Sell Before the Floor, Buy the Next Thing

“‘Rainbow would have completely crashed and gone like the others because it was a bubble company and the share price was totally in bubble territory and he’d paid big prices for all those stakes in the companies he had,’ Alan Gibbs says. ‘The clever thing he did was to sell out to Brierley before the crash so he must have had some presentiment of it. If he’d stayed five more minutes, he’d have been on his belly. He was lucky.’ Sir Bob Jones recalls Ken Wikeley saying to him, ‘You know, Craig has an almost animal intuition to know when to jump out of something.’”

“But Heatley needed something new. Brierley’s had offered him the role of heading their North American operations but working in a market in which he had no contacts held no appeal for him. While they never said it, he had the sense that Brierley’s had been disappointed by his decision not to go. Maybe it would have suited them to have him out of the way, he thought. Nothing else that interested him seemed on offer. Telecommunications and broadcasting were fields about which he knew nothing but gradually, and with full disclosure to Brierley’s, he started working on the project with Jarvis and Green. By late 1988, after about a year on the BIL board, the new project was requiring all his attention and he resigned from Brierley’s. He sold all his shares in the company, making a loss on much of the stock because he had bought at $3 after the crash, thinking it was a good buy, and was selling at $2–$2.40. But as the price gradually sank to 50–60c, he was simply relieved to have got out when he did. Now he was free, cashed up and keen for a new venture.”