Pay Consultants to Open Doors

“Heatley and Jarvis were introduced to Sam Chisholm, the Kiwi then-chief executive of Kerry Packer’s Channel Nine. Sky paid around $350,000 to Chisholm and some of his people to act as consultants—effectively to broker the introductions Sky needed to set up meetings. It felt like a lot of money to pay for not much but it was the price of opening doors.”

“Heatley and Jarvis developed a matrix of who, around the world, owned the rights to all the products that they thought would work on the three channels they were proposing. But it was no longer a matter of Heatley simply picking up a phone and calling. This was different. Heatley and Jarvis learned that, far from their first impressions, the ‘worldwide’ media industry probably boiled down to about 20 influential people controlling most of what a company like theirs wanted. It was a global family, and one in which Heatley and Jarvis knew no one and no one knew them. They had to establish their bona fides and convince people they did not know to have faith in the future of a TV company that was not yet on air in a remote market about which many people overseas knew nothing. Beyond the existence of Television New Zealand there was, at that point, not much else to know.”