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.