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to let a nice man from a big bank give me a cheque for £56 million

      AS MY PART OF THE DEAL I had accepted forty per cent of the value of my old shares in cash, with the other sixty per cent being held as shares in the new company. These shares were to be released to me in three tranches of equal amounts over the next three years. After that it was up to me whether I sold them, kept them or lit fires with them.

      Everyone at the time said I was mad to accept so much paper as opposed to real money, with the other main players in the deal negotiating a much higher percentage of cash payment for their equity.

      ‘Not so smart now, though,’ I thought a few days later, sitting in DC’s office watching the share price of the new company rocket from our sale price of £2.00 to a high of £3.76.

      This meant that where I had been sitting on £30 million pounds’ worth of new equity at the point of sale I was now, just over a month later, sitting on a value of £56 million.

      It was time for another conversation with Goldman Sachs, except now it was they who called me, shortly before dispatching a very nice man to come and visit me. He represented one of their investment funds.

      ‘Chris, we would like to offer you £3.76 per share for all your shares today,’ he said, sitting opposite me in an office I’d borrowed. ‘That, as I’m sure you know is £56 million,’ he went on. ‘What do you say?’

      Well, to be honest I didn’t know what to say. I was already richer than I ever imagined I would be and these latest figures being tossed around were plain silly, but before I could even consider a decision, I had something to discuss with the nice gentleman on a point of clarification.

      ‘Er, I don’t actually have all the shares yet. I only receive them a third at a time over three years.’ Of course this was not news to him.

      ‘We are aware of that, Chris. What we are suggesting is that we buy them forward – that is to say we buy all your shares off you at an agreed price today, no matter when you get them. The price is firm.’

      Now I have done many stupid things in my life but what I was about to do next is right up there at the top of the list. I suddenly convinced myself that there were dastardly goings on here, after all this was Goldman Sachs. Why were they so keen to totally buy me out and at such a premium?

      ‘Surely they must be up to something,’ I concluded to myself. ‘Why the hard sell?’

      I tried to look intelligent for a second, tapping my fingers under my chin in a contemplative manner before declaring with gusto, ‘No thanks very much, I’m fine as I am. My shares are not for sale to you or anyone else.’ Upon hearing this, the nice gentleman from the big bank turned ashen. It was obvious to him I’d just lost my mind.

      He tried to help me.

      ‘But Chris, do you realise how good a deal this is for you? It’s a guaranteed profit of almost one hundred per cent on the huge profit you’ve already made selling your company.’

      But I was not to be moved. I was determined to turn down this second ‘offer of a lifetime’, no matter what. In fact the more he tried to reason with me, the more I became suspicious and convinced myself I was right.

      By the time the nice man eventually gave up trying to give me £56 million for nothing more than a signature, he was incredulous.

      In that one encounter I had become delusional. A fathead of seismic and cataclysmic proportions.

      Whereas before I had understood my limitations when it came to business and accepted that thus far I had enjoyed no more than perhaps a highly fortuitous roll of the dice, I had now unwisely entered a state of mind where I presumed to actually know what I might be doing.

      Mistakes don’t get much bigger than this.

      The nice man from Goldman Sachs left the meeting shaking his head in disbelief. Over ten years later I’m still shaking mine. Excuse me for a moment whilst I just go outside to scream.

       TOP 10 WAYS DRINKING TOO MUCH LEADS TO FOOLING YOURSELF

      10 You pass off being scruffy for being eccentric

      9 You pass off being drunk for being creative

      8 You pass off being an angry pain in the ass for being misunderstood

      7 You pass off not eating for being fit and lithe

      6 You claim contentment is for the unambitious

      5 You see responsibility as the badge of the dull

      4 You mistake standing in a bar for hours on end talking shite for having a good time

      3 You only have relationships with people based around alcohol

      2 You are genuinely surprised when people disappear to go home

      1 You think that anyone who goes to the pub all day, every day, may actually have something to offer the world

      I MIGHT NOW HAVE UNWITTINGLY EMBARKED upon the most rudderless stage of my still relatively young life but at least I no longer owned the radio station, which suddenly felt more like a plus than a minus. After just over two years at the helm of a major business, a weight of which I had hitherto been unaware seemed to lift off my shoulders, leaving me instantly feeling lighter.

      Gone for ever were the days when I needed to worry that we were spending too much money on new equipment or vastly expensive poster campaigns that seemed to have little or no effect. I could also forget about the fact that we were paying immense amounts of money to several very average broadcasters to do little more than tell the time and announce a competition every now and again.

      In many ways I was freer than I had ever been before. I had all day every day after The Breakfast Show untouched, TFI was still flying and I was now perceived as a whizz in business (except of course by the people who really knew what business was about). And all this before I turned thirty-four.

      So where does such a heady cocktail of success and opportunity leave a guy? Well, in my case it left me as high as a kite after coming off air every morning, in the middle of one of the most exciting cities in the world, with no more work to do and a truckload of disposable income burning a hole in my bank account.

      It’s obvious now, when I look back at those days, that I was destined to go off the rails.

      How about this for a clue?

      Meticulous planning would go into my ‘recreational’ activities after the show each day and I convinced myself that in spite of these ‘plans’ I still had a hold on reality. But it was the almost frightening level of attention to detail that should have alerted me to the fact that there might be the beginnings of a larger problem here.

      It was almost as if the producer in me had been enrolled by the devil to ruin my life as efficiently and comprehensively as possible.

      I would begin my post-show programme of preparation for the day with a trip to the gym. Ironic, given what was to follow, but in my mind the fitter I was, the more unhealthy a lifestyle I could get away with. I would work out for all I was worth for an hour every day, followed by a forty-minute in-and-out sauna session, rounded off with a sleep in the relaxation room – it was a very posh gym.

      The relaxation room was a big circular space lined with white leather recliners, all of which were arranged in semicircular rows facing a huge fish tank. There was suitably soft lighting and subtle, ambient music that seemed to come from nowhere and the room was dominated by a huge planetarium-style curved ceiling that came fully into view the instant you pushed back on your chair.

      It wasn’t difficult to drift off in such a soporific atmosphere unless one of the larger club members had drifted off before

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