A fool and his money…

There’s been lots of excitement this week across the PR industry following the sale of Financial Dynamics. Not only because, at $260m, some agency heads who’ve spent the last decade flogging their guts out have been reminded that some rainbows do, indeed, have a pot of gold at their end, but because it wasn’t Martin Sorrel handing over the cash! It was a management consulting company. Which now means that there’s a whole new bunch of cash-rich companies ready to buy your PR agency.

Of course, those of us that have been around for a while know that this isn’t the first time that the management consultants have got stuck into the industry. In June 2002, PricewaterhouseCoopers bought OneMonday (since renamed Next Fifteen) for £3m.

Now, you’ve just done the obvious thing and assumed that PwC picked up the company at a bargain basement price…when all it actually did was buy the rights to the name OneMonday.

And why? Because, at the time, PwC was going through the process of re-branding itself to ‘Monday’ - a process that reportedly cost £75m and actually came to nothing (the eagle-eyed amongst you will know that PwC is still called PwC) - and wanted to ensure there wasn’t any confusion.

So that turned out to be one of the best bits of business Tim Dyson, CEO of Next Fifteen, did that year…or indeed any other. Particularly as OneMonday was just the name of the group…not a recognised PR brand. And the name had only been around a year or two. And Tim came up with it in the bath one Sunday night., saying something along the lines of “one monday a massive management consultancy is going to pay me so much money I won’t need to go to work tomorrow…”

So, what odds on PwC knocking on Tim’s door again? First the company name, then the company?

We contacted Tim. His response: “LOL”

Lots of Lolly, presumably.