Page 167 - Be Reasonable – Do It My Way , Peter E. Daly AM, My Story

CHAPTER 16 - GET THE LION ON THE LINE AND LET US TRACK YOU DOWN A BETTER DEAL
to see him at the appointed time. The Group Financial Director was supposed to attend the meeting as well. However no-one saw him until about half an hour after the meeting had started, when he walked in late. Kerry told him he no longer wanted to see him but just to give me a cheque for $3m. This was typical of Kerry’s approach.
Lion was an initiative well before its time. Bearing in mind that this was back in 1987, the Lion was advertising on TV and getting people to phone into a call centre in the office where sales consultants sat in front of PCs that were scripted and sold business directly. The model was so successful that Winterthur took great interest in it and eventually applied their learnings to starting up Churchill Insurance Company in the UK.
Board meetings of Lion were, to say the least, exciting. Kerry had appointed Tony Greig, Ray Stone, Trevor Kennedy and Don Burke as the Consolidated Press Holdings directors and we had Alan Mason, Free Strickland, Hans Strickler, the Swiss General Manager International, Tricia Kelly and myself representing NW. We had a celebratory lunch at the Hilton Hotel in a private room. The waiter came up behind Trevor Kennedy and had two live crayfish in a bucket fighting to get out of the bucket and Trevor said to the waiter “ for Christ sake I want to eat the f.....ing. thing, not play with it!”
Board meetings were a lot like that and poor Free Strickland, who was Chairman, was suffering with his blood pressure. So, at the start of every meeting Free would wire himself up to his blood pressure monitor and as the meeting went on and got more heated, he would take a pill. Then he would stop the meeting check his blood pressure again and take another pill. One day it got so bad that Trish Kelly, who was the Company Secretary, had to call a taxi and put Free in it and send him home.
The final crunch came at one Board meeting when the CPH directors asked when this company was going to start making some serious money and when they could stop having to put in
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