Short Profile Norman Rentrop

Norman Rentrop is chairman of VNR Verlag für die Deutsche Wirtschaft AG (VNR Publishing House for the German Business World), a $ 100 million newsletter publishing group with operations in Bonn, Berlin, Salzburg, Zürich, Warschau, Bukarest, Moskau, London, Manchester, Madrid, Johannesburg

Founded in 1975, the company employs 300 people and more than 400 authors at its Bonn, Germany headquarters, and over 600 people and 1.000 authors are employed worldwide. The group publishes more than 100 newsletters, looseleaf services and magazines in the fields of marketing, public speaking, finance, investment, real estate, human resources, taxation, stockmarket analysis, business expansion, and more. Norman war born in 1957 in Bonn-Bad Godesberg, Germany, was schooled at a Jesuit school, later becoming an exchange student at Eton College in England and graduating from Cologne University with a degree in Business Administration. He gained journalistic experience at a school newspaper, a youth magazine for Bonn, a local newspaper and the armed-forces newspaper. He started his first newsletter (die Geschäftsidee) while he was in school with 10,000 Deutschmarks earned from being a reporter for a local daily newspaper. He turned to American-style direct marketing to grow the company, since German newsstands were crowded in the mid-70s and bookstores did not welcome newcomers. NPA meetings, Folio conferences and DMA conventions became his training camps. His training was enhanced by seminars given by visiting North American direct marketers like Henry Cowen, Joan Throckmorton, Dick Benson, Ted Nicholas, Stan Fenvessy, Ted Kikoler and Dick Hodgson.