 Smith and Chairman of W.H.Smith News, he engineered the sale of W. H. Smith's publishing business to Hachette Livre in 2004, staying on to run Hachette UK, which became Britain's biggest publisher when it acquired Little, Brown in 2006, also becoming a director of the American company.He subsequently acquired around 20 additional publishing businesses for Hachette.His policies of industry-leading service to authors and involvement for every member of staff were successful and the company regularly published around one in four of all British bestsellers.