Pecking Order, page 5
“Ah, as some of you have already heard, our contracts with Watkins Financial Group, Pellman Developers, Harvey Furniture, and Williams School Supplies are all in their last year, and the clients have not been, ah, considerably pleased with our efforts of late to save them money.”
Kevin was a straight shooter in a business that needed and appreciated it. There was no beating around the bush with accounting. The numbers and tax laws spoke for themselves.
No one said a word as he continued.
“So, over the next few weeks, our efforts as the tax staff will be to turn over every new stone to find ways in which we can squeeze another pint or so of orange juice out of the city, state, and federal tax laws—as we know them to be—to try and maintain these very, ah, important clients.”
Chip frowned, smiled, and shook his head with a chuckle of sarcasm.
Dwayne read his disturbance and asked him about it. “You have some questions, Chip?”
“Well, yeah, I mean, with all due respect, I understand how important these guys are as clients, but as their accountants, I feel that the auditing department should be the ones to go through all of their books and tell them how they can save more money on their end, instead of them coming down on us to find more loopholes in the tax laws.
“I mean, if you ask me, it just doesn’t seem fair to put that kind of pressure on us,” he commented. “I mean, the tax laws are the tax laws.”
Kevin said, “Well, the auditing department is already working on their end. We met with them yesterday.”
Dwayne said, “Obviously, you haven’t spoken to anyone in the auditing department.”
Chip looked confused that they were assumed to have known everything already.
“Well, isn’t that what we’re ultimately paid to do, to work as a team? But if we weren’t told about this in the meeting yesterday, then how are we to know that?”
Ivan stared at Chip and knew better. Chip just didn’t want the extra workload. He argued about everything, things that it didn’t make any sense to complain about.
Amy Ashford, a tax veteran in her early forties, spoke up to stop Chip’s nonsense.
She said, “Well, I did hear about it, and I assumed that we would have our meeting before the week was out, and lo and behold, here we are. So we should all be on the same page now for next week.”
Dwayne nodded to her. “Thank you.” He looked as if it had been a long day for him already, but it was only 10:37 AM.
Amy turned and addressed Chip before he got a chance to spit any more needless venom.
“Chip, although I see your point that auditing should be the ones to tell a company how it can benefit by tightening up within its own ranks, since we are their accounting firm, it’s still considered our job to do everything in our power to find them every way possible to save money. Otherwise, why should they continue to choose us over any other accounting firm? It’s all about going that extra mile for the client,” she stated.
Ivan spoke up. “That’s about it.” He knew the deal like the back of his hand. It was what Barry Mitchell had always told them: the rich will bully their way to heaven, and unless their company could tax the middle class to stay afloat like the government did, it was in the best interest of the company to stay in the good graces of those who could afford to write the larger checks.
However, when the meeting was adjourned, Chip was not at all pleased with Ivan’s acceptance of the matter.
He pulled Ivan aside for privacy and addressed him in low tones. “Hey, man, I mean, don’t you get tired of all the extra ass-kissing they force us to do for some of these dickless clients we’re under contract with? I mean, let’s get real here, man. How much of that money do we even see for this extra work that we all do?”
Ivan remained silent. Chip had a point. They remained under salary no matter how hard they worked on taxes.
Ivan told himself, That’s exactly why I have other plans now. I’m gonna look out for me as hard as I look out for them.
But instead of telling that to Chip, he answered, “I understand what you’re saying, man. I do. But at the end of the day, our job is to save our clients money. That’s all it is.”
Chip studied Ivan’s eyes and his calm demeanor, and he realized that he was unwavering. Ivan meant what he said, and a man had to respect that. So Chip stuck out his hand for an honorable handshake.
“You’re right.” He paused and stood there bewildered for a second. “Well, let’s get back to work, then,” he commented. “We’re still on Hutch and Mitchell time.”
Chip still managed to slip his wicked sarcasm into the mix. All Ivan could do was laugh about it…for the moment. But like he had told himself, he had other plans now.
Three
Black Network Parties
SO, YOU’RE TELLING ME that you’re going to start promoting parties now? I mean, come on, Ivan, are you serious? You’ve never even thrown a party before.”
Catherine was crystal clear over the speakerphone. She made Ivan’s idea sound preposterous. But he was adamant and all smiles while sitting on his sofa explaining it to her.
“Do you like the company name, at least?”
“I mean, the name is catchy, yes. But…throwing parties is a lot more than a catchy promoter name, Ivan,” she warned him. “And I thought you told me you couldn’t even get in the party.”
“I couldn’t. But that’s what gave me the idea to throw my own.”
Ivan was excited by the challenge.
Catherine sighed over the phone. She really sounded concerned. She said, “You’re not gonna quit your accounting job for this, are you?”
Ivan frowned at the assumption. “Hell, no, I’m not gonna quit my job. Why would I do that? This is the first time I’ve had the freedom to work my money.”
“Okay, I’m just checking. Don’t bite my head off,” she told him. She said, “Well, if you’re gonna start throwing parties like that, then maybe you should start off with, like…after-work network parties or something. Just start with something small. You know what I mean?”
Ivan thought it over and said, “Network parties? How am I gonna make any money off of that? People don’t pay for those. That’s just the bar making money.”
“Well, invite somebody out that they’ll pay to see, then. Get some of the Padres to talk about the lack of black players in baseball or something. I don’t know.”
Ivan thought about that idea as well. He said, “You think I can get Butch and Deke to come out for an after-work crowd? I mean, they got practice and games around that time.”
“Look, Ivan, it was only a suggestion. But I think this whole thing is crazy, if you ask me,” Catherine snapped.
“All right, well, the first thing I need to do is get my logo and website together. So I’m meeting up with a couple of college guys this weekend to run my ideas past them,” Ivan told her.
Catherine said, “A couple of college guys?” It didn’t sound professional enough.
“Yeah, I’ve seen some of their work online before, so I reached out to them with an email as soon as I got home, and they responded back to me to meet up with them tomorrow.”
There was an extended pause over the phone while Catherine considered it all. “All right, well, it pretty much sounds like you got your mind made up. So, good luck on it.”
“Thanks,” Ivan told her. “And what about your job interview? You think they’re gonna hire you?”
“We’ll see. But I hope they do, though. Because I can’t wait to see how you’re gonna try and pull off this party promotion thing.”
“Try? Sounds like you don’t believe I can do it.”
“Well, you’re not exactly Mr. Party Animal, Ivan. Or should I call you Mr. I.D. now?”
Ivan chuckled. He said, “I don’t have to be a party animal. All I need to do is put on the party. And I’ll find other people to do all that other stuff.”
“Can you even dance now, Ivan?” Catherine teased him.
“Yeah, I can still dance. I’m gon’ dance to this new money. Ching, ching, ching, ching-ching, ching, chinnggg,” he sang in his response.
Catherine chuckled over the phone. She said, “Well, I’m glad you have confidence about it, because you’re gonna need it.”
Ivan thought hard after that. How much confidence did he have?
“Yeah.” That’s all he could say. He had done enough talking already. He needed to start putting his plans into motion.
“All right, so, call me up and let me know how this job situation works out,” he told her.
“I will. And you let me know how things work out with you.”
When Ivan hung up, he was surprised at how well their conversation had gone, considering he had dodged her advances the night before. In the past, Catherine wouldn’t call him for a week if she was upset with him, let alone talk to him for an hour.
“I guess she’s growing up now,” he assumed to himself. Then he pondered his own maturity. “And so am I,” he mumbled with a nod.
He figured it was time to move away from the safe road that he had traveled on for so many years and start taking new chances. And he was excited about doing so.
IVAN DROVE THROUGH the familiar territory of College Avenue on San Diego State’s campus before reaching University Boulevard. He was en route to make his Saturday meeting with the undergraduate web team of TheFreeWorldWizards.com. They had built a high-adrenaline website that loaded up fast and flashed a constantly changing scenery of graphic designs, photography, and artwork. Ivan had been tipped to check out their energizing site at his office months ago. But he’d had no reason to contact the guys who set it up until now.
He pulled up to the address off of University Boulevard and immediately spotted two college-age white guys sitting on the elevated patio of the apartment. They sat in white beach chairs in front of a plastic white table, awaiting his arrival. In the driveway below them was a light green Camaro emblazoned with superheroes and cartoon characters.
“Ivan David?” one of the college guys asked him as soon as Ivan climbed out of his car. The two partners were total opposites in appearance. One was a heavyset blond with long hair past his shoulders, while the other was slim, with short dark hair and glasses. However, they both wore casual T-shirts and shorts with their loafers.
“So, who is Paul and who is Jeff?” Ivan asked them as he approached the stairs to join them on the patio.
The heavy, long-haired blond answered first. “I’m Jeff and he’s Paul.”
Ivan nodded. “Okay. Well, I’m Ivan.”
They shared a chuckle as Ivan reached them on the patio and sat down in an extra white chair.
Paul told him immediately, “I love your company name. We can do a lot with I.D. Promotions.”
“Lots of things,” Jeff added. “But what are your ideas for it?”
They were hitting him upside the head fast.
Ivan responded, “Well…first of all…” He slowed things down a bit. “I want to create a logo where the ‘I.D.’ part is big and stands by itself. And the ‘Promotions’ part should almost seem like an afterthought. So in other words, when you’re looking at a flyer, as soon as you pick it up, you should be able to read ‘I.D.’ immediately, and then ‘Promotions.’ You know what I mean?”
Paul had a large sketch pad and a black pen right there on the plastic white table. He grabbed them both and said, “That’s easy.” He drew a large, extrathick “I” with a matching period and a large, extrathick “D” with another period. Once he finished that, he wrote the word “Promotions” across the center of the “I” and the “D.”
He said, “If you do something like that, all you have to do is change the background colors of the letters, and your brand will pop off of any flyer as soon as you look at it.”
Paul then made a large box around the I.D. Promotions logo with enough space to draw a dancing couple to the far right side. At the top of the box, he wrote “Party Downtown,” and across the bottom he created scribble-scrabble to represent the other important information.
When it was all finished, Ivan looked at the mock-up of the flyer and grinned. “Damn. Just like that, hunh?” He was impressed.
“Yeah, man, that’s easy,” Jeff said. “And what we can do is use that same logo for the website, and we can move it around every five seconds or so. So it’ll read ‘I’ period, and then ‘D’ period, and then we freeze it for a few seconds, before ‘Promotions.’ Then we move it to the next spot and do it again. You know what I mean?”
Ivan nodded to him. “I can see it already. Top. Bottom. Left. Right. Corner. That’s a good idea. It’ll really push the name in their heads.”
Jeff said, “Yeah, but this is what we were thinking about. With the whole I.D. thing, man, you’re sitting on a gold mine. Now, you want to promote parties and other events and things, right?”
Ivan nodded, wondering where the college guys were going with it. “Yeah,” he answered.
“Okay, so you’re going to be collecting, like, an email list and population data for all of your promotions, right?”
Ivan was still studying him. “Yeah, of course.”
Jeff then got excited. He said, “Okay, so that’s the coolest part of your company name, because you’re basically asking people, ‘Who are you?’ Like, ‘What is your I.D.? Tell us about you.’ You know what I mean? And then they’ll go online and tell you. And you collect all of their data. And everyone will come to your site and sign on, because they want everyone to know who they are. Being popular is the American way.”
Jeff looked at his partner Paul. Paul was all smiles. Then Paul took over with his own excitement.
“So, what we came up with, and what we can do, is, like, have random spotlights of the people and businesses, celebrities and musicians who come out to your parties and events. And, of course, the people who come to the website. And once we build up that list, in no time you can write your own meal ticket for sponsors and advertisers who would love to be a part of what you’re building.”
Ivan nodded and kept his cool as he ran the concept through his head. He realized that San Diego was a multicultural city, but what audience did he want to attract? Two white college guys pushing his website could very easily lead him to the wrong demographic of people. And although their energy, intentions, and theory were all sound, Ivan had to make sure his new business had a core group to start with. That way he wouldn’t end up courting whomever with no particular focus. He summed up all of his own ideas before he responded to them.
“What do you think?” Jeff asked him. He and his partner both looked anxious.
Ivan looked at them both and joked, “If I wanted to sell you this company name for five hundred dollars, would you buy it?”
The college undergrads looked at each other and froze. Jeff was the first to speak up.
“Are you serious?”
Ivan started laughing and paused for effect. “Nah, I’m not serious,” he told them. “I’m just tripping off of how you two came up with all those ideas in one night.”
“Hey, that’s what we do, man,” Jeff told him. “Ideas are priceless.”
Ivan said, “Okay, well…your ideas sound good for later on down the road, once I see where I can go with it. But for right now I wanna build my core audience with the African-American professional crowd, twenty-five and up. And I know it’s not a lot of us here, but that becomes my advantage to make sure I hit ’em and I hit ’em hard to get them behind me.”
Jeff and Paul listened to where Ivan wanted to go with his website, and it looked as if all of the energy had been sucked out of them.
Jeff was first to speak up. “Well, it’s your site, man, we’ll do what you want us to do with it, but you can always market and promote to whoever you want. I wouldn’t limit who you invite to your site, though. Why would you want to do that?”
To explain himself more clearly, Ivan said, “Okay, let’s take your idea for a minute. Now, let’s say that we end up spotlighting a blond-haired white girl, who is twenty-two years old, and she likes rock music and skydiving.”
He looked them both in the eyes to make his point. “You see where I’m going with this? How in the world am I gonna benefit from that when I know I’m not promoting rock parties and skydiving?”
Paul said, “You never know. But you mainly want to let the site create its own audience. Then you find out where your strongest support is. That’s what we did with our site.”
Ivan said, “Yeah, but you’re not gonna be paying for locations, DJs, security, celebrities, and all the other things that I’ll need to pay for to get these parties off the ground. So my website needs to cater to the audience that I’m going after. And once we’re able to do that, if we find that the site is attracting other people than what I expected, then we’ll find a way to cater to them. And we can sit down and do that together. But I’m not a college student anymore, and I don’t have time for this website not to do what I need it to do, especially while I’m paying you for it.”
Jeff nodded and understood Ivan’s point. He said, “Okay. Well, let me ask you this: If you don’t have a lot of time right now to build your own list, would you be willing to buy a data list of African-American professionals in San Diego? Because we can research that for you.”
Ivan was still amazed. These guys were fast on their feet.
He said, “You can buy a list like that?”
“That’s what telemarketing companies do,” Paul answered him. “And now the internet companies are doing it.”
The plot thickened.
Ivan nodded and said, “All right. Well, let’s try that. In the meantime, what kind of price are we looking at to set up my logo and create and manage my website?”
The college partners discussed all of their price tags, including the management of the website, and nothing jumped out as outrageous, so Ivan planned to agree to most of it. At the same time, good business sense included negotiation, and Ivan wanted to make sure the two college students had an extra incentive to work hard for him.
