Ater a three-year stint, Alison Goff, CEO of the Quarto Group, will be stepping down from her position at the end of the year due to personal reasons. She will remain as an advisor to the board.
Prior to joining Quarto, Goff had been at the Hachette UK division for 21 years before leaving in April 2020. Goff moved to Quarto as CEO in January 2022, taking over from CK Lau, Quarto's largest shareholder who was serving as interim CEO. He will once again take over as interim CEO Nov. 1 and will remain in that post until a successor to Goff is found. In her time as CEO, she led a full corporate rebrand project and introduced several new imprints to the group, including Carnival, a cooking and wellness imprint.
The most consequential development during her time, however, was overseeing the transfer of Quarto from a public to private company. That process began in December 2023 and was completed early this year. In its last public figures released in late August 2023, Quarto reported that sales for the first six months of 2023 fell to $52.0 million from $61.9 million in 2022, with pre-tax profits slumping from $6.6 million to $2.6 million over the same period. About half of the publisher's annual sales are from the U.S.
Among the reasons Quarto executives cited for going private was that it would result in costs savings while also leading to administrative efficiencies.
