had been getting really excited about," he recalls.The object of his enthusiasm was a magazine for Amstrad users, Amstrad Action. This is at least partly because Bath is intertwined in his mind with the success of his company.Anderson started the company after being fired by his then employer for refusing to move the magazine he edited to Ludlow."I remember driving down the motorway singing at the top of my voice.

The Future sale was part of a pounds 2bn disposals programme instigated by chief executive Marjorie Scardino and designed to refocus the business into four key areas: educational and consumer book publishing, business information and broadcasting. As far as it is concerned, Future gave a good return on investment and was a profitable business but one "that was worth more to someone else than else than it would be to us", a spokesman says.Anderson is also quick to point out that the Future which has just made its market debut is a different beast from the one Pearson sold, as it now includes Anderson's US business interests, Imagine Media, and Il Mio Castello, an Italian publisher acquired in March.According to co-lead manager Warburg Dillon Read, Future's growth projections (for operating profits on a pro-forma basis) amount to 55 per cent this year, 39 per cent next year and 36 per cent in 2001, which is the "incredible potential" to which Anderson refers.As for the London thing, Anderson is practically allergic to the capital. It was also awareness that the thing had incredible potential beyond what Pearson saw in it."Pearson's view is naturally somewhat different. The potential horror was that it would be taken over by something like an IPC, ripped apart and moved to London and I would have felt really miserable about that whole scenario. We spent the money because we thought we knew what to do with the company and we had a different vision from the other buyers, but we weren't laughing up our sleeves or anything," he says.Anderson and his partners had only 10 days to raise pounds 100m. He heard about the sale through an investment banker."I think Pearson would have preferred me not to participate in the auction - it complicates things when the founder of a company comes back into it - but I just had to get back involved.

Given that the company has just attained a valuation 450 per cent higher, that looks like a bargain."Clearly, in retrospect, it was a terrific bargain. He bought it back last year, with Future chief executive Greg Ingham and Apax Venture Partners, for pounds 142m. His clothes, like his demeanour, are understated if unquestionably expensive.The former computer games magazine editor made his first fortune when he sold Future to Pearson for pounds 52.7m in 1994, trousering somewhere between pounds 30m and pounds 40m in the process. Ranked 600th in this year's Sunday Times Rich List, Anderson had an estimated personal wealth of pounds 40m but few of the trappings that went with it. Future just happened to be [laughs] in one of those growth hotspots."Colleagues are convinced that his new-found status as seriously rich won't change him - he was not exactly short of a bob or two before the flotation. He prefaces many of his answers with awkward little coughs and chuckles; he uses the phrase "it turns out" frequently and attributes much of his success to luck.Here's a snatch of Anderson-speak: "A huge piece of luck was to discover after the event - we didn't know this at the time - that there was this giant trend away from generalist media to specialist magazines. At the end of the first day's trading that had risen to pounds 632m, valuing his 25 per cent stake at pounds 140m.Yet Anderson appears more flushed with embarrassment than success.

Seeing him folded neatly and unobtrusively into a corner of the sofa in the Bath hotel where we meet, it is easy to believe. Last month, the company he launched with a pounds 15,000 bank loan in 1985 floated with a market capitalisation of pounds 577.5m. The founder of the UK's fourth-largest magazine publisher, Future Network, is slight in build and unassuming in manner. Apparently, whenever Anderson has a meeting at one of the company's offices, he waits patiently to be collected from reception rather than marching straight into the boardroom. Publishers are often tall (IPC's David Arculus), capable of losing a metre or two from their waistlines without appearing svelte (the late Robert Maxwell) or large in presence (Rupert Murdoch). Chris Anderson does not fit the mould of the multi-millionaire media mogul. The standards are pretty low with contract magazines out there and it's a pretty wide-open market."In the US he plans to get particular help from a man who used to work on the international side of the City, his old friend, the disgraced former Barings director, Peter Norris.This may raise eyebrows in some quarters but you get the feeling that John Brown doesn't give a fig Things are anything but orthodox at his company..