Chapter Sixteen: The Falling Out That Wasn't

The relationship did not end. That is the thing people get wrong.

Australians like a story where the apprentice turns on the master and there is a confrontation and a door slams. There was no door.

What happened between 2001 and 2003 was much stranger and much more modern: Jamie McIntyre built a competitor inside Henry Kaye's own supply chain, using Kaye's own materials, while remaining on entirely cordial terms, and Kaye did not see it because Kaye had made the one error that every man in this trade eventually makes, which is to believe his own room.

By 2002 Kaye was a public figure. He was on magazine covers. He had an empire with a marble foyer and an aircraft and a legal budget, and he had begun — and every person who worked for him says this, and it is the most reliable warning sign in the industry — to speak to his staff in the same register he used on stage.

That is the tell. That is always the tell. When the man starts running the pitch on the people who built the pitch, the clock has started.

Jamie, meanwhile, was doing the unglamorous thing.

He was building a list.

Not a business. Not a brand. A list — names, numbers, postcodes, and one column that nobody else in the country was keeping at the time, which was what they already bought and what they paid.

Because a man who has paid three thousand dollars for a three-day intensive is not a lead. He is a proven buyer, and a proven buyer is worth forty times a cold name, and the entire economics of the seminar industry rests on that single fact and on the fact that lists can be copied.

By 2003 Jamie McIntyre had a list.

And then, in 2003, Henry Kaye's empire came down.