Al makes a big move, and they finally find a way out of the current mess for the agency with just about everything else unresolved.
He did have an idea. It was something he’d never tried before, but it was very appealing. He had no idea what Bill and Carla would think of it, but it had the advantage of including them in. He spent an afternoon explaining it to them, then made his call. Al had picked a time when Keith would be in the office and they would be at work. He put the phone on speaker, and began;
“Keith, I think that we can at least put David’s reputation in some perspective, and prevent the company getting fried in the trade rags for an ugly mess. I’ll take over the agency here; in lieu of my golden handshake, make the Australian agency over to me, as is, including the apartment and the office rent already paid. I’ll send a story to Dawn saying I jumped at the opportunity, which isn’t really too far wide of the facts, and I expect good solid business based on the original principles of the agency to be happening soon, despite the controversy. That will shut up the gossips. Also true, by the way.”
Bill and Carla stared at him. The reality was quite different, as a gut feeling, to Al’s slightly over-folksy rendition of his idea to them. Keith loved it.
“At least it ought to make the business look worth buying out. I’ll do better than that, Al. You can keep 50% of the handshake as well. White can’t argue with it; joint agency assets are subject to majority votes. He couldn’t reasonably object. It gets our books out of a very deep hole. I know Saul will agree. Are you turning into a nice guy all of a sudden, or is the sunshine affecting your brain?”
“I’m really a horrible person having an aberration.”
“Well, it puts a book value on the Australian agency of about ten times what it’s worth by Bill’s figures you sent me. That eases the pain a bit, and I admit you’re well enough known to add some credibility. Even I believe it.”
“Tell David I want a DVD of his first meeting as partner.”
“I’ll record it myself. The paperwork will be over there in about two/three days. Are you sure this is what you want to do?”
“No bull. I think we can make this operation sing, and I do mean profitably.”
Al was sure he heard more than one other person laughing as Keith rang off. Bill and Carla had accumulated several hours’ worth of questions.
“Al, we…… are stunned.” said Carla.
“Very,” said Bill, at a loss for the first time since Al met him. He revived.
“Keith agreed pretty fast,” he noted.
“Yeah. They have something cooking over there and I hope it’s Tony and Harvey. It’ll be interesting to see what they do. David is the guy they need there, not White. It was nice of him to think of saving some of the payout for me, though; he really didn’t have to do that, particularly since it would have almost covered the loss.”
“You seem pretty upbeat about the possibilities, Al.”
“I am, because I see a way out of this. I think we ought to be able to get a few of David’s clients back, and I also think we can hunt up plenty of our own.”
He paused, with just about every emotion he’d ever had doing an encore. He hoped that wasn’t as obvious as it felt.
“An idiot has come and gone and the world has not ended. I’ve spent years patching up relationships with clients, and I can tell you we ought to get about half of them back.”
Another pause; he wished his mouth would keep up with his head.
“The only difficult part is cash flow. The other half of my golden handshake figures out at a bit over a million and a half, Australian. That won’t run too far with overheads. We need someone else, preferably a silent partner, who is prepared to take a back seat, and put in about as much again. That was going to be the next move, anyway. I could have paid to run this for a couple of years on my own savings money, but we can do a lot more with extra capital. We also have the advantage of not having to run an agency structure. We can sub out production. That’s simpler in many ways. It can’t be too hard to find production people here.”
“It isn’t. There are plenty, and most are rated pretty good, through to excellent. Actually I know a few myself……” said Bill.
“Why am I not surprised? You always seem to know far more than you seem to realize you know.”
“Ah, he’s just a gossip, Al,” said Carla. “He’s always got something good to say about people you didn’t even know he knew. It’s disgusting.”
Al felt, again, that he’d found some real talent in Bill and Carla. They had great people skills, almost unconscious, no wonder David had hired them. They’d both instinctively found new business through contacts. Carla brought this up indirectly.
“Al, we don’t really know that much about the advertising business. Bill was hired as an office-type business manager, and I was hired as an executive assistant-cum-receptionist/secretary. Don’t you have to be a high-flying, verb-grinding, fashion plate to be an ad-person?”
“Yeah, like David.”
They both laughed. Anybody further removed from that image didn’t exist. David was more like Harpo Marx.
“Carla, I bet that you did little or no receptionist work, less secretarial, and more people-managing than anything else.”
She stared at him. Bill put in, “Perfectly true. After we got the chainsaw off her, she was always up to the minute and kept the business running, talking people through production schedules, explaining things, chasing accounts…….”
“Next bet. You didn’t have to be trained to do that. David told you what you wanted to know about what was supposed to happen and that was enough to work with.”
“Yeah, but that’s just common sense. People have to know those things.”
“Ever see Tony do that?”
“Never. Point made.”
“Al, before you parlay your bets up to a debt we can’t pay, what she means is we aren’t professionals.”
“Neither is Tony, and they pay him six figures just for looking like that. Anyway, speaking about debts, I still owe you two for…….everything. Let’s have dinner to celebrate.”
He’d liked the way Bill had put that comment, and Carla’s obvious grip on her work. By now he expected it, but it helped a lot now they were all out on the same limb. They went to the Old Tai Yuen in Chinatown, which Al had discovered in his erratic explorations of the area around the apartment. Conversation got expansive, and Al learned that Bill’s wife’s name was Jane, and their son was called Will. David had come along in time to save Bill from the difficulties of being a nearly forty year old manager with nothing to manage. Carla had been in between a government job and the dole, both of which she described as like not washing for years on end. This interested Al, because she looked as though she could simply walk into any club and get wined and dined all over with no need to work at all.
“Ever think of modeling?” he asked, innocently, because he was sure she could do that easily. This was evidently something she knew a lot about.
“That is a tough game. I did do a bit. Can be pretty sleazy, too. I did one shoot as a swimsuit model, and I was fighting off all these bloody photographers for weeks. It seemed they all knew how I could get some more jobs……. A friend of mine’s a professional, and she says that if it weren’t for the money, and lots of it, modeling would be her idea of death. She’s pretty cool, but even she gets neurotic, really paranoid. She even had a stalker, after a catalogue she did.
Fashion agencies are really hard. Deadlines by the truckload, reshooting the reshoots, fights about money, set squabbles, a pack of hangers-on, all these cases walking about being bitchy, and the ones that aren’t bitches are the ones that go nuts. I qualify all that by saying that I was only doing a few very simple shoots when I was a teenager/ early twenties.”
Al decided not to probe any further. This was clearly an attractive woman that knew the ropes and had chosen not to hang herself with them. They moved on to how to deal with the cash flow situation.
“Joe,” said Bill.
“Joe?” said Carla.
“Joe?” asked Al.
“Joe Arthurson. He’s loaded, young, a nice, if pretty different guy, and he wouldn’t notice if he bought the Harbor Bridge a few times.”
“He needs training wheels to order lunch,” explained Carla.
“His problem is that he tries to be a businessman like his father, more or less to prove himself, and lands on his backside every time.”
“He was the Plaster Duck Messiah,” said Carla.
“Nigel talked him into buying “orl vis rear-lly greaaat cheeeap stoof” from a friend of his. Truckloads of crap. Nigel was supposedly going to do the promotions for a series of cheapo shops in Sydney. Might have worked, but what Joe knows about distribution would fit into a teaspoon, and Nigel was always busy becoming a better alcoholic.”
“Joe’s a really nice bloke, Al, it’s just that he’s an idiot,” said Carla.
“He overdoes things. I’ll try not to garble this story. As I said, he got loaded up with all this crap by a friend of Nigel’s. He thought Nigel was going to help him sell it, and he did the deal on that basis. (That scored with Al. There was a time when he didn’t know to avoid people like Good Old Nigel himself). Nothing happened, of course, and Joe would come in looking for him, expecting him to be doing the promos for his stock. He’s actually a pretty crash hot photographer and graphics fiend. He even did some of the graphics for the ads he thought Nigel was going to do for him. Pity he doesn’t do more with it. I managed to persuade him to get a wholesaler I knew to have a look at the warehouse or so full of Old English Clichés, so he didn’t take that much of a bath. The guy took most of it, and that got him out of trouble with his father.”
“People in business do make honest mistakes occasionally. You had me worried for a minute until you said he listened to you. That’s a good sign. A real idiot either never listens to anyone, or listens to everyone.”
“Trick is you have to persuade his father to let him use the money. He keeps Joe on a pretty tight leash. It’s really his money, and Joe is expected to prove he knows what to do with it before he gets any real cash for himself.”
Dinner finished and they wandered back to Al’s for a coffee and Carla’s advice on how to decorate. That subject had come up somewhere, and she’d blitzed the field with some quite pithy comments on what she thought of interior decorators and their prices, styles, and ancestry. Keith had left a message on the phone. Al found himself greeted with effusive praise.
“Saul loved it, Al. He said he told David two hours ago and he still hasn’t stopped laughing. White ummed and ahhed but Tony did far too good a job running down the business in his presentation and he didn’t have a leg to stand on. He couldn’t formally oppose it, anyway. You knew that.”
Al had known that.
“Anyway, expect all of that ASAP. Thanks, Al.”
Bill and Carla looked at him expectantly.
“We’re on,” he said.
He was thinking that Saul was already in touch with David.
