Enter Slick Dick

“If bullshit was music, that fellow would be a brass band.” -Paddy Crosbie

Lefty is the acting CEO of Mythical MegaCorp Ltd. He can't deliver on anything. In our three year existence, we only have one product in the marketplace generating some money, and it was one that I rushed out as a "special" job for a client. Hell, Lefty is so incompetent, that he couldn't deliver the garbage in a garbage truck.

This has not gone unnoticed at board meetings. Mr. Muckety Muck our chairman always castigates Lefty for being tardy in delivering products to the marketplace and establishing revenue streams. However El Presidente always jumps to Lefty's defense. While the president is running interference Lefty comes up with a plausible lie or excuse as to why the project is late. Mr. Muckety Muck has always been the CEO of public institutions that do not pay as well as the private sector. He has just gone through an expensive divorce and he invested his small nest egg in Mythical MegaCorp Ltd. He can't afford to lose his investment.

But even El Presidente secretly knows that Lefty can't deliver. So he quietly goes on a savior hunt. El Presidente is a serial savior hunter. The very first savior of the company was Lefty. Then he was supplanted by the next savior, Mr. Project Manager. He didn't pan out and was canned, and I was the next savior. I was quickly supplanted by Lefty again when Mr. Project Manager left the scene and Lefty announced that he was now the acting CEO. Lefty is screwing up again, and it is time for a new savior.

El Presidente found him in no time flat. His name was Slick Dick. He was a lower echelon consultant in a top five accounting firm. With much fanfare, El Presidente announced that he had found us a CEO that could lead us on the path to profitability. As it turned out, Slick Dick was the ex-boyfriend of El Presidente's niece.

Slick Dick was a piece of work. From his dress, I first thought that he was gay. He wasn't. He just liked wearing feminine flowery shirts or gay chic casual. When I examined his CV, there were three universities listed. The first one said Aerospace Engineering. He studied Computer Science at the next university, and he had an MBA from a second tier business school. When I asked him about the first two universities, he readily admitted that he did not graduate. Closer inspection revealed that he signed up at each institution and dropped out during the first year.

His CV was wonderful. At his very first job, he was almost the CEO of the corporation. He said that he introduced all sorts of new products worth billions of dollars. When I phoned the Human Resources office to check up on him, they had never heard of him.

However as a consultant, he knew the buzzwords. That is all that he knew. He also has a gift. He can pick out fellow bullshitters. And he always wants to look good. His modus operandi is to find the guy in the organization that knows what he is doing, pick his brain and present it as original work.

This presented a challenge for me. Slick Dick immediately realized that Lefty was an incompetent bullshitter who was way over his head. Since Slick Dick was the latest savior and expert from afar, he had the ear of the president as well as the board of directors. All of the directors had invested their own money in the corporation, and there was no way that they wanted to see it evaporate. Maybe Slick Dick was the answer. Lefty knew the threat the minute it walked through the door. Lefty tried to surrepitiously conduct warfare on Slick Dick the way that the did on me.

Lefty would try to undermine people by whispering insinuations in El Presidente's ear. Since Lefty sort of saved El Presidente's business butt on a couple of occasion, he usually had his ear. This time though, Lefty's insinuations against Slick Dick fell on deaf ears. Slick Dick was going to save us. Lefty demanded that we put it to a vote. He disqualified El Presidente's vote because of the neice connection. Then he called a meeting insuring that there would be a minimal quorum. I was in the unique situation of having a vote on the board of directors that counted.

The lay of the battlefield was this. Lefty is bad news. He needs to be deposed. I also want vengeance. However would I be jumping from the frying pan to the fire by supporting Slick Dick? The comparison was easy. Lefty kept re-surfacing as the savior because of his relationship with El Presidente. That was a strong source of power for Lefty. However that was weakening with Slick Dick on the scene.

I had to think about this for a minute. Would I jump from the frying pan into the fire by supporting Slick Dick over Lefty. Then it struck me. Slick Dick needed to look good. His source of power came from being right. And his source of right information came from me. It was a no-brainer. I voted to retain Slick Dick.

Lefty then tried to salvage something by saying that we would take on Slick Dick in the New Year. He bought himself a month to try to sink Slick Dick. It is going to be an uphill battle for him. Slick Dick got on the airplane and flew away. But he micro-harasses Lefty, by sending him emails asking for background documentation. It is the documentation like partnerships agreements and merchant agreements that Lefty has been negligent in producing. For the first time, Lefty has shifted his focus from trying to sink me and is concentrating on Slick Dick.

It reminds me of Hitler and Napoleon. Both of their troubles came when they were at war and opened up a second front to fight Russia. Slick Dick is my Russian ally.

Living On Minor Miracles

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” -- Albert Einstein

I'm the type of guy who likes to plan and control things in business. This includes things like projects, product launches, budgets, business activities and company capitalization.

When I threw my hat in with El Presidente and Lefty, I lost the last vestiges of control of my life, and those two goofballs live on minor miracles when it comes to capitalization of our company.

Mythical Megacorp Ltd. is the company we formed. I am third in the chain of command behind El Presidente and Lefty. Those two bozos are attached at the hip and share a common wall of two empty brains. If they hadn't hid it so well when they were wooing me, I would not have signed on. Being third in the chain of command, means that I have no voice at all.

Take company finance. We are a startup company, and the revenue streams that we generate, are still not enough to sustain the company, and the salaries of me and the other employees for an extended period of time. Every three months we run out of operating capital.

So what does El Presidente do? He has a circle of rich friends, and by chance he has convinced some of them to invest in the company. When he lands a live investor, we have to do a dog and pony show. We demonstrate our product in the most Mickey Mouse manner (with due apologies to Disney). While this makes me cringe, El Presidente and Lefty beam at the hokey theatrics.

When we get down to our bottom dollar and payroll is just a week away, El Presidente makes desperate phone calls to his friends and previous investors, urging them to drop more money on the company. Half of the investors are doctors, and I swear that if I was ever going to pull a Bernie Madoff, I would concentrate exclusively on medical doctors. Getting them to part with their hard-earned money is easier than getting money from any other profession.

So today, El Presidente had a previous investor in for another round of pocket fleecing. This time the mark, I mean investor, brought his accountant with him. The amazing thing is that we have had so many rounds of financing that we have run out of shares. So what those bozos do, is obfuscate the percentage holding of the company. If a mark comes in with say $200,000, he is told that he is getting 40,000 shares at $5 each. The next person who delivers up $200,000 gets shares at $8.00 each. Since it is private capital, there are no laws that I know of that are being broken, however I have heard both Lefty and El Presidente tell some people that the company is fully capitalized a week before they go out for more money. Lefty sighs and says that the equity is over-subscribed by 6%, but will work the figures to meet the payroll.

This scares the crap out of me. I know that we won't crash and burn, because El Presidente is a millionaire, and would be ruined in his social circle if Mythical Megacorp Ltd. crashed and burned. He has sold shares to some of the most prominent people in our community, included Mr. Muckety Muck who is our chairman and one of the leading lights. Mr. Muckety Muck was named to the board to add prestige to our startup.

So every few months, we live on minor miracles hoping that El Presidente call pull off another round of financing that will last a few more months. At each round of cash injection El Presidente is sure that this is the last one before the business can support itself. However Lefty can't seem to launch any product because he doesn't believe in planning.

The ironic bit is that the business idea is quite viable. I keep telling El Presidente that we could get venture capital or angel investing. Hell we could even get a loan at a merchant bank in the right circles. Or we could find a corporate partner with deep pockets. However El Presidente and Lefty own about 45 percent of the equity, and they do not want to get diluted.

If we went for a strategic round of financing and brought in say, $5 million dollars, we could get to where we want to go in no time. Money is the fuel of growth. However, El Presidente and Lefty cannot see that 10 percent of a $50 million dollar company is worth more than 25% of a one and a half million dollar company. And Lefty actually enjoys squirming away and putting off competitors, even though his nails are bitten down to nothing and he has already suffered one heart attack.

But what these jerks are doing, is making me live on minor miracles as well. Like everyone else, I have bills due at the first of the month, and sometimes they can't pull off their minor miracles and bring money in until the 7th or 8th day of the month, and everything is in shambles when my checks bounce. Of course, they never reimburse me for the bank fees.

But as I previous iterated, I own the intellectual property of the company, and Lefty and El Presidente have forgotten that it is not transferred to Mythical Megacorp Ltd. And other major companies are expressing interest in buying us out, if we can generate revenue.

So my thinking cap is on. I do not want to exercise the intellectual property trap on them yet. I could stage a board of directors coup d'etat and remove them if I can convince the other equity holders to vote to remove them, however I do need a strategy as most of the investors are their friends. However, one thing is for certain. If it came to a choice of friendship or losing money, our investors would ditch El Presidente and Lefty in the wink of an eye. I have to figure out how to engineer that. I have to do it delicately in this quiet war.

The Two Faces of Lefty

The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite! -- Tennessee Williams

Lefty has unique anatomical features. He has at least two faces. None of his faces are very attractive.

I mentioned that Lefty has little man syndrome. He is our acting CEO. He insists that the staff call him "Mister". He is never wrong. He is quick to anger. He has an ego the size of the Titanic. He thinks that there is only his way. He is both a jerk and an idiot and he is also a liar.

It is interesting that Lefty calls himself a church goer and a Christian. He never actually goes to church -- he sends the wife to do the family praying. His kids get bundled off to church as well. Lefty thinks that he has a ticket to heaven.

When it comes to management, Lefty is a micro-manager. I have seen him spend most of the afternoon arranging the office when new furnishing came in. He calls two hour staff meetings (I don't attend), and pontificates on how smart he is and how the world will unfold according to himself.

He also micro-harasses the women. It is just a shade short of sexual harassment, but never overtly crosses the line. You see, Lefty is a Christian. When it comes to El Presidente, it is full sexual harassment. When he makes his grand entrance into the office, the gives all of the women little neck rubs -supposedly to alleviate the tension.

Lefty is under fire. Mr. Muckety Muck the Chairman actually knows a thing or two about business, and is hammering Lefty for a project plan for the new product launch which will bring some revenue to the company. Lefty has gone to say that through his twenty five year career he has seen business plans and they are just paper. He doesn't believe in them. He doesn't believe in project plans, launch plans, or any kind of planning at all. He runs the company out of his hip pocket. This is dangerous when you are Chief Financial Officer as well. However, he has the full unwarranted confidence of El Presidente, because he has sort of saved the presidents butt on two occasions and prevented huge monetary losses. El Presidente is used to losing money in a big way.

But speaking of the president, even he is anxious to get the company revved up so that he can brag to his business cohorts on how successful the company is. El Presidente is easily impressed by new faces and shiny objects. Therefore when his cousin introduced a Arab, Mr. Metro Slick, who works at one of the Big Three accounting firms as a consultant, El Presidente jumped all over him to come in and assess why we can't launch products. Never mind that his cousin eventually dumped Mr. Metro Slick. Usually women are good judges of men, and I trust their judgments. I will describe Mr. Metro Slick's entrance in another entry, but for the sake of brevity, let's just say that Mr. Metro Slick lit a fire under the Board of Director's asses to see some plans. Lefty was in a jam, because the man who didn't believe in plans now had to produce some.

The telephone in my office rang this morning. It was Lefty. He was all collegial and friendly. He asked me how I was doing. He was blissfully unaware that yesterday he was telling lies about me to El Presidente. Someone once said that the definition of evil is having no conscience. I know that Lefty doesn't have a conscience, but I don't know if he is just evil or doesn't have enough brain circuits for a conscience.

Lefty tell me that the project plan and gantt chart that I drew up was too complicated. He was playing up a folksy "aw shucks" routine where he had jotted down some points and milestones about the next launch, and wanted me to go over it and see if he missed anything. I knew what he would do. He would take it to the board meeting and present it all as his work.

Immediately, I was faced with a dilemma. Do I help him out? Remember, this is a secret war. I have to appear that I am on side. I have to let on that I am a team player. I came up with a plan. My project plan had items from his purview and my purview. I would make sure that all of my items were correctly detailed, but I wouldn't help him with his. I am going to let something get past him and let him get roasted by the board of directors.

I have to tread a fine line, because I can't do the company harm. I have to make him get egg on his face, but actually make sure that critical items get done for the launch. It is a nerve wracking, high stakes game. But it was interesting to see the two faces of Lefty today.

At War

Family, religion, friends.. these are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business. --Montgomery Burns (the Simpsons)

It is a strange thing to be at war. Especially with your business partners. However, I moved a thousand miles away from home for an incredible opportunity. What did I bring to the table? It was know-how. Prior to me joining, they were just a bunch of relatively rich guys sitting around talking business.

After I joined, I developed their first product. It was something they asked for. Unfortunately what they wanted was not properly thought out. They introduced a product into the marketplace that was single focus, and not what the consumers wanted. It bombed.

The effort wasted time and more importantly seed money. But the burn rate of money was nothing, compared with what was to come. When the penny finally dropped for my partners, they hurriedly decided to create another product to rescue the first. Once again, I was called to create that product, which I did. That was a year ago October. The main bit of product development took a month. Almost 14 months later, it is still not to market. Why?

That is a long story. The startup had a principal who supposedly was a project manager. He was the one that actually recruited me. Early on, it became obvious that Mr. Project Manager was a dud. He knew all the big words to things, and his whole idea of management was to push all of the work to someone else. He was a lazy son-of-a-b*tch who for the whole year that I knew him, used the same notebook to take notes to run the company. It was a mini 4 x 6 inch notebook the size of a regular snapshot picture. Amazingly, to run a complex business, the book was never filled past a quarter of the pages in a year. I use a notebook a month.

Mr. Project Manager decided we should launch on a given date. Never mind that we were not ready. He forced the launch. The marketing wasn't done. We rented a facility and spent a lot of money and the press never showed up. It was a fiasco.

By this time, my business partners recruited Mr. Muckety Muck to act as chairman of the company. Mr. Muckety Muck was a well-known high profile CEO in some major public institutions. My partners got him to invest some money, and offered him some shares for real cheap so that he would take the position and lend some credibility to the venture.

It was quite apparent that Mr. Project Manager was lazy windbag. I told my partners this for months. Finally the failure of the launch forced them to the same reality. Mr. Project Manager was chopped. But not before Mr. Muckety Muck gave me hell for not alerting the board of directors to the problem earlier. I had, but they weren't listening. One of the defining traits of my partners is that they will not act until the very last hour when they have to in a critical situation.

My two partners are El Presidente and Lefty. El Presidente is the more successful of the two, and Lefty is the sidekick. El Presidente gets himself into business jams on a regular basis, and Lefty eventually somehow picks up the pieces and retrieves as much as possible out of the situation. As a result, El Presidente and Lefty are thick as thieves. When Mr. Project Manager was sacked, Lefty took over as acting CEO. It was a huge mistake.

Their biggest problem is ego. El Presidente is a dreamer who gets sidetracked easily and Lefty suffers Little Man Syndrome which is peculiar to short men with image issues. Both of them think that they are the smartest men that they know.

Today, I got into a shouting match over the phone with El Presidente. He actually doesn't work at the company. He does other things which luckily brings him money to fund his hair-brained schemes.

I recently had some profile in the press, and it has the potential to embarrass El Presidente, mainly because Lefty had failed to do certain things in preparation for my public profile. As a result, Lefty lied like a rug to the El Presidente to cover his ass for letting something slip. El Presidente took it out on me, because of course he is never at fault when things go bad. It is not even Lefty's fault -- it is mine because I am the outsider with all of the brains who should have known these things.

So today, I have a pretty bad taste in my mouth. At one time when they were wooing me, these jokers said that they were my friends. But I have to sublimate my ego. I have the ability to sink this business, but if I do so, I cut my own throat as well. The only choice that I have is to make this business work and play my trump card. I have a pretty powerful trump card.

When they took me on as a partner, they failed to get an agreement that the Intellectual Property belonged to the company. Mr. Muckety Muck saw that this was a risk and ordered my partners to rectify the situation. At the time, the honeymoon was still on between my partners and I, so I drew up a form to sign and transfer the Intellectual Property. They ran it by the lawyers. I said that I would transfer the IP for $1.00. The lawyer said that I could challenge that later. So they didn't know how to compensate me for the IP. Lefty forgot about the issue.

In the meanwhile, they went to bigwigs around town to invest in their business. It is a good business idea, and several prominent people invested. What they failed to disclosed to investors was that the company didn't own the IP, and there was a legal opinion to prove it. This is my trump card and my weapon.

If I use the weapon too early, then they will force the issue and make me turn over the IP for a sum of money or shares that are worth a lot less now, than when it is a going concern, so I have to hold back. I don't want to shoot too early. I want to make the biggest bang at the most critical juncture. It is a tough job to hold a powerful weapon, and tactically hold off firing it. Sometimes the ego wants to blow them all to hell.

To be continued.