The business gets moving despite the obstacle course in the form of Harvey White. It is quicker to read the book, you know. Hope people like it as much as I enjoy writing it. There is a second book in process.
Ann, Ian, and the most delicious blueberry Danish with strawberries, cantaloupe and cream Al had ever eaten, wandered back in, to hear Bill saying,… “You actually pretty much said it yourself, Joe. Jobs don’t do themselves. Same principle in business, really.”
“A business can be an art form, in the way it’s done, the products it creates, the styles of management can be a sort of performance art, too. Not wanting to overload the analogy, but you really do try for a sort of creative dynamic in the way the operation works,” said Al.
“The human element is quite fantastic. You can find yourself mixing with such totally different people, every day, in all professions, with all different points of view; the human race, in motion. People are better seen when they’re trying to achieve something,” said Carla.
Ann and Ian became several years younger in the course of the conversation.
Ian was very efficient. A partnership agreement, about as vague as a nuclear weapon, arrived in three days. Ian was including himself in as a trustee on behalf of Joe. Everything else was as per Al’s definition. The money was there, one and a half million. Bill was a lot less than vague, too.
“You know, having Ian associated with us is probably worth as much money as that, or more, in itself. The bloke’s good business, personified. You can’t buy contacts like that.”
“I must say, if there was a person other than Saul that I’d go looking for business advice from, that’d be him. He had us checked out long before we walked in the door, and those questions were going to kill the whole deal with one wrong answer. I might ask to take lessons. So we have no problem with this?”
“None.”
Al signed. He looked at Bill. Curiosity was killing him. They were well enough acquainted by now for Al to feel comfortable with asking the question which had been bothering him.
“Tell me, Bill, I really do have to ask, what exactly is your relationship to Saul? I’ve been trying to figure it and I can’t.”
Bill looked very thoughtful.
“I’m not at all sure. I’ve only met him in person once. I met him through David, when we went over there to do our spiel on the agency. We said hello, and that was about it. Other than that, one phone call. All that happened was he rang Tony one day, got me, and we talked for three hours.”
“What did you talk about, for three hours?” Al reminded himself that Saul was worth about US $50,000 an hour after tax.
“Saul had one of our unsigned monthly balance sheets, which he described as “enigmatic”. I said that was an understatement, excuse the pun, and explained that what he saw was as close to a full disclosure of every transaction as we were able to provide. I was having visions of myself getting summarily fired at the time.
He then asked me what I thought were good qualitative accountancy practices. That convinced me I was about to get fired, so I rattled off a series of statutory requirements, talked about audit requirements, and so on. Actually, that would have taken nearly an hour in itself. In hindsight, everything I said would have stacked up as being to the exact opposite of the statement he had in front of him. I didn’t think of that at the time, I just staggered on with the definition.”
“When was this?”
“First month Tony arrived. I’ve never had to deal with such a sudden mass of material in such a mess. The copywriters’ contracts were being drafted, we had twenty new people billing us every day, for what, we had to find out ourselves. Tony would walk in at all hours and just give us a wad of cash register type receipts for things, then vanish again. I explained this to Saul, on the understanding with myself that I was probably out of a job anyway.”
“How did Saul react?”
“You’d have thought I’d been talking about nice sunny Sydney weather, for all the response he gave. Actually most of that conversation was me talking, really. Then he said to contact him if for any reason I felt there was grounds for concern……..is his sense of humor that good?”
“Yes.”
“He knew, then, from almost day one……?”
“Which means Keith also knew. Saul and Keith fighting is like a row between brothers. They argue, but competitively, not like personally hostile argument. I’ve never quite believed that fight they had. I think the whole thing was staged to set up White, make him think there was a split, and when this came along they’d already agreed to send me because they knew I disliked White and Fazzina, and was a friend of David’s.
White probably pointed me out for the same reasons, and could always say I was just sticking up for David if I came out with anything against Fazzina. Everybody else would have swallowed that, too. The straightforward approach, going back and producing piles of crappy receipts, threatening letters, and lousy accounts, might have been the most harmful thing I could have done. A fight exactly where White wanted it. He would have blamed you for the accounts and David for the poor results…..a messy possibility, guaranteed to create more internal problems, since David would concentrate on attacking White and Fazzina……. He’s got a terrible temper when he gets upset…. ”
“Still a bit round about, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. If they’re trying to get White to crash, though, they’d have to get him in terms of the partnership arrangement. It’s too expensive to buy him out, and he’d walk away with far more than he came in with. They must be trying to get some evidence of his breaching the agreement, and/or trying to encourage him to breach it. Any ideas?”
“Got a copy of the agreement?” asked Bill.
“I can get one.”
Getting a copy turned out to be far easier than expected. David had one, and emailed it over to Al. The conversation with David was very enlightening.
“David, I get the impression that there’s a lot of choreography in this situation?”
“Yeah. The Nutcracker Suite, with underwriters. We’re thinking of getting the Bolshoi………”
“So what is happening?”
A lot had been happening for a while, even before the great war had begun. Saul and Keith had soon developed a serious distaste for White. They’d needed the money, though, and hadn’t been about to try to do 50 million on credit. White brought in customers, but they weren’t sure how. There was great secrecy about his part of agency operations. Questions were asked whether White even told himself what he had for breakfast. A selection of nondescript accounts, mainly small, dutifully paid, arrived on the books. Al hadn’t seen any of the actual work, which was another hallmark of White, who never seemed to do anything in-house. Ads and commercials were made somewhere, presumably by subcontractors, and were delivered like pizzas. They were OK, but not novel; characterless, much like White himself.
David said that as accounts, a less interesting collection of book entries would be difficult to imagine. An exercise in applied monotony, worth a few million profit a year. The nearest thing to a big account, a shipping company in New York, was given great fanfare, paid well, and was treated exactly the same as the dry cleaning franchises and the fresh-bakeries. Advertising For The Undead, he called it. Zombie business.
Since advertising involves trying to get more clients to spend more, the level of stability alone was unnerving. Every now and then a new client would be found by White, and would become an entry on the books. Meanwhile, in this morgue-like, uninformative, environment, people came and went in numbers. White’s business remained separate from the main agency, by terms of the agreement. White even kept a separate payroll, inefficient as that was, and although it all came together in the joint accounts, there was no insight into the workings of his operation.
Who all those people on White’s payroll were, nobody was able to find out. Saul and Keith immediately smelt a large number of rats that were rather slack on personal hygiene. Most of the “employees” never even entered the building, as far as they could discover. Those that did were kept close to White, and never went to meetings without him being present. Fazzina was in that sense atypical, a conspicuous puppet of some sort.
Keith and Saul soon decided independently that nothing like this could possibly be trustworthy. White helped this impression by building a mansion, well within his means, admittedly, but then, “his means” were never clear. Money seemed to appear when he needed it. Matters were not helped when White started blocking things. An expenditure here, an ad there, he began to disrupt the machinery. These appeared to be random events, just instances, and although a few people were very annoyed at their work being trashed, literally, no pattern had been apparent. Keith and Saul had considered retaliation in kind, but it wasn’t really worth it. A nitpick-a-thon had begun.
David had been happily out of the loop setting up the Australian agency. He was going to be a partner, too, both Keith and Saul had agreed, so things were fine. Then White started to cut up about the whole idea and possible losses. Actually this was by then quite consistent with his other obstructive hobbies. It was a storm in a teabag, not even a teapot. The Australian operation was funded on chicken feed. The agency wasn’t expected to make money on local accounts, anyway, certainly not that soon, and was going to be used for promotions of their US clients, when the business cash flow and production requirements were established. Meaning you don’t rush 4000 miles away and set up an agency on the basis of maybe finding a few natives willing to do business. You’d go broke in seconds.
Al and David had for some time been looking at their production costs. It was actually a lot cheaper to do ad production in Australia, which was the eventual strategic intent. That product could then be sent back to the States and sold at better margins. However, you also needed an entity which could pay its own way to make that a safe option. The Australian agency would also be making money from its own business and product from its own budget which could then be sold in the US, which would be all profit. Doing it that way also meant, very importantly, that no extra money would have to be diverted from the US operations, which could be very counterproductive, in that the money would not be available for valuable work over there.
White, however, had other ideas. He didn’t like David, and had the right as a partner to veto agency expenditures. He either couldn’t or wouldn’t accept the need to spend time setting the operation up, and said he had no faith in David’s ability to run a hole in the ground. He said he wasn’t going to agree to anything else until somebody did something about the Australian agency.
This was not an empty threat. The partnership wasn’t a majority rule thing. White had been determined to avoid a situation where everything was subject to a 2 against 1 decision, and had implanted a clause in the agreement where unanimity was required for budgeting. If you own a third of a cow, you want to be able to milk it.
Keith and Saul had been kicking themselves. If they tried to cut him out they risked a lot; it could be very costly. They could, in theory, have had a separate sub-partnership agreement operating with David. White wouldn’t have been able to interfere, any more than they were able to intrude on his private party with his accounts. That, however, would have exposed them to a possible breach of their partnership with White, if they excluded him. White would have had a quantifiable, in dollar terms, talking point, at least, legally, and demanded his cut from any extraneous business, as a right. He could say the partnership with David was just carrying on agency business in another guise, and denying him of his entitlements, which would be true. They had made plenty on the $50 million White had injected into the business, about as much again, each, but now the jerk was getting in the way.
Worse, his interest in the agency was now worth a lot more than that. Kicking him out would do him a very large cash favor. Under the terms of the agreement White was at least arguably within his rights to make those demands on any settlement. They had to give in, temporarily, at least. A fight about the Australian operation just wasn’t worth it, if it was going to be a catalyst for a break up of the partnership before they were ready for it. Fazzina was sent out, David was recalled and had meetings with Keith and Saul, separately. At the next board meeting, David had ripped into White with notable lack of restraint.
“What did you say, David? I heard a few things, but nothing definitive.”
“I called him a self-fornicating excrement-archive, an inferior disease, an incestuous bacterium, a sexually transmitted mistake, an insult to everything that’s ever lived, a liability to evolution, the result of failed masturbation, and then I got specific.”
“Your social skills have certainly improved.”
“All thanks to you. Anyway, enough about me. How’s Australia? That’s a very good move, Al, and you did me a very big favor, as I’m sure you know but aren’t willing to admit. Everyone in the business, meaning everyone we’ve ever met between us, has been talking about it. Those are really nice, very competent, people you’ve got there, too.”
“Yeah. Thank you for finding them, by the way. They were what really decided me on doing all this.”