Autobiography

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
C17. DAVID SULLIVAN
The business acumen of David Sullivan was
first demonstrated to me in the late 1970s, in a
telephone call out of the blue which was both
bizarre and brilliant. We were adversaries in
business, and he was as fierce as we were in
maintaining our position in the marketplace.
Yet, despite this, he did the unthinkable and
picked up a telephone to propose a deal that
made so much sense we could not turn it
down.
We both had a range of top-shelf magazines
and were competing with each other for space
on the shelves. In order to stay one step ahead
of the other, we were increasing production to
flood the market and maximise sales. It was
having a disastrous effect as the marketplace
became ever-more crowded and competitive.
Everything changed the day he telephoned and
suggested he would hand over his distribution
in return for us becoming joint publishers. It
was a stroke of genius, and we asked
ourselves why we hadn’t thought of it first. We
did the deal on the telephone with no official
agreement, just a letter of intent, and it
altered the nature of our business overnight.
We were no longer in competition but in cooperation,
thus changing both our companies
into substantial profit-making businesses.
It opened the way to a string of deals over the
next three decades. First there was the deal
proposed by David that involved Sport
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