Napkin Deal as Power Move

"We’re all sitting there, and Eric just doesn’t show. We wait and make small talk. I try calling Eric, but as is often the case, he is not answering his phone. We wait for a while and then, thinking he isn’t going to come, order and eat our bacon and eggs anyway. Eventually, Eric does roll in – a bit bleary-eyed. He gets straight to it and begins outlining what he wants to do and how the deal might look. On the back of a napkin, no less. He pushes this across the table to our breakfast guests. They look it over. ‘OK, when are we going to get something in writing?’ their lead guy asks. Eric looks him straight in the eye as he answers: ‘You just got it.’"

"Back in that room, where we’re putting numbers in a jar for the Telecom offer, my slip was the one that got pulled out: $15 million. We can never know if that was the right number – and I know Eric had wanted to pay less than that – but it got us the business. From there, we had to work out how to actually pay for it. Here’s where the deal got even crazier. We hadn’t actually secured the finance to back our offer; we couldn’t yet put money where our mouths were. Normally you wouldn’t be handed an asset without having first paid for it, but somehow, in this case, we got the keys and began the handover before we had properly paid. None of us can remember now if a small deposit changed hands, but if it had, it can’t have amounted to much, because we still hadn’t figured out how to finance the deal yet. The business we had bought was a bit of a mess, to say the least. In the transition from government department to private company, there had been people retained that shouldn’t have been (obviously not the ones we’d filtered), and there was relatively shoddy record keeping. The stock control seemed to have been fairly non-existent up until this point. We had bought all of the hardware, but the business couldn’t give us a proper asset list."