Paddick

"Paddick and Risley met to discuss the deal with Keeping at Joso’s, a seafood restaurant in Toronto’s ritzy Yorkville neighbourhood. It ended up being a very expensive fish dinner for Risley. As the asking price crept north of US $ 50 million, Paddick sensed it was giving Risley pause. Ultimately, though, Risley wasn’t deterred by an extra $ 5 million. “You know what, Brendan? Ten years down the road, if $ 5 million is the difference between whether this was the right call or the wrong call, we shouldn’t be doing this deal at all,” Risley told him. “Let’s do it.’”"

"Columbus’s immense growth over the next decade—from startup to significant competitor of the incumbent Caribbean telcos—is partly explained by how swiftly it moved in making decisions and acquisitions. This is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that Paddick and Risley purchased Merit Communications, a small Jamaican internet and phone company, before closing the Cable Bahamas deal."

"In Risley, Paddick discovered a partner who moved swiftly—a man of little patience, uninclined to get bogged down in details. Instead, Risley was like a helicopter, whisking along with a bird’s-eye view of the business and where he saw it heading. “I’m quite fine with a deal taking six months,” Paddick told me. “John wants it to take six minutes.... I get a legal document and I’ll spend hours reading it. John goes to the signature page. I like the art of the deal and have a philosophy that silence can be one of the most powerful tools you can use in a negotiation. John can’t stand it. Silence kills him.”"

"In all, Columbus did about fifty acquisitions between 2005 and 2015. That period also saw Columbus lay thousands of kilometres of cable throughout the Caribbean, including between Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, from Colombia to Ecuador, and across Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and El Salvador. “We were an attacker for ten years. We basically built a network like stink and competed like stink as best we could,” Paddick recalled. “Our job was to build the best network in the region and make sure whatever came next worked best on our network. And that’s what we did. And what ended up happening was not only did the next killer apps like Netflix work best on our network, but all the other carriers in the region put down their pens and their capital budgets [for] building networks that were similar to ours and said, ‘We’ll use your network [to carry our traffic].’ That was a real game changer.”"

"The country was also better connected to the rest of the world. “There is not a politician, regardless of party, who would not agree that Columbus coming to Jamaica was a massive nation-building exercise,” Paddick said. Lee-Chin, who prides himself on being a nation builder in his native Jamaica, pointed to the subsequent rise of the information and communication technology industry there, and the creation of thousands of call-centre jobs. “That [was] enabled by Columbus because we brought competition and dropped the price so that it became economically feasible to start a call centre in Jamaica and the Caribbean,” he said. “When I saw that and I saw the impact it had on so many people’s lives, I thought, ‘Whoa! Can you imagine if this was done twenty years ago—how much more development there would be in Jamaica?’”"

"As the closing of the Cable Bahamas deal approached, in early 2005, Paddick got a call from an RBC manager in Freeport: US $ 50 million had been wired to Paddick’s personal bank account. Risley had sent his share of the Cable Bahamas purchase funds without any of the usual, formal protections sought by investors; he’d sent US $ 50 million like it was an e-transfer to pay a plumbing bill. “There was no escrow agreement.... There wasn’t a piece of paper, there wasn’t a contract, there was nothing,” Paddick recalled. “There was just trust.... And it was something that would repeat itself numerous times over the life of Columbus.”"

"yet he’d see Risley pecking away at his keyboard. “John would write the most incredible, motivating, thoughtful emails to the management teams of each place we just left, always encouraging them to reach out to me or him, to tell us how we can help them,” Paddick recalled. If management listed a limitation or hurdle—say, the need for capital or some specific expertise—Risley would try to quickly present a solution."

"“I’d love to do something with you again,” Paddick recalled Risley telling him on the day the Persona deal closed. “If you ever want to do anything, count me in.”"

"I asked Paddick about Malone’s entrance to the company at the end of our first interview. “That was 2013,” he said. “Malone was only in for two years. But quite a two years.” Having already kept Paddick on our video call for an hour and a half, I suggested we could cover Malone’s involvement in a second interview. “The Malone story is pretty simple,” he replied, suggesting it didn’t have to wait. “He put in $ 185 million [USD] in January 2013 and got $ 1.1 billion in November 2015. Not a bad [thirty]-something months.”"

"Cable & Wireless’s offer of US $ 3.1 billion was $ 1 billion above Digicel’s—thus easily ruling Digicel out—and $ 175 million richer than Liberty Global’s offer. Cable & Wireless’s proposal was enticing—a premium of 12.5 times forecasted EBITDA for the next year. Risley wanted to accept but Paddick felt he could milk a few more drops from Cable & Wireless’s new CEO. He called Bentley on a Saturday and though he didn’t name the second-place bidder, offered enough clues to identify it as Liberty Global. Bentley would have expected Paddick and Risley to choose Liberty Global if it came down to a close contest, given that Malone was a Columbus shareholder. So Paddick told Bentley he had to sweeten Cable & Wireless’s offer. It was a bold play: Paddick claimed he needed space between Cable & Wireless and Liberty Global even though Cable & Wireless was already the highest bidder—by nearly $ 200 million."

"At the end of each meeting, Risley would ask questions such as: “If you had unlimited funds, what would you do? If you had another $ 50 million, what would you do?” “That was the most productive part of the meeting because you got to the aspirational side,” Paddick said. “John was incredible at getting you to think bigger and bolder than you thought you safely could.”"

"“I was just trying to get more money,” Paddick told me. “I had a guy [Bentley] who was basically sitting there going, ‘Holy shit, I can spend the next ten years rebuilding my piece of crap network while Digicel and Columbus and others continue to pick away at me... or I can go acquire the biggest thorn in my side who have all brand-new fibre-based networks.’ He just had to have this deal. You could smell it a mile away. So I was just basically squeezing the blood out of the turnip at that point.”"