Recession is when you are who you know

Thursday, July 16, 2009 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories: Media sector | Tags: Alex Connock, entrepreneurs, media, diary, Ten Alps, Donald Trump, Michael Jackson, Bob Geldof, networking, Roger Graef, Live Aid, Murder Mansion, Entrepreneur’s Diary

Alex Connock, CEO, Ten Alps: During the Great Depression, a director of Jimmy Cagney movies called Raoul Walsh had dinner at newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon mansion. The guests: J Edgar Hoover, Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill, General MacArthur, Howard Hughes, Somerset Maugham and many of Hollywood’s most beautiful actresses.

Now that’s how you build a media empire!

In fact, who you know is always a defining asset in any business. Talent may be a necessary condition, but only a great contact book is a sufficient one. 

You’ve got to bring a network to the table, and even more so in a recession, when the cost of every customer acquisition counts, so there is less cash for cold-calling. Why hire someone to work through your target client list, when you can hire someone who plays golf with them?

Shine, Britain’s fastest-growing TV production company, is run by the impressive Liz Murdoch, for whom Blackberry must have had to produce a custom, expanded-memory version, so many top names she will have in hers.

At Ten Alps, our 20 acquisitions have almost all derived from our own networking encounters – a lunch, a drink, a friend from university. Few if any came from an out-of-the-blue sales memorandum

So it’s no coincidence that my most successful colleagues are also all amazing networkers.

Take Geldof, whose peerless schmoozing skills allowed him to book a line up for Live Aid which didn’t so much save the planet as actually nearly stop it, and who sang in a tent at his 50th party with a jaw-dropping scratch band including the Rolling Stones and Queen, with Sting on backing vocals and Jools Holland on piano.

Or take Roger Graef (OBE) who wins business-making cutting-edge TV, such as our recent Murder Mansion about the police, not just because he is a brilliant film maker – but also because he’s actually taken the time to get to know the chief constables. 

That kind of networking is not a by-product of the success these people deservedly enjoy – it’s the essence of it.

I woke up to this when I was working briefly in New York as a (feeble) writer at People Magazine. So seriously did they take the schmoozing that it was obligatory to NOT be in the office from 1-3pm, and you got hauled in for questioning if your expense account spending was too low. 

I was sent to Atlantic City to get to know Donald Trump, and ended up going across America with him and Michael Jackson in Jackson’s jet.

The plane was owned by the then boss of Sony, Akio Morita, and when we got off, Trump wrote him a thank you letter to say how grateful he was.

In a recession, letting clients know you are grateful is a pretty good place to start.

You can catch up on Alex Connock’s previous posts or view all posts  from our Entrepreneur’s Diary series, in which we follow a male and a female CEO to discover what life is like behind the scenes of their business.

Picture: © Alex Connock