Chapter Twelve: The Workshop

The building was on St Kilda Road and it had a foyer with a water feature and a very good receptionist, and the offices behind the foyer were nothing like the foyer, which Jamie also noted and used.

What he found inside was not a business. It was a factory, and the product was not property.

He worked out the real product in his third week, and when he worked it out he had to go and sit in a stairwell for ten minutes.

The product was the seminar itself. Everything downstream of it — the property, the options, the mentorships, the deals — was the excuse for the seminar. The seminar was where the money was made, because the seminar cost a room hire and a PA and a man's voice, and it returned three hundred thousand dollars in an afternoon, and it did not depend on any council in Australia approving anything.

The property was the cattle.

The seminar was the catwalk.

And Henry Kaye had understood this before anyone else in the country.

Jamie learned the trade in that building over four years, and the trade was more technical than anyone outside it has ever credited.

He learned the room temperature. Nineteen degrees in the morning, and you let it come up to twenty-two by mid-afternoon, because a slightly warm room makes people compliant and a cold room makes them cross their arms.

He learned the seating. Never fill the back. If you have four hundred people and six hundred chairs, you tape off the back two hundred, because a full room of four hundred is an event and a half-empty room of six hundred is a warning.

He learned the break structure. Never break on a high. Break in the middle of the logic, just before the resolution, so that the room comes back to get the answer.

He learned the objection stack — that there are only ever five objections in any financial sale, and they arrive in a fixed order, and that a presenter who answers all five before anybody has raised one is not answering objections, he is building a wall.

He learned the use of the whiteboard. Kaye's whiteboard arithmetic was a work of genius and it never once survived contact with a calculator, and it was never meant to. The whiteboard is not a proof. The whiteboard is a ritual object. It says: here is a man who is showing you his working.

And he learned the thing that was not technique, and which he never got as good at as Kaye, and which he compensated for with charm his whole life:

The silence.

Kaye could stand in front of six hundred people and say nothing for eleven seconds. Jamie could manage four. He worked at it for years. At his peak, in a stadium in 2009, he got to seven, and he came off stage and said to Warren Stokes, "Seven," and Warren said, "I know," and it was the proudest either of them had been about anything that year.