Just three months after selling Esat Digifone in early 2000, Denis O’Brien gathered friends and advisers to Dublin’s Morrison Hotel for the start of their next big adventure. O’Brien was missing the daily cut and thrust of running a fledgling mobile phone company. With plenty of money to spend, he wanted to do it all over again, but this time in a sunnier climate.
The countries of the Caribbean had come together in 1989 to plan the region’s future telecommunications needs. This was one of the last economic areas in the world to liberalise its telecommunications sector. Now each government was preparing to dismantle the monopolistic stranglehold enjoyed for almost a hundred years by a British-based telecommunications giant, Cable & Wireless (C&W).
There were potentially 40m phone users across the Caribbean — a huge market hungry for competition. O’Brien had learnt that there was plenty of money to be made by going up against a monopoly. Just as he had created a lean and fast-paced mobile phone company in Ireland, he relished the prospect of taking on C&W.
So when Jamaica’s government advertised a competition for a mobile phone licence, O’Brien and accountant Ossie Kilkenny decided to bid. Already partners in Spin, a Dublin radio station, the two set up a new company, Mosel, controlled by O’Brien, with Kilkenny owning a 20% shareholding. They estimated it would cost about €30m to get a network operational in Jamaica. Kilkenny agreed to invest €6m. Jamaica was a poor economy with a population of just over 2.5m. With a hostile and corrupt environment, it would be a difficult proposition for O’Brien to sell to banks and potential investors, but he was undeterred.
As the Irish government had done, the Jamaican government hired international experts to work with its officials to select the winner. In contrast, however, it held a straightforward auction, granting a 15-year licence to the highest bidder, rather than adopting the beauty pageant favoured by Ireland. The auction took place one afternoon in April 2000, with O’Brien monitoring it from Dublin. Frank O’Carroll, one of the former Esat crew, was in Kingston to handle the bid as O’Brien issued his instructions over the phone. At first it looked as if Mosel had won the licence with a bid of $25m. Then, after some confusion, the process was restarted.
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“Someone put his hand up at the wrong time and it went around again,” explains a witness. “It finished with Mosel’s bid of $47.5m.” Even though O’Brien’s consortium had ended up paying nearly twice as much for the licence this time around, it was delighted to be back in the mobile phone business.
Its network was to be called Digicel, using Digi from Digifone and adopting the American name for a mobile phone, cellphone. They planned to launch within a year. From the start Digicel struggled to overcome slow-moving bureaucracy. It was also difficult to find local partners and to raise finance from banks in the region. “They were seen as a bunch of crazy Irishmen,” says one local banker. “Taking on C&W was like taking on the British Empire. People thought they were mad.”
Rather than sitting back and enjoying their new-found wealth from the sale of Esat, Leslie Buckley, Lucy Gaffney and many of the former O’Brien crew were conscripted to replicate their Irish success in Jamaica. They were eager to get back to business. “We would have been bored otherwise,” Paul Connolly says of the group. “It would be good fun.”
Just as he had assiduously built up political contacts in Ireland to influence reforms in the telecommunications sector, O’Brien now began to build a rapport with the Caribbean’s political elite. He paid regular visits to ministers in the islands where new licences were likely to be issued, bestowing dignitaries with everything from Irish hurleys to fancy ties. Connolly says his friend was happy to be back “hustling” for licences.
Now that he was regularly travelling to the Caribbean from Portugal, it was time for O’Brien to buy the ultimate luxury: his own jet. As a man who largely eschewed the trappings of wealth and preferred to live a fairly down-to-earth life, he struggled with the decision. “He thought long and hard about it,” says Connolly. But a private jet was becoming an essential item for this newly minted millionaire.
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In 1998 he and Connolly had clubbed together to buy an eight-seater Hawker 125, using it on fundraising trips for Esat Telecom and hiring it out to other merchant princes. Now he needed some serious wings. He ordered a Gulfstream GIV jet, for which he paid more than $30m (€24.4m). “It was not that easy to get to Jamaica and you could lose a day travelling,” says Connolly. “The GIV quickly became a critical component of Digicel’s ultimate success as it allowed him to branch out more aggressively in the Caribbean.”
Executives working in Kingston were identified and persuaded to join the Digicel team. Lisa Lewis had worked at C&W for nine years handling the company’s customer-care division. She was asked to meet Seamus Lynch, Kilkenny and Buckley to discuss their plans. “Over two hours we chatted about all the things I had done and if I had my time over again what would I do differently? It was informal. I thought they were picking my brains. Then the following day they offered me a job as project manager for its billing systems,” she says.
“It was unheard of to leave Cable & Wireless. The following Monday, when I said I was leaving, I was thrown out of the company within an hour,” says Lewis. “It was very emotional.”
Lewis was Digicel’s seventh employee. Within days she was travelling throughout America looking at similar operations, learning how to create a new system. “It was a whirlwind. I was supposed to be gone for a week and I was gone for three,” she says. “By the time I came back there were 20 people in the office. That first year was madness. I never saw my family. I didn’t see daylight as we tried to launch a company from scratch and none of us knew what that meant.”
The Digicel office was equally basic. People shared one large table and everything was done on a tiny budget. “People were coming from serious jobs to be told they would be sitting up around that table sharing with six others. And we shared cars. So you only left the office when the last person was ready to go, and they were usually the most senior person.”
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For the most part the Irish and Jamaican staff worked well together, but there were cultural clashes that led to tension in the cramped office. Lynch proposed a management retreat in the nearby resort of Port Antonio to alleviate the situation. A bruising encounter, it showed how different the two island nations were in the way they related to one another.
Harry Smith, the former Digicel chief customer relations officer, says Lynch proposed that the men share bedrooms to save on costs, something that was not received well. “I don’t want to say Jamaicans are homophobic, but the idea of sharing rooms for whatever reason was not going to happen.”
O’Brien dropped in and out of the highly charged meetings, at which it was obvious that use of language was one of the biggest cultural problems to be overcome. “The Jamaicans said they found it offensive that the Irish cursed so much and the Irish said they found it offensive the Jamaicans used so many sexual innuendos,” says Smith.
Lewis explains that while Jamaicans use colourful language, corporate Jamaica is more reserved. It was normal to address senior colleagues as ‘Mr’ or ‘Miss’, while everybody at Digicel was on first-name terms. “The Irish had serious issues with our physical interaction as Jamaicans, which is a lot more touchy-feely,” she says.
The sessions helped them to coexist, according to Smith. “What we have now is cursing sexual innuendos as everyday parlance,” he laughs.
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O’Brien flew in and out of Kingston regularly, summoning Digicel’s staff to meet him, sometimes in the middle of the night. They soon learnt how hands-on he was about managing their progress, insisting that every member of the management team become integrated within Jamaica’s business community and get themselves appointed to the board of the local chamber of commerce and other networks.
“Denis and Seamus [Lynch] broke your heart about that. At meetings Denis would ask everyone how many boards you were on and take a note of it,” says David Hall, now with Digicel Haiti. “You were doing this in your own time. It gave you access to people and allowed you to build up a relationship and get a good feel if things were working.”
O’Brien loved meeting people who had ideas about starting a new business or getting involved with his ventures. Colleagues say his diary was constantly filled with meetings with various contacts and even strangers who had something they wanted to run past him, making it difficult for them to discuss urgent matters within the business. “He had so many contacts and so many irons in the fire all of the time,” said Sean Corkery, who worked with the businessman in Esat.
“People were always turning up bringing him ideas and you would be asking whether they were worth it. There would be no business case analysis done. They didn’t all come to fruition, but invariably a lot of them would be good. But you wanted your time as well.”
Around the office O’Brien would amiably talk to everybody, greeting them either by name or by the nickname he had given them. But he was a mercurial character, one day cheery and full of conversation, another moody and aloof. One person recalls O’Brien getting into the lift and ignoring him, the only other occupant. The unsettling encounter left him wondering if he had done something to annoy the chairman. Worried about the consequences, he unburdened himself to a colleague, who said: “Just go up and apologise.” “For what?” he asked. “It doesn’t matter, just do it.”
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It worked. A friendly relationship with O’Brien was swiftly restored. This kind of experience was far from isolated. Colleagues developed a code for assessing the boss’s mood. His personal assistant, Nicola Prendergast, used to describe the “weather conditions” round the chairman’s office. News that it was “sunny”, for instance, signalled a good time to drop in.
As Conor Lenihan, a former employee and now a junior minister, says: “I would have some sympathy with people who ended up in a difficult relationship with Denis, and I would still be friendly with some of them. He put such a huge premium on loyalty that if he even sensed that criticism had moved from honest and constructive to what he perceived to be disloyal, he became hugely difficult to deal with. If he perceived that anybody was being disloyal he became utterly unforgiving, and that was basically the end of you and the company.”
Gaffney, who was viewed by colleagues as O’Brien’s “shadow”, says the telecoms tycoon constantly challenges those who work for him to put in an incredible performance: “Denis stretches people like elastic bands.”
Working at Esat, she explains, was like a hectic journey on a fast-moving train. “Some people can hack the pace and others can’t. If you were lazy or disloyal you were pushed off, but if you couldn’t stay on board through no fault of your own, Denis would be very loyal.”
“I remember telling him that I couldn’t be bothered to work for him any more and I resigned,” recalls Lenihan. “I had a temper tantrum and we both shouted and screamed at each other. I walked out and went down the street and he came running after me and pinned me up against a Georgian railing. He pleaded with me not to leave him now and invoked loyalty and friendship and a hundred different things if I’d stay. I said I would if his behaviour changed. In fairness to Denis, he was always ready to entertain a behaviour change if that was what was required to keep you in the company.”
By April 18, 2001, the new Digicel mobile-phone network was ready. At O’Brien’s insistence, a spectacular ceremony had been prepared to create curiosity and hype, alerting the entire population to the exciting and cheaper mobile-phone operator. Details of the launch were a secret, with O’Brien once again imposing military-style discipline.
Digicel’s logo had similarities to Digifone’s. It was a bold red colour with a hint of green to denote Irish involvement and he wanted it prominently displayed all over Jamaica. The company blitzed the media with advertisements featuring a daily countdown to the simultaneous launch in Kingston and Montego Bay. “Those who were invited got a mobile phone in a gift bag and the message on the phone was the invitation,” said Jean Lowrie-Chin, a public relations consultant. “All of the phones would be connected to Digicel at midnight. It was very dramatic.”
In Kingston, the Pegasus Hotel was transformed to host the ceremony, which would be attended by hundreds. Guests filed past a display of the first moon landing and could listen to the famous ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ recording. “The launch was live on television, radio and the internet,” explains Smith. “It was the biggest launch Jamaica had ever seen.”
When the network went live, it was planned to have a video link to Jamaican reggae artist Shaggy, who was playing in Philadelphia and he would welcome everybody to Digicel. The afternoon before the launch there was a problem with the satellite. Smith asked Jamaica’s superstar reggae entertainer, Beenie Man, to step into the breach. “The day of the launch he lost a friend of his and I don’t know if he was drinking or something, but he was in no shape to do the launch.”
When he explained the situation to Gaffney, she told him he just had to get Beenie Man to perform. “First he refused to go on stage, then he got into an altercation with a security guard and I didn’t know if he was going to perform. But he did. He came on stage in slippers and we kept the camera shots from the knee up.” After all the drama, Smith discovered the next day why the video link to Shaggy had broken down. The technician had been pointing it in the wrong direction.
O’Brien attended the show, as did politicians, business people and diplomats. At midnight two young Jamaican Digicel staff, Jodi-Ann Maxwell and Makonnen Blake-Hannah, switched on the network. “It was part of the image we wanted to project,” says Smith. “Normally in Jamaica people would have had the dignitaries, but Digicel was brave enough to use two young people.”
They wanted to make the Digicel brand accessible to everybody. “We put emphasis on putting service into areas that never had service. Cable & Wireless only had coverage in the main towns and along main routes.” They knew the Jamaican population was hungry for the new network. A poll on the main television bulletin on the eve of the launch suggested that 98% of the population wanted to sign up.
When the Digicel stores opened the next day there were queues of people waiting to buy phones. “We hoped to have sold 100,000 handsets in a year,” says Smith. “We sold 100,000 in 100 days.”
- Extracted from A Mobile Fortune — The Life and Times of Denis O’Brien, by Siobhán Creaton. Published this week by Aurum Press, €14.99