The Dealmaker: Lessons from a Life in Private Equity

by Guy Hands

An inside account of the multi-billion pound world of private equity and a masterclass on the art of deal-making.

The Dealmaker is a frank and honest account of how a severely dyslexic child who struggled at school went on to graduate from Oxford and become a serial entrepreneur. It describes Guy Hand's career in private equity, first at Nomura and then as head of his own company, Terra Firma. It looks in detail at the huge deals that Terra Firma has done over the years, involving everything from cinema chains and pubs to waste management, aircraft leasing and green energy. And it offers a brutally honest appraisal of the deal that almost bankrupted him - the acquisition of multinational music recording and publishing company EMI in 2007, just as a global financial crash loomed on the horizon. Above all, it takes the reader inside the previously very secretive world of private equity, explaining how this multi-billion pound sector operates and what opportunities it offers.

Both insightful and page-turning, it will prove inspirational and essential reading for all those concerned with or interested in the world of investment.

Genres: Finance, Business, Biography, Nonfiction

368 pages, Hardcover

First published May 22, 2012

Reviews

[Karoline Holm · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hands is highly self-reflective at times, and surprisingly out of touch at others. It’s the chapters when he truly reflects on his choices and lessons learned that are interesting to read. The rest is just one big eye-roll. For example when he is explaining how he would like to invest more in environmental-friendly initiatives by planting trees in the same sentence as he breaks down how he flew London - Las Vegas - Paris on a weekly basis to do so. Or when he casually mentions his luxurious holidays and party attendings in the same paragraph as how tough it was for him personally to go through all the financial hardship. Or the most contracting one: realising he missed the formative years of his children and stating he wants to spend more time with his family, whilst concluding he needed to work harder, travel more and take on more business initiatives.

The last chapters feel like he ran out of motivation to write and wanted to wrap up quickly with a few anecdotes on what is important in life - seemingly without any actual changes in attitude.

Nevertheless, I’m sure it’s interesting for people in the industry to get an inside look on what happened during the financial crisis and perhaps take notes on what not to do in the future. If anything, this book is a strong tool to discourage anyone to venture into private equity - at least the way Guy Hands have been operating.

[Mohit · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fine. My big takeaway was that there's nothing remarkable about Hands - not temperament, intelligence or gumption. Hands was either successful by (A) being high beta, which blew up with EMI, or (B) by being politically connected.

[Jan-Luca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book includes several interesting and valuable insights into the life of Guy Hands and the world of private equity; especially regarding the disastrous acquisition of EMI, the ensuing 2008 financial crisis, and the following litigation with Citigroup.

Personally, I also enjoyed the anecdotes from Guy Hands's Nomura days (especially with PFG), and the account of Terra Firma's Tank & Rast takeover (despite its relative brevity).

Furthermore, it was refreshing to see that Guy Hands included his mistakes and shortcomings more prominently than his successes, which not only speaks for his character but also offers much more valuable lessons to the reader.

Still, it was a bit too long-winded overall, and the ending felt somewhat unsatisfying (more like a pitch for the author's recent political engagements and ESG-commitments rather than genuine reflection).

[Harry Harman · Rating 5 out of 5]

1982. Successful in my application to Goldman Sachs, I embark on twelve years.

1995. I’m now working for the Japanese investment bank Nomura. An Inland Revenue inspector has told me that for several years, when I was at Nomura, I had been the UK’s largest individual taxpayer.

2002–2007. I leave Nomura’s protection and on 1 April 2002 start my own company, Terra Firma.

My father practised as a barrister; my mother ran a nursery school in the capital, Salisbury.

I had joined the chess club, and had even reached the final of the school tournament.

I’ve had a deep fear of losing everything for as long as I can remember, which perhaps helps to explain why self-made millionaires like me so often tend to remain focused on creating wealth long after the average person feels rich beyond their wildest dreams.

The job was with Lansdowne’s, a local newsagent. Aged fourteen I joined him as a junior shop assistant. he’d always prompt them about something else they might want to buy.

with an advertisement in Lansdowne’s shop window, I launched a part-time career shooting weddings, portraits and, the bane of my life, people’s yippy little dogs and unruly cats.

I did well enough in my GCEs to get into the sixth form. Initially, I was going to do two maths subjects, chemistry and physics. I fetched an A in economics, I achieved only an E in physics – and an X in maths. Having secured my place at Oxford

Julia gave me stability. she was the talisman of my life.

we debated whether Russia would ever become a democracy, while I argued that since the Russian people had been conditioned to suffer for hundreds of years they would always choose an autocratic leader. It was a kind of national Stockholm syndrome.

I was good at training the salespeople.

Margaret Thatcher’s political mentor Keith Joseph.

By early 1980, I decided to open an art gallery ‘Artsake’. Much of my stock, which I mounted on racks, came wholesale from The Poster Shop in London. The margins were fantastic.

But then Artsake was hit by a bad case of subsidence. I had made the naive assumption that because the building dated from 1820 and was still in one piece 150 or so years later, I didn’t need to commission a structural survey before I bought it. That was unwise. It needed substantial repairs and extensive underpinning. What had been a nicely profitable business now became a millstone. I found myself owing £40,000 – six times the average wage at the time – and, in addition, paying 20 per cent per annum in interest on the debt. I faced bankruptcy.

I had two options. One was to open a second business to increase my earning power. The other was to do something that had most definitely never been part of my grand plan: get a ‘real’ job. the employer that paid the most: Goldman Sachs.

He patiently explained that bonds are basically a debt security sold, or issued, by governments and corporations when they need capital. Goldman underwrote the issuing, sold the bonds and had a team that traded bonds on the secondary market.

Chuck Davidson, whose nickname, I later discovered, was Chuckles.

‘What makes a good trader?’ I asked.
‘Greed,’ he instantly shot back. ‘You’ve got to be really, really greedy.’
I thought this was worth a follow-up: ‘So what makes a great trader?’
He rolled his chair backwards and pointed to his groin. ‘These. You need great big brass balls.’ He burst into thunderous laughter.

its trading goals were twofold. One was the obvious one: to make money. The other was to avoid paying tax on the money it made – not perhaps surprising in an era when the top rate of tax was 83 per cent. Payments in kind would frequently turn up, giving the office the feel of a market stall. One day it would be a huge delivery of toilet paper, the next it might be boxes of lingerie. Such consignments would be sold on to friends running stalls in places like the Old Kent Road.

If I found bonds which I felt the market undervalued, I would accumulate as large a position as possible in the hope of being able to sell for a large profit. I was, in other words, seeking to find value where others didn’t see it– an approach I have stuck with ever since.

France, for example, was seen as a huge credit risk and had government bonds trading at above 19 per cent, whereas Disney theme parks were trading at around 9 per cent. Investors clearly felt that Walt Disney would repay its debt on time but were far more sceptical of the French government.

‘Just go out and spend some money, and T&E [travel and entertainment] it.

Over the next few years, senior salespeople and traders at Goldman Sachs who had once commanded earnings in excess of $1 million a year were fired and replaced by a computer and a smart MBA graduate earning $65,000, doing far more and much faster trades than the old-timers ever could.

a Tombstone is given to someone who has worked on a major bond or equity transaction. My Pearl Street Tombstone, which sits on a shelf in my boardroom in Guernsey, is a Perspex block

The problem was that Saks had a poor credit rating, which made borrowing in the traditional manner prohibitively expensive.

When Andy, my favourite lawyer, told me I couldn’t do something, I had two stock replies: either, ‘Is there another jurisdiction where we can do it?’ or, ‘If we can’t do it, what is the closest thing to it we can do?’

My team and I had noticed that management teams of traditional companies tended to use their capital very inefficiently. They would use it to become conglomerates or to diversify pointlessly into unrelated fields (water companies buying hotels, for example) when they should have been reinvesting in their core business. We became convinced that there was money to be made by restructuring such companies, making them more efficient and employing their capital more wisely.

his word was law

I had my business plan, but I had no track record outside of Goldman and I knew it would be difficult to raise an independent fund by myself. Mort recommended I meet with Nomura, the Japanese bank. The Tokyo-based group had no investment banking business to speak of outside of Japan

His real estate operation was one of four new ventures, including one trading in emerging markets business, a proprietary trading business in London and a debt trading business in New York.

He proffered an £83,000 salary, no shares, no loan and no bonuses. He did, however, offer me a share of any profits made. Far more importantly, he was offering me my own business within Nomura and a real opportunity to control my own destiny.

I had asked them if they would be willing to pay for a business coach to advise and mentor me if I were to join them. I felt this was essential if I was going to make a successful transition from the distinctive culture of Goldman, where I had been a technical expert with entrepreneurial instincts, to Nomura, where I would need to be a business leader with entrepreneurial instincts.

I use the expression ‘I hear you’ several times each day. It means what it says – not ‘I agree’, or ‘I disagree’, just ‘I hear you’

He called these four stages forming, storming, norming and performing.

Forming, Tuckman’s theory has it, is the stage where people get to know each other, and try to grasp the task at hand. They discover each other’s strengths and weaknesses and learn who to rely on. At this point they avoid conflict and ‘play nice’ because they want to be accepted. Their leader’s job is to help the team figure out objectives, roles and responsibilities.

Storming begins as people feel safer and start pushing the boundaries. There may be clashes as different personalities and working styles rub up against each other. The leader needs to keep the team focused and resolve conflicts.

Norming is where the plan comes together. Team members begin to benefit from others’ strengths and accept their weaknesses. They’ll help each other out and start socialising with each other. At this stage, the leader should be asking questions rather than issuing instructions, and even organise social events to encourage team-bonding.

At the performing stage, the team is stable and the goals are clear. People get the job done with minimal supervision and conflict. A good leader will encourage creative disagreement, help celebrate achievements and crucially – step back. High-performing teams are largely autonomous. A good leader will delegate and focus on the vision.

Apart from anything else, he had two great skills. He had an intimate grasp of how to tailor presentations in a way that the Japanese audience in Tokyo would understand them, which made him indispensable to me. And he had a wide knowledge of Europe’s best restaurants, which made him indispensable to Nomura’s head office.

although their foundations might be solid, they were viewed as risky and therefore tended to be undervalued

Once upon a time, the brewing industry had been a licence to print money. Beer was, and still is, incredibly cheap to produce and if you could achieve scale then you could reduce the cost of its distribution and marketing. It therefore made sense for brewers to own pubs throughout the country, and over time the six leading firms had achieved what amounted to a monopoly. But by the 1990s the easy money-making days were over. In 1989 the government had introduced legislation, known as the Beer Orders, that was intended to loosen the brewers’ grip by capping the number of pubs each could own.

I was learning about nemawashi from Yamazoe-san. It’s a Japanese word that literally means ‘going around the roots’, although it’s best translated as ‘laying the groundwork’. It’s an informal process you go through when arguing for a proposed new project that involves preparing the way for the ultimate decision by talking to everyone involved to gather their support. If people find out about a new idea in a big meeting, they feel sidelined and are more likely to vote against the plan. If you gently seek their buy-in from an early stage – and that means securing the buy-in of everyone from the most junior to the most senior – you’re ultimately more likely to win their support.

‘Why not invite a group of senior Tokyo executives over to do a tour of the pub estate?’ he suggested. That would be the best way to secure their backing.

Since that elaborate pub crawl, every deal that has gone well for me has involved my team conducting extremely granular site-by-site, customer-bycustomer, product-by-product due diligence. The two deals that have gone seriously wrong did so because we took short-cuts.

requires a particular mindset. You have to think like an owner and not like an agent.

skills and knowledge can be taught but attitude can’t.

We also instituted staff bonuses for rents being paid and improved performance.

aiming to be 90 per cent right in a short period of time rather than take forever to be 99 per cent right

In 2001, we sold the final portfolio of the Phoenix Inns pubs, generating a total of £406 million. The initial equity investment had been fully repaid within twenty-seven months and we achieved a total cash profit of £176 million.

Key to deciding whether to get into the ballpark was working out what the average life expectancy of a train was. The industry assumption was that it was thirty years. We soon realised that such a figure was very misleading. Some train components dated back to before the First World War. Other parts were only five years old. We concluded that we shouldn’t be looking at thirty-year life cycles, but rather a programme of patching and mending trains so that they could last ninety years and longer.

If we determined that the existing trains had a lot more life in them than the market thought, we discovered another potential upside too. The government might have been privatising the railways, but they weren’t privatising the risk. If a train company – a customer for our stock – went bust, the government was legally obliged to step in to provide a replacement. This meant the credit risk was very limited and the rolling stock companies’ future cash flow was more reliable than most potential bidders recognised. In effect, our bid would be underwritten by the government, which had a triple-A credit rating. We could afford to bid high to ensure we won. And we could securitise the remaining, very reliable lease payments to repay the capital invested and obtain a profit on the equity at no cost.

We sold the equity in the Angel Trains company in 1997 to the Royal Bank of Scotland for approximately £600 million – a huge cash profit.

The company believed that people paid too much too early would lose interest in the business and leave. They preferred to keep my team hungry. I didn’t agree. I thought that paying more would mean that I kept my team and could hire more great people to build a much better business over the long term. Sadly, I was proved right.

what did I want to achieve financially in life? I told him I wanted enough to be able to afford a big house in the country, two Labradors, a Range Rover and foreign holidays.

His second question was – what sum would do that? I said I thought £10 million would be enough. He asked by what age I wanted to have that. By the time I’m forty, I told him.

By 1998 I had made more money than I had ever thought possible, but I’m not sure I felt I had ‘arrived’.

I remember once giving a speech to several hundred private equity practitioners, investors and advisers in which I explained the simple maths behind private equity. At the end of it a senior private equity partner took me aside and asked me never to give that speech again. ‘If people actually understood what we do,’ he said, ‘they wouldn’t pay us as much. We’re probably in the best paid profession in the world. Let’s not spoil it.’

Essentially, doing a leveraged buyout is much like buying a house – except that you’re using a company rather than a house as collateral for the loan and you have to ensure that you are borrowing from banks at a cost lower than the return on the deal you expect (a good relationship with trusted bankers is therefore absolutely essential).

Imagine you were to buy a company for £10 million at a price-toearnings ratio of 10 – that is to say that if the shares are trading at £10 then the earning per share for an investor over a year is £1 – this would provide you with a 10 per cent yield each year. You then reinvest all the money the business gives you each year at a similar rate and you also gain, say, 2 per cent each year in earnings growth through inflation. After five years, you sell the business at the same price-to-earnings ratio. In the process you’ve made one and a half times your money.

Obviously, for this to happen you have to buy well, but there are also other weapons you can deploy to increase value. First, you can borrow, which will enable you to increase the return on your equity, as the debt is other people’s money. In a typical leveraged buyout you use one third equity and two thirds debt. Let’s say you borrow the debt at around 5 per cent interest for five years. Because the cost of your debt is much lower than the 10 per cent yield on the business, the return on your equity is supercharged. In this example, as you’ve paid 10 per cent (i.e. a price earnings ratio of 10) on your equity, which forms one third of your purchase price, and 5 per cent on your debt, which forms two thirds of your purchase price (and is someone else’s money), at a stroke, your returns have gone from a multiple of 1.5 to 2.3: it is just maths.

Next, you can make operational improvements by increasing sales (which affects the top line) and increasing margin or cutting costs (which influences the bottom line). In the deals I look at, my objective in the first five years of owning a business is to achieve operational improvements of 4 per cent a year (we’ve usually done better than that, but 4 per cent over a longer period of ten to twenty years is ambitious). Now your returns including leverage – have increased three times over.

Then there are mergers and acquisitions. Let’s assume that you decide to merge your business with another business that trades on exactly the same multiple and that this merger occurs simultaneously with selling the combined business. It could be expected that the larger business will trade at a higher multiple (i.e. a lower yield). Say, for example, you increased the multiple from ten to twelve, and brought the yield down from 10 per cent to 8.33 per cent. The reason for a higher multiple is that you have created a larger business, which most would deem as being safer. By making the business safer, along with the other improvements, you have now increased the value of the business by four times its original value.

Finally, you can reposition the business, something I learnt during my securitisation days at Goldman that PFG and then Terra Firma specialised in. You might opt, for example, to change the business’s profile, perhaps getting rid of its riskier parts to make the remainder safer. Or you might find ways to explain cash flows more transparently to give potential buyers more confidence in the numbers the company is producing. The word ‘transparently’ needs to be stressed here: there have been notorious cases where management teams have changed the way they report their results to achieve the opposite of transparency. Get it right and, in my experience, you achieve a higher multiple. Let’s assume you increase the multiple again by two turns, taking the exit multiple from twelve to fourteen. Now you have made 4.9 times your original investment.

The financing had been done largely off the balance sheet, we concluded. This was hardly unusual at the time and because such a swap is considered a foreign exchange transaction and is not required by law to be shown on a company’s balance sheet, it still happens today.

Most private equity firms overcome the challenge of raising capital by starting out with several partners who can share costs and risks

Bill’s view was that we needed to focus on the biggest market North America – and he gave me invaluable advice on how to treat potential investors there. British schoolboy jokes, he said, are simply not appropriate at a dinner in the US where there’s mixed company. There are also language differences to be aware of. A scheme, for instance, means a plan to the British, while to Americans it means a dodgy deal.

I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and had to embark on a programme of lifestyle changes and medicines that would treat the symptoms but never cure the disease.

had managed to secure a meeting with Canada Pension Plan (CPP), a huge public investor with a global mandate to invest in private equity. head of private equity, Mark Weisdorf

CPP unlocked the door for us. Soon another €100 million came from the state of North Carolina. Now we moved on to Abu Dhabi, where we gave a number of presentations to the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA)

By the time Terra Firma Fund II closed in February 2004 we had travelled to seventy countries and seen 400 potential investors, most of them many times. Some eighty-seven backers had contributed a combined €1.9 billion

when we finally sold, in 2015, to a consortium of Allianz Capital Partners and several other infrastructure funds, we had achieved a total return of 7.5x on the original investment.

I immediately sought the advice of Kroll – a world-class private intelligence and security service. this particular individual tended to carry out his threats

acquired and sold 14 companies and delivered a 41% compound-annualised rate of return

net profit of €400 million and returned all their money within two years (normally it takes 5-7 yrs)

investment banks wanted me to do an IPO. the thought of having to report to a public board, endure quarterly earnings calls and speak to analysts about how the business was going, all filled me with dread.

[Popescu Constantin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book on securitization and structured finance. Also the business case studies are very interesting, and it's refreshing to see a business author talk so much about his mistakes. The main problem was the length (I feel like half the book could be cut out easily).

[Hugh Hsu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reads like a novel. Towards the end feels like a generic bio where the author boasts of his achievements and thinking

[Ben Duggan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gave me an entirely new perspective on the work of PE firms and their ability to add value to what sometimes can be a dying company. Conversational yet intellectually stimulating. Some of the deals were almost tee’d up the same way a good thriller book are.

[Alex McKenzie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting anecdotes, too focused on details of the deals for me. If interested, worth reading for his inside take on the EMI music saga and ensuing chaos.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK read, long chapters which I’m not a fan of.

Interesting at the time but not too many takeaways for me to be honest.

[Simon Dobson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Are there lessons here? I'm not entirely sure. It's certainly a rags-to-riches story of a self-made man, and a very entertaining and honest one. Whether it provides any insights into the world of private equity is less clear to me.

Hands made his money from corporate takeovers followed by ruthless cost-cutting and asset-stripping. This is good for him, possibly good for the next buyer – and utterly tragic for everyone else concerned, whose jobs are eliminated or consolidated with scarcely a backward glance, and the excuse that the companies would have failed anyway. That might be true, but it's not a certainty, and it can only happen in a culture where everything has been financialised without any broader responsibilities being taken (or even admitted to exist). Hands' later philanthrophy has to be set against this.

It all rather crashes down when Hands buys a record company, perhaps the epitome of a company whose value comes predominantly from the people it employs and not (as had been the rationale for the deal) from the back catalogue of hits. It shows how different companies and industries can be, flying in the face of the simplifications of finance that they can all be treated the same. Maybe that's the lesson, albeit possibly an unintended one.

[Jan Hoekman · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's an honest account, and that's refreshing. For contrast, the Blackstone/Schwarzman book reads more like a pitch of the perfect gladiatorial dealmaker, and that was written by someone for whom it seems (and he makes it seem) that nothing has ever gone wrong. By contrast, this is written by someone that has taken a beating with a massive misstep (EMI), and the result is not only a report of the emotions felts during bad times, but I think also a more nuanced account of the good times. I also like that he's gone very deep into individual deals, conveying a good sense of what this business is like. The book is too long for its content, and he especially talks too much about how he has been misled or problems otherwise weren't his fault, and that just seems a tad bitter, especially during the last third of the book. Also the first third on childhood is a bit too long for my taste, albeit interesting.
The middle third is 4/5.
For me highlights were:
1. Buying Pubs in the UK, strategically selling of parts, and improving the rest
2. Account of EMI + lawsuit.
3. Operating within Nomura, especially when they faced their suite of problems.

[Andrew Collins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting inside look at the UK and EU private equity markets from one of the original founders, Guy Hands. His insights and his personal history surrounding the securitization of various assets to fund deals is an interesting precursor to the CDO, Collateralized Debt Obligations, that ran rampant and drove the 2008 Financial Crisis.

Another good takeaway was how much trying to build something as substantial as Steven Schwartzman's Blackstone impacted his life. He did not get there, (he almost did), and it appears it really impacted his health, family, and personal psyche, in a material way, but it also appears to have given him a refreshed viewpoint and an inspired set of goals/missions to help the world (e.g. ESG, politics, etc).

I am not sure I needed all the political backdrop, it was certainly educational...was far more interested in deals that went right (Angel Trains) and deals that went south (EMI) . Worth the beach read and I am happy I picked this up at Daunt Books in Marylebone.

[Jaxx Tshabalala · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very reflective account of Hands’ thought process behind his varied investments since childhood. Having anti Apartheid South African parents who immigrated to the UK has him advocating the need for diversity especially given the networks of privilege he grew up in. Hands uses classist lineage to describe key figures in the book almost to imply a journey of ease or hardship.

In business, relationships and networks are everything and Hands approaches them headstrong through his rise and decline in the latter half of the book. His insights into transforming burning platforms are invaluable and are playbooks one can easily follow. The end of the book sees a man picking up the pieces and forging ahead, in a more socially responsible manner almost as a means to have a more likeable image.

[Fabrizio Poli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Guy Hands shares many stories about his career in private equity and the various deals he has done over the years. He puts a big emphasis on the team of people who helped him along the way and the importance of surrounding yourself with good trustworthy people.
The book flows well and doesn't contain the 'psychobabble' you get with certain business books. Storytelling is key and is what makes this book standout.

[plrbr · Rating 1 out of 5]

The only worthwhile to read part of this yawning journal entry “memoir” is the EMI deal. Extremely boring and self important tone are on full display to try to impart wisdom. I wanted to ditch the book, but I have to finish this book to be just with my review.

[Rafa Garcia Dominguez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un libro muy interesante y entretenido sobre el mundo del private equity.
Recomendado para quien tenga un nivel aceptable de finanzas y nociones sobre el mundo del private equity y las inversiones alternativas

[S Ravishankar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that provides insights into large deal-making and the pressures that come with it. The author’s account appears authentic as he writes this account. His personal troubles and his coping methods are particularly interesting.

[Harry Charles · Rating 1 out of 5]

Self-important and self-apologist tone throughout. Basically a memoir of a rich guy pleading "making loads of money through cutthroat business doesn't make me a bad guy." I think he is mostly trying to convince himself of this, which is a bit of a boring and cringe premise for a book.

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed it! Easy to read, gives a good breakdown on his moves and why

[Melissa Chen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good to read a first hand take on such a journey, honest and good insight. I thoroughly enjoyed the book

[Usman Altaf · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading - explains his success, challenges and regrets.

[Mike Merrill · Rating 3 out of 5]

you can skip this one, but i liked the part about McDonald's

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

Easy reading. Comes across as a collection of pub/dinner stories, with Guy himself coming across as remarkably unremarkable.

[Steve Croft · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about Guy Hands. He was extremely dyslexic and pretty much can't read, but had an amazing ability to 'do deals' and thus built a massive hedge fund in the UK called Terra Firma. Terra Firma rose to prominence and then came crashing down in 2008. It's pretty honest and funny, he seems like a pretty humble guy. I really liked the book, but that's probably because I am interested in the subject matter (buying, growing businesses etc.) and I like British dry humour.

[Tom Duggan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting read. Some wild moments throughout his career.