Chapter Fourteen: The Lieutenants

The other thing he learned at St Kilda Road was the bench.

Kaye did not employ salesmen. He employed presenters, and he ran them the way a football club runs a squad — recruiting, developing, rotating, losing them to rivals, taking them back.

There was a whole ecosystem of them by 2000. Men who did the warm-up. Men who did the three-day. Men who had a speciality — the tax bloke, the finance bloke, the negotiation bloke — and who toured the circuit doing the same ninety minutes in six cities.

And they moved.

That is the single most important structural fact about the Australian seminar industry, and nobody outside it ever grasps it: the operators change, the operations collapse, and the personnel simply flow to the next one. A presenter who did forty events for Kaye in 2001 did forty events for somebody else in 2004 and forty for somebody else again in 2008, and the audience in 2008 had no way on earth of knowing that the man with the lapel mic had been standing on a stage in a collapsed empire seven years earlier.

Jamie understood that flow before he had anything to flow to. He kept a list. Not written down — he never wrote anything down, which is a habit that served him for twenty-five years — but a list.

Who could close.

Who was loyal.

Who was loyal to Kaye versus who was loyal to the money.

And one afternoon in 2000, in a corridor at St Kilda Road, he watched Kaye dress a presenter down over a conversion rate, and he watched the presenter take it, and he watched Kaye walk away, and he watched the presenter's face after Kaye had gone.

And Jamie McIntyre thought, with complete clarity and no malice whatsoever:

He'll come to me.