It's Not What You Think (31 page)

‘So, how much money do you have?’ At this point there was a pause, it was bordering on comical. I had only paused, however, not because of the nature of the question but simply because I wasn’t entirely sure how much money I did have in my bank account. The thought of putting whatever that amount was into the deal didn’t bother me for a second—after all I was totally convinced we were going to make this thing work.

‘I think it’s about two million pounds,’ I said unconvincingly, but thinking it may be somewhere around that figure.

‘Actually it’s a bit more than that,’ one of them said—they had done their homework, ‘but two million will do. Two million is the figure we would require you to put into the pot.’

None of this was a problem for me and I wasted no time in telling them so. This was the final tick in the box they needed as I was now committed both emotionally, professionally, energetically and financially. In short they had my balls on a plate but if it meant us getting our radio station
then they could sprinkle them with salt and pepper and serve them up for dinner for all I cared—we were in France after all.

The message came back from Paris:

‘The French are in,’ Michael was screaming with delight again.

‘
Mon dieu, zut alors, vive la France
!’ I screamed back—or something like that.

What Michael didn’t tell me was that after I had left the meeting they demanded a similar financial commitment from him. We were now both in this together and now deeper than ever. We had both committed to putting everything on the line in the pursuit of our goal. The heat was being turned up. This was becoming no place for the faint-hearted.

We were now up to £67 million of guaranteed funding, all signed off and ready to be handed over, but as the days rolled by Capital were edging ever closer to a ruling in their favour from the MMC and would be in a position to exchange contracts the instant the decision came through. Incredibly though, they still had not woken up to the fact that they could extend their exclusivity option or that they might need to. This continued to leave the door open for us for now at least. We still had to get our hands on another £20 million pounds and we had to do it fast.

10 They were a 500 million pound company

  9 I was a ‘wacky DJ’

  8 They thought the deal was in the bag

  7 We knew it wasn’t

  6 They saw it as part of their corporate master plan

  5 We saw it as beyond our wildest dreams

  4 They did not want it enough

  3 We could not have wanted it more

  2 For them the heat had gone out of the deal

  1 For us the heat was becoming unbearable

By now I had taken our quest to buy the radio statio
nonto the air, declaring my intent to the audience. The management at Capital must simply have taken this as a bit of fun—purely for the benefit of entertainment—but the irony of it all was that everything I was saying was true.

I suppose they may have thought that no one in their right mind who was trying to steal a highly profitable business close to the value of £100 million from under their nose would choose to advertise that very fact every morning on the radio, but this is exactly what I was doing.

The more I talked about our efforts, the more we realised they might sound too fantastic to possibly be true. If it was a ploy to put our rivals off the scent of what was really going on then it was one that seemed to be working, I decided to ramp up the soap opera and make things so ridiculously transparent. I even went as far as where we were in the process with daily updates. So far so good, but the clock was now ticking very loudly and we still needed to find the final chunk of our funding in what was now literally days.

This is where David’s prior experience with Branson proved to be priceless. He explained that if Richard sold a company and in doing so had already realised a hefty profit, he had been known to leave a slice of the cash behind for another roll of the dice. David thought that this could be one of those occasions where he might be persuaded to do such a thing.

We had no choice but for someone to pitch our business plan to Branson himself.

It was decided that I was the principal so it was down to me.

The pitch had to be strong and confident. It had to have a story that would build layer upon layer as to why R.B. should sell to us as well as leaving some money in the pot, rather than get out clean by selling to Capital—and at a higher price.

We started to construct the call.

There was one massive consideration that we figured might swing things our way: Branson was fiercely protective of the Virgin name and brand—the very identity that he had worked for years to create and nurture and one that had become very much unique in the business world. Virgin was a mysterious mix of being corporate yet not too corporate, respected whilst still exciting, and now established but still at the cutting edge. Anything bearing the Virgin name had to reinforce that image and we figured it wouldn’t be difficult to argue that the Capital group were unlikely to be suited to such a task. They were notoriously dreary and old school in comparison to Branson and his maverick ways.

David, who knew Richard better than most, said that this could be the Achilles heel of the Capital deal. In direct contradiction to what everybody else had been telling us, David said Branson might even ‘prefer’ to sell to someone else other than Capital, especially if that someone promised to remain more faithful to the Virgin philosophy. David was sure that if we could get this across to R.B. it could be the key to not only persuading him to consider selling to us but also to him maybe investing himself and leaving in the £20 million we needed to take us up to the magical £87,000,000.

The financial sell was, of course, also vital and would go something like: R.B.’s £20 million, if he chose to take us up on our offer, would to all intents and purposes be a loan but would also entitle him to close to an outright quarter share of the new company. If and when we sold, he would get all his money back plus the added booty of whatever the new company was worth on top. Meanwhile he would also receive full interest on his loan.

It was a very good deal. All I had to do now was pitch it to the great man.

The time for the call was set—the message came back that Richard would be available for a telephone conversation at 7 p.m. the following Friday.

Now I don’t know if this was some kind of cruel joke or not but 7 p.m. on a Friday night was precisely the time
TFI
came off the air.

‘You are not serious,’ I said to Michael when he informed me of the news.

‘That’s the only time he had offered this week and if we leave it till after the weekend it may be too late—it’s take it or leave it.’

Of course we had to take it.

‘Oh and there’s another thing,’ Michael added.

‘What’s that?’ I asked tentatively.

‘He will be on Necker, his private island. He will have just finished playing tennis and will be waiting to start lunch, so he’ll be in no mood to be messed around.’

‘Fabulous,’ I thought to myself. ‘Not exactly the perfect time to ask a bloke to sell you his radio station and lend you twenty million quid into the bargain.’ Still, always concentrate on the positives and you never know what might happen. ‘Please God let him have won at tennis,’ I thought to myself.

When it came to
the
Friday, the day was a confusion of preparing for the show and preparing for the phone call. I have to be honest and say the phone call was very much taking precedence in my mind. After all, I had hosted
TFI
dozens of times before whereas I had never made a phone call like the one I was about to make to Branson, the prospect of which made my previous phone call to Kenneth a couple of weeks ago seem like a walk in the park.

I knew that when it came to the pitch I had to go in hard and not waver for a second—to get Branson to take me seriously at all would be a minor miracle. If I stumbled or appeared unconfident or disorganised, particularly at the beginning, I would be toast for sure. Technically of course I still had nothing to lose—except now we were only one short conversation away from maybe making this once impossible dream a reality. I had to be on the form of my life. The principal of the piece had agreed to talk to us—the man who could say yes—and it was my job to convince him to do exactly that.

Whenever I’m in a situation similar to this, i.e. pooing my pants, I always think about twenty-four hours hence when it will all be over. We will all still be here and, sure, some things may have changed but basically life is never as dramatic in reality as we tend to make it in our heads. This would be one man talking to another, the first man offering the second man a completely respectable, well thought out, considered, not to mention very attractive, proposal—the second man able to accommodate the first man if he so wished. One way or another we would know the outcome soon enough.

My main priority as far as the preparation for the phone call was concerned was to retain enough energy to be able to concentrate come seven o’clock and so I consciously spent the whole day pacing myself. I’d been up since five, I had done a radio show, I had sat through three hours of briefings with the investors and the team, I’d been to the gym, I’d rehearsed the television show—twice, I was now actually hosting the show and yet the most important part of my day was still to come.

I had to make sure I had the mental wherewithal to get my pitch across—concisely, energetically, positively and convincingly. I had one shot at this speech, that’s all, and I knew that if I blew it, a chance like this would probably never come around again.

That night
TFI
had the habitual three guests and three bands plus the usual bunch of jokes and sketches but all I could think about throughout the whole show was the damned phone call. Everywhere I looked I could see Richard’s face—he was the lead singer in all the bands, he was all my guests, even the audience just looked like one huge set of dazzling white teeth staring right back at me.

After what seemed like for ever, I introduced the last band and was immediately ushered off the set and into a room which had been prepared specifically for the phone call. A few senior members of the production team had been made aware of what was going on and had been briefed to get me in position as swiftly and efficiently as possible. The allocated room was the smallest of four dressing rooms, being not much bigger than a broom cupboard, I suddenly felt sorry for all the guests that we had forced to make do with such a claustrophobic space. No wonder Keith Allen was in such a bad mood after we’d put him in there! All that was in Dressing Room No. 4 for my tenure was: a chair, a bottle of water, a monitor so I could watch the
end of the show and the dreaded telephone—just looking at it made my stomach disappear.

As the final band was still playing I dialled the international number which had been guarded by one of the producers all day. As I did so, I could see the end credits of the show beginning to crawl across the screen. I pressed each digit on the keypad extra firmly to ensure it registered, the whole dialling process seeming to take an achingly long time. A few moments later and the band had finished, the audience were applauding but there was still no connection. My palms were sweating and my right leg was shaking ten to the dozen as I continued to await the loud, clumsy click that would tell me I was finally through. A few seconds more and there it was, followed by the lazy ring of a telephone line somewhere thousands of miles away that tells you wherever it is you’re calling it’s nowhere near anywhere else. After three or four rings somebody picked up—it was a lady’s voice, bright and friendly and, judging from the ambience, she was outside.

‘Hello, Necker Island.’

So far so good.

‘Ah, hello,’ I tried to sound as calm as I possibly could. ‘It’s Chris Evans for Richard. He should be expecting my call.’

‘Oh yes, Chris, that’s right, he is. I’ll just get him for you.’

I can’t tell you how much better that nice lady and her one fabulous sentence made me feel.

As I waited for Richard to come to the phone I could hear the distinct clink of cutlery piercing the air and people having fun laughing in the background as the breeze caused the line to crackle. I began to picture the scene there as opposed to where I was—holed up in a clammy little cupboard with chaos outside the door and sweat now dripping down my back. As the irony of the situation sank in, I could feel myself about to laugh.

‘Hello, it’s Richard,’ said a recognisable voice on the other end of the line instantly snapping me back to attention.

Shit
,
focus you prick
, I chided myself.

‘Oh, hello, Richard, thanks for taking my call. It’s about your radio station.’

‘Right, I see, what about it…?’

‘I want you to think about selling it to me.’

There. That was the plan. It couldn’t have been any more concise than that now, could it? The perfect start.

‘Ah, really, now I heard about this—tell me why.’

He sounded both amused and intrigued and, more importantly, he’d given me the green light to make my speech. This was all I needed. I launched straight in. I was suddenly totally in the moment. I didn’t miss a beat.

I started off by explaining to him how I knew the importance of the Virgin brand as far as he personally was concerned, the spirit where it came from, what it stood for and what people had come to expect of it. I then explained that Capital had little if anything in common with the aforementioned qualities and would ultimately only be interested in pushing their own brand and not that of another company. I ventured that it was even conceivable they might look to rename the station altogether.

Next I moved on to the workforce that was still employed at his radio station and how I had seen them operate over the last few weeks and how much pride they took in what they had created. He also needed to know how much they valued the fact that they worked for him and how downhearted they all were at the prospect of being sold to the men in grey suits from the Capital group. Virgin Radio was different because they were different and they were different because he was different.

All the while he just listened. It was going as well as I could have hoped for.

Having set up the downside of him selling to Capital, it was time for me to pitch the upside of him selling to us.

I urged him to reconsider that whatever he thought Virgin Radio was worth today, it had nowhere near reached its full potential. I did this by going through the financial arguments which by now I knew as good as anyone, having heard them time and time again in our meetings with the banks and our various investors.

I then went on to describe my own position and how, not unlike himself when he had started, I found myself somewhat of a square peg in a round hole. He was the maverick businessman, I was the maverick broadcaster and we both shared a comprehensive understanding, knowledge and passion for what we did for a living.

I explained that although this conversation was ultimately a money conversation, for me this was not a money deal but something much more, something I had to do in order to continue to broadcast. Obviously I realised the figures had to stack up as well, which is why I had surrounded myself with a grown-up, experienced business wall of steel, including David Campbell whom I knew he trusted; Barbara, whose company had helped Virgin Radio get on air in the first place and my agent Michael Foster, who was the best playmaker in town.

I assured him that whatever Capital was lacking, I was confident we could deliver and not only that but there was also a real possibility he could end up making much more money. It was at this point I took a deep breath as it was time to inform him that if he were to go with us we needed him to leave £20 million behind to bridge the gap in our funding.

This is what I said:

‘Richard, as it stands now, you will make £83 million profit if you sign with Capital. If you sign with us you will make £61 million today, and I can almost guarantee you will make at least another £40 million within three years—probably considerably more.’