Ron

"CAA had no formal business hours. If the partners’ cars were in the garage at 8:00 in the morning, so were everybody else’s. When I made my evening rounds at 7:00, 80 percent of our people were at their desks. The work was the thing. We even had a no-fly-by-day rule: if you flew to New York, you took the red-eye so you didn’t waste a workday in the air. Ron and I would park our cars in the number one and number two spots and leave them there when we walked to business dinners, before coming back to retrieve them. We worked insanely hard, but we fostered the illusion of working impossibly hard. I believed momentum was everything—once a company relaxed, it was done for."

"*I yelled at Judge, ‘You know it’s a contract, we’ll sue your asses off.’ Then I got hold of Ron. ‘Alan,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to buy. Do what you like, but I’m not going to buy it.’ He knew as well as I that the threat of being sued was better than buying something you don’t want. This left me in a quandary, because I’d spent months walking through Tappenden’s many premises, examining records in the land registry, searching Companies Office files back several years. In those days companies didn’t publish accounts of subsidiaries; big conglomerates would always try to confuse where the money came from. So it was hard to know where the real money was being made.* *Yet it was critical in terms of valuing the company. I’d taken a fitting off my boat to the engineering works in Christchurch, talked to the sales people about a new fitting, got them to show me around the foundry and could tell whether they were busy or not. I’d done something similar in all their businesses. That’s what it takes. If you want a successful takeover, you have to find value where the market can’t see it. More than that, if you have a better idea than the owners or directors of where the value lies in a company, then you can bend them round to getting what they want, while you get the pearls. I knew more about Tappenden’s various companies than its own directors did. So, I thought this is a good deal going wanting. I* *said to Tom, ‘I’ll buy it.’*"

"*I yelled at Judge, ‘You know it’s a contract, we’ll sue your asses off.’ Then I got hold of Ron. ‘Alan,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to buy. Do what you like, but I’m not going to buy it.’ He knew as well as I that the threat of being sued was better than buying something you don’t want. This left me in a quandary, because I’d spent months walking through Tappenden’s many premises, examining records in the land registry, searching Companies Office files back several years. In those days companies didn’t publish accounts of subsidiaries; big conglomerates would always try to confuse where the money came from. So it was hard to know where the real money was being made.* *Yet it was critical in terms of valuing the company. I’d taken a fitting off my boat to the engineering works in Christchurch, talked to the sales people about a new fitting, got them to show me around the foundry and could tell whether they were busy or not. I’d done something similar in all their businesses. That’s what it takes. If you want a successful takeover, you have to find value where the market can’t see it. More than that, if you have a better idea than the owners or directors of where the value lies in a company, then you can bend them round to getting what they want, while you get the pearls. I knew more about Tappenden’s various companies than its own directors did. So, I thought this is a good deal going wanting. I* *said to Tom, ‘I’ll buy it.’*"