Monday
Day One of our rebirth. Group decision to call ourselves Armadillo & Pounce again, even though Pat Pounce remains a deadly rival these days down at the Four Pats in DC. Basically no one can agree on anything better, and we might have some residual brand equity. As for proper equity, we have eight partners with 10% each, and the other 20% earmarked for employee options. Ken Armadillo is sullen on this, but since he didn't cough up any of the bucks we raised to buy our freedom from Tulip, I think we're being generous. Still gets his name on the shingle. I'm elected as a kind of internal Czar or Chief of Staff, which gives me free reign (get it?) to bully John Bonanza, although he hasn't shown up yet. We put him in charge of our library. Heide Vertig will run the team of analysts and manage case team allocations. Young but kinetic partner Mark Wahlberg will run our client marketing and selling. First job: pipeline development — since we're not yet able to pay ourselves, a new experience for most of the party.
Tuesday
Phone every old client I know to tell them our exciting news. Ed Spanks at Old Wally Brewery says he might have a twenty grand project next quarter and I'm sniffily dismissive. By the end of the day, I'm ready to call him back and sign up. The market is a horror show. My great hope — Du Rite — says they've zeroed out consulting for this year. Rodent Oil won't speak to me at all.
Gloomy dinner at a steak house where everyone confesses similar findings. Mark Wahlberg says the problem is we don't have a product. Ken just gets drunk. I turn on Bonanza, who hasn't said a word, and ask about the library since we need to trawl the media to find old friends in new jobs. Has he been scanning the Journal's "Who's News" column, for example? Of course he hasn't. The lump hasn't done diddly but has the barefaced cheek to tell me to relax.
Go home and review our investment accounts, run the numbers to see how long till we can't make the mortgage. Theo has strep throat and keeps me up all night retrieving stuffed animals from the floor, but no sweat since I wasn't sleeping anyway.
Wednesday
Bit of a funk. Can't think of anyone else to call so wait for callbacks while reading the paper. Awfully, awfully quiet. Grab Heide and Jason Wozzel (fresh from school and thus exposed to the latest new thinking) and go for chai lattes (whatever happened to a good old simple vanilla venti cap?) and try to brainstorm new product ideas. So … re-engineering happened, and then came all that grow-to-be-great stuff, and Fast Company blather, and now feels like a "back to basics" gestalt. People really need to get close to their customers, Wozzel says unhelpfully. Return on human capital, Heide volunteers. No more hire-and-fire, but instead a team-based … Gently I cut her off. It's been done, I say. And it didn't work.
We need something more brutally honest, more vicious. Like competitor destruction blueprints?, suggests Wozzel. Run with that, I say. Heide suggests that everyone is longing for simplicity. Why don't we offer to make it simple for people, instead of all our usual six months of complexity? What, give us 20 minutes and we'll give you a strategy?, I snarl. We recycle our chai cups and head back to the Quietest Office in the World.
Thursday
Nothing. No nibbles, no callbacks, no ideas. Ken leaves early for a long weekend skiing, not exactly a morale booster. No sign of Bonanza in the still-empty room we're pretending is his library. Decide to fire him tomorrow.
Friday
Mark Wahlberg has bad news at our Friday rap session. Our pipeline looks like Mother Hubbard's cupboard, which I read 23 times to Theo last night. (Suspect I'm getting his throat now, and one thing we don't have yet is health insurance.) I mention my embarrassingly tiny possibility for Old Wally, and I'm our illustrious group's official winner.
Finally, as is becoming a bit of a tiresome habit, John Bonanza enters dramatically. We were wondering where you'd disappeared to, I growl. Sold a case, he sings, I sold our first gig. He's waving a piece of paper in the air and skipping around. Is he drunk? Everyone gathers around, all babbling at once. What? Who? When? How much? Bonanza holds up a hand for calm. It's the CIA, he tells us, laughing. Starting now. Half a million. A mood of hysterical confusion seizes the room. But what do they want us to do, says someone? I'm not at liberty to disclose that information to this group in this room, says Bonanza. I cover my eyes, feel my old bones creak. It's happening all over again.
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