One Friday in 1988 Esat was going bust. The fledgling company had just lost a vital deal with a British partner. It looked like curtains. Denis O'Brien caught a flight to Leeds/Bradford and took a cab to the partner's headquarters. Without an appointment, he got a ten-minute interview with the deputy chairman which ended with the deal back in place and O'Brien holding a cheque for IR Punt10,000 as a down-payment. He returned to the airport in the deputy chairman's chauffeur-driven Bentley! As one of his colleagues said on his return to Dublin: 'Jaysus, O'Brien how on earth did you do it?' This is the story of how O'Brien did it: how he took Esat from nothing to the company that secured Ireland's second mobile phone licence. Finally, the stunning sale of Esat to British Telecom in January 2000 established him as one of Ireland's wealthiest and most successful entrepreneurs. And along the way, he had established the hugely successful 98FM radio station. But it had been a long road. More than once, Esat had stared into the abyss of liquidation. One crisis was averted by a board member lending the company his life savings of IR Punt80,000 to help pay the next week's wages!
Through it all, O'Brien's persistence and nerve kept the show on the road and eventually delivered the goods. Brendan O'Kelly, a former Esat board member, tells the inside story of a remarkable business triumph.