By John Fraser and Chris Gilmour
“Let’s do lunch”… It’s the most magnificent phrase in the English language.
Lunch is not just about sharing good nosh and a few bottles of red nectar. It is also good business.
On one’s arrival in the Business Day newsroom, the then editor Peter Bruce issued a command – that he didn’t want to see people sitting at their desks at lunch hour.
He wanted them out there, networking, getting scoops, building trust and relationships with the sort of people who would spill the beans. Fully baked and ready for the front-page splash.
And it wasn’t unusual to see Peter himself in the local steak and chips joint, hobnobbing with the great and the good, the influential and the mighty, captains and midshipmen of industry and political movers and shakers.
In the stockbroking world, too, lunches were de rigueur, at least in the days when stockbrokers were still stockbrokers and not just the securities divisions of investment banks.
Most stockbroking firms had their own dining rooms, which were used almost every day to entertain clients. Waiters wore starched uniforms, and the host had a little bell to let the staff know when to bring the next course. All very quaint.
And, of course, the booze flowed. We can remember several occasions when these in-house lunches finished only at 6 o’clock in the evening. There were probably later finishes as well, ones that we were incapable of remembering after all those brandies.
Of course, the hedonistic side of a lunch is fun. Those increasingly rare occasions when your corporate host, replete with expense account rands and on a mission to woo the humble hack or analyst, hands you the wine list, and suggests that you must choose the booze.
It works the other way as well. One industry association chum we entertained would always go straight for the most expensive prawn starter when a humble hack was footing the bill.
A proper lunch involves more than one course, booze and an infusion of coffee. Then we sit, merrily belching as the barriers come down, the barricades are dismantled, and those gems of information flow.
After scoffing a heaped pile of food, it is always great fun to see if we can get our host to offer a port (a double, of course) that is of considerably greater vintage than his guests.
Christ had the right idea about the benefits of breaking bread and sharing wine, although his choice of dining companions did prove fatal. (And why on earth did they all sit along just one side of the table?).
Fortunately, these days one can normally find more reliable dining companions, prepared to hand over a bag of silver when the bill arrives, rather than to indulge in ungrateful betrayal.
But the golden days of lavish lunches have largely gone now, swept away by the impact of de-regulation and the dead hand of investment banks.
To be fair, we started seeing the demise of the boozy lunch in all its former glory by the mid to late 1980s when the likes of Allan Gray analysts and portfolio managers would attend lunch grudgingly – and certainly wouldn’t touch alcohol.
This abstinence is a very American thing; our Yankee cousins eschew the idea of drinking at lunchtime, reserving this for after work. How sad.
These days, younger finance whizz-kids, in particular, tend to be a humourless bunch, and no amount of arm-twisting will persuade them to take you to lunch.
They fully subscribe to the view that all relevant information about a company is contained in the financial results and that anything else is peripheral. They don’t appreciate the benefits of social interaction and obviously don’t understand that it’s not what you know but who you know that matters.
Especially when they enjoy a good, long lunch.
The Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) qualification has a lot to answer for in this respect. There are massive sections in the CFA charter on ethics and doing the right thing – and this organisation seems to regard accepting a lunch…as being tantamount to succumbing to bribery.
And we won’t even go down the road of imagining what they would think of when it comes to alcohol. Shock, horror! Double the garlic and send for the exorcist!
It is all very well for journalists and analysts to attend results presentations or AGMs, to ask clever questions and then to interact with management over a sausage roll of two.
But, as we have bemoaned before on these pages – to the deaf ears of so many corporate PRs, whose lack of understanding of the benefits of social interaction would lead to the speedy elimination of the human race – you just can’t beat a proper sit-down session.
It is all about trust.
You don’t need to like your lunching companion, although many would be surprised by what really nice, charming and generous people do inhabit the financial world.
You need to build an understanding, a bond. A lunch in the best of times may help in the worst of times.
Get the cell number of your dining companion. It will be invaluable when the fertilizer hits the fan and the rottweiler PA tries to block all calls to her beloved boss.
An open line of communication is the saviour of the journalist and analyst.
And, of course, a sound relationship works both ways. If your company is the target of a hostile takeover, if some unscrupulous rival has been leaking malicious material about your business, that’s the time for a call to a trusty journo or analyst, to provide the other side of the story. Timely truths, and even a bit of crafty spin, can save your share price, your company and maybe even your job.
However, it can be useless to cold call someone, anyone from any side of the corporate equation, from out of the blue. There will be suspicion, maybe hostility; maybe they will be in one of those meetings that last a lifetime, or getting down and dirty with Miss Moneypenny, and they just can’t come to the phone.
Once an aviation company released its financial results in the early evening. Everyone had left its head office. The security guards couldn’t help, and nor could anyone at the call centre.
The next morning, once the vampires had all returned to their coffins, we finally got hold of the CEO.
Abject apologies followed, and while breakfast is no substitute for lunch, at least the hotel where we met for a mutual glaring session had some brekkie buffet bubbly on ice.
Cell numbers were exchanged, better transparency was promised, and the relationship was launched.
Lunches were to follow. Information was to flow. At the next lunch, a starter was born.
Of course, there are other, less subtle benefits of lunching in some of Joburg or Cape Town’s better restaurants.
Firstly, you often bump into someone you haven’t seen for a while. A chance encounter with a former editor of Business Day once led to some useful and enjoyable writing work – and even a job offer.
While there be the people whom you can greet, hug and to whom you can transmit transmit Covid, you will also be able to look around the room, to spot shadowy figures slipping into the discreet, private dining rooms, where the mega deals are made.
Just knowing that CEO X has been lunching with CEO Y could provide the first hint of the merger that will lead to the formation of a new corporation, let’s imaginatively call it XY.
Reading the room can prove almost invaluable, and it might even give you a premature indication of your paper’s next mega-scoop.
So don’t sit hunched over your desk, in solitary misery, blinking at your computer screen and dispiritedly munching on a stale sandwich.
Venture forth, and if that contact you really need to make has failed to send you an embossed invitation, contact them yourself and suggest a coffee.
When they agree, reject the suggested time and offer a better plan for the encounter with those magic words: “Let’s do lunch.”
After all, man cannot live by stale sandwiches alone!
John Fraser is a journalist and broadcaster, and Chris Gilmour is an investment analyst. Both are available for lunch.
ZA Confidential 