By the way, this isn’t about being cheap. It’s about being realistic. That company I worked for had five-hundred-plus employees, East Coast and West Coast offices, and had been around for over twenty years. Tiny Reparations was just getting off the ground, hadn’t started making money yet, and had only four people, including myself, working there. Splurging on perks when we didn’t have revenue coming in would set us up for failure. This meant my “bad and bougie” tastes got downgraded to “reasonable and paid in full at the end of the billing cycle.” Has a nice ring to it, don’t it? I wish I could say I got this reality check all on my own. I didn’t. Mai looks over all the expenses with a fine-tooth comb as though she’s performing an audit. If there’s a pricey item I like, she’ll present me with the Wayfair option because blowing money on a bunch of cute shit from Restoration Hardware so the office can look fly for the ’gram is irresponsible and not what a boss does.
But it’s more than just office space. You need to have an emergency fund to tide you over during your low-grossing periods and must be able to afford your overhead, of which a big chunk will be employee salaries. I’ve already covered the importance of having a lawyer, but your other must-have will most likely be an assistant because, trust me, you’re not as efficient as you think you are. Unsure about the right time to hire an assistant? When feeling like pulling an Usher in an R&B music video aka being so emo that you start dancing in the rain, not caring if your jeans are soggy, becomes a regular occurrence, ya need some help. And the only way you can afford this help is if you’re living within your means not only personally, but also professionally.
So remember, the numbers don’t lie, be clear about what is a need vs. a want, and understand that your profits increasing isn’t a license to ball out of control, but to build your future and maintain your financial independence. However, if you do want to splurge on Grey Poupon for the office (and also your life!), go for it. That mustard is good as hell.
What Warren Buffett Should’ve Told Ya #9: Understand What You’re Not Good At / What You Don’t Like Doing and Have Other People Do That Shit
Orgasms are great, but have you ever tried paying someone to do things you don’t wanna do and gained hours of your life back? I don’t know about y’all but, to me, delegating feels like a rebirth. Like I just hatched from the egg that Lady Gaga stepped out of during her performance of “Born This Way” at the 2011 Grammys. My face has the collagen bounce of a prepubescent Korean gymnast. My energy is that of an early-aughts college student hopped up on Four Loko the night before their senior thesis is due. There’s nothing more counterproductive than bringing an “I ain’t really trying to fuck with this right now” vibe to tasks I loathe (expense reports, scheduling meetings across various time zones) or that aren’t my strong suit (super schmooze-y calls because I hate kissing butt to get what I want), because I’ll make careless mistakes, take twice as long to get things done because I’m dragging my feet, or my negative energy will be a buzzkill for everyone around me. Believe me: Once you get to a place where you don’t have to do everything yourself, you shouldn’t, and instead, you should trust others to help take care of the smaller details so you can focus on the big picture, which is you being as successful as you’ve always dreamed. And to have free time making curated U2 playlists for your friends even though they didn’t ask for them. Just me?
What Warren Buffett Should’ve Told Ya #10: Your Employees Don’t Have to Like All Your Decisions, but They Gotta Respect Them
When I was a kid, I desperately wanted L.A. Gear sneakers. I don’t know why, but I had my heart set on owning a pair of shoes with soles that lit up like a Times Square billboard every time I took a step. So I asked my parents and they politely said, “Hell no,” and told me my Keds Champion* leather shoes would suffice. True, but I was ten! I didn’t want sensible-ass sneakers! I wanted something that looked dope and oozed suburban wealth. None of that fazed my parents and they held steadfast that their money would be better spent on food, mortgage, and other practical bills. Sure, I was annoyed for maybe a week or two, tops, but I didn’t act a fool. I simply got over my disappointment, put on those Keds, and played with my classmates. And if my parents weren’t wholly confident in shooting me down (they probably were since they’re not label people, so, if anything, L.A. Gear’s popularity only made them more inclined to decline what I was asking for), they didn’t show it because they knew that buying me whatever I wanted whenever I wanted it could turn me into a shallow person.
This is what you have to understand when you’re the boss: You’re going to call some shots or do things your employees won’t like. They have to get over it, and you have to get over the fact that you’re going to disappoint some people, because guess what? Sometimes, what’s in the best interest of your business will be at odds with what your employees want, and that’s okay.
Your company cannot be run by committee, so you’ve got to make the executive decisions. And if you want to (and more often than not, I think you should) explain your reasoning behind the choices you make so your staff understands your thought process, gets a sense of when you’re open to taking risks and when you’re not, and can have a better grasp on how they can come up with ideas that align with your vision, do it. Still, there’ll be times when you’ll want to go a different way. Your employees have two options: They can lick their wounds and get on board with Keds, or be rude, dismissive, and demand L.A. Gear, which you can address in hopes of finding a solution, or agree to part ways if they’re incapable of respecting your authority. Either way, what matters most is you set the tone and they follow it. Basically, you’re Kirk Franklin, they’re the choir, and y’all about to perform the fuck out of “Melodies from Heaven.” Good luck!
What Warren Buffett Should’ve Told Ya #11: This Could’ve Been an Email
Working from home can be lonesome. So sometimes folks are jonesing for human connection via Zoom. I empathize with all that. Still . . . I. Do. Not. Need. To. See. Your. Face. You do not need to see mine. We don’t need to Hollywood Squares this situation when a short and simple email would have sufficed. Is an email a little impersonal sometimes? Sure. But also, isn’t writing each other how couples survived the Civil War? Like, didn’t soldiers send letters home to their wives and that was enough for the wives to get through the loneliness and another week of making the same tired corn bread? If letter writing could keep a marriage alive during the entirety of the Civil War, then I’m sure my working relationship with Heather can thrive via the emails I send her while taking a dump. If this stance paints me as antisocial, then so be it. I just believe that working from home during a global pandemic is taxing enough—after all, we’re expected to maintain the same level of productivity we had pre-Covid—so having to carry on as though we’re not experiencing collective trauma, all the while putting on our professional bests or code-switching for the Zoom cameras is . . . well, frankly, none of us are getting paid enough to do that.
But worse than the people who want to use Zoom as the default means of communication are the tricks, who, at the last minute, decide a scheduled conference call should now be a VIDEOCONFERENCE CALL. Wait a damn minute. Why are people calling audibles last minute as if we aren’t all dressed like it’s day two of our periods? Even if you can’t have a period or never had a period, you’re dressing like your uterine lining has just finished a ropes course aka you look a fucking mess. The audacity, to assume folks have washed their faces that day. Taken a shower. Brushed their teeth. Put on an outfit. I ain’t wasting my cute clothes just so I can sit at my makeshift desk (aka the dining table) and work. This is an athleisure and sweatpants household until further notice. So stop it with the Zoom surprise meetings. You can’t do that to people, especially Black women like me. Because now I’m pulling a muscle diving for a wig so I can put it on my head before I click “Join with video” and have to spend the rest of the day IcyHot’ing my back. So, in the future, when you want to set a Zoom, ask yourself,
Could this be an email? And if the answer is “yes,” then bitch, clickety-clack, click-click on your keyboard like a Delta Airlines employee trying to rebook you on a flight and keep it moving.
* * *
Well, I hope this provided some guidance on how you can operate your own business. I know there’s a lot to figure out, and it will always be a lot because there is always more to learn, tweak, experience. The magic is not in doing it how Warren Buffett or Shonda Rhimes or I have done, but in customizing the rules to fit your wants and needs.
Some leaders have zero interest in conquering the world; they just want to monetize a passion or skill set and make a nice living and be a part of their small business community. Others have grand designs on changing the industry they’re in or leaving a mark on history or pushing the conversation forward. Whatever the case may be, just do your work and create a legacy you’ll be proud of, and if grit, determination, creativity, and the occasional fantasy about destroying your life in spectacular fashion are what’s needed to get the job done, you’re my kind of CEO. Let’s chat.
But not on Zoom, please. If I get a Zoom invite from you, I will definitely fake my own kidnapping.
#Quaranbae
I’m not saying you should shit yourself in front of your significant other (IS THIS THE MOMENT WHERE I RUIN ANY CHANCE OF BEING AN OPRAH BOOK CLUB SELECTION? I. FUCKING. THINK. SO.), but I believe that unless you do mortifying things, accidentally or not, that make your partner pull a Walter White and get a burner phone so they can create a Raya dating profile to search for fresh peen or vajeen, then, frankly, you aren’t in a relationship. Y’all are just comrades who are sexin’ and passing time like prisoners in Litchfield hoping to get released early on good behavior. But a relationship? That, my friends, is, among other things, a compilation of inside jokes and annoyances, romantic moments and unforeseen problems, and, most important, the sobering reality that no one else in the world would put up with your specific brand of nonsense quite the way your partner does.
This is especially true for soul mates. British Baekoff’s mine, and not because he said I was his a few years ago while nursing me back to health from a nasty flu as we watched Hidden Figures. He’s the One for many reasons. Nobody makes me laugh, nurtures and challenges me, loves and likes me in spite of my flaws, believes in me completely, and makes me feel secure and at ease the way he does. And I’m not talking “a tank top and well-worn sweatpants on a lazy Saturday afternoon” type of comfortable. I mean a comfort so freeing that my breathing calms and my heart beats at a steady rhythm that stays right in the pocket like a thumping bass line in a funk song. With him, I’m at my safest. With him, I’m at home. Matter of fact, he is home. And you know what I do when I’m at home? I shit. Regular old deuces as well as those close calls where I give my toilet seat a thumbs-up and go [insert Denzel Washington laugh], “My man!” The point is the second I’m with Bae, all my body’s defenses power down, which results in the occasional burp or fart, followed by an “Oops, babe!” or “Sorry, boo!” However, three months into the ’tine aka quarantine, my body had betrayed me in front of Baekoff like never before, and that haunts me to this day. Like, I’ll be going about my business and my brain will troll me by queuing up this memory, which stops me in my tracks. Then I stare off into a random corner of the room I’m in like I’m Angelica Schuyler in Hamilton and start singing “Satisfied”:
I remember that night, I just might (Rewind)
I just might have definitely, accidentally sharted in front of my boyfriend, who was shocked and also had a look of Oh, this is what Maya Angelou meant when she wrote, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time” on his face. But c’mon. He had to have seen this coming, right? I had become lax in the whole “not passing gas in front of each other” department and coped with living through a pandemic by eating food in weird combinations (e.g., an amuse-bouche of dessert, then dinner, which was followed by more dessert). It was only a matter of time before my stomach went no más.
This is probably why my boyfriend stifled a laugh and asked, “Did you just shit yourself?” This. Messy. Ass. Heaux. He knew damn well I did, but wanted me to admit it, so that “Remember that time when you shit yourself in front of me?” could be the “That’s what she said” of our relationship. Well, my parents didn’t raise me to go out like that. So, with my heart full of pride, I clinched my butt cheeks and said with the utmost casualness, “W-what? Oh! Nah, I mean, I get why you’d think that because my butthole emitted a deep, Johnny Cash baritone sound; however, let me assure you, good sir, that was merely a stage-one fart with a touch of bass because of the seaweed in this store-bought pho I just ate.”
I quickly waddled to the bathroom to poop out the pho and two giant slices of three-layer red velvet Betty Crocker cake I had eaten and took a shame shower. Obvs, we didn’t have sex that night. He and I straight-up 11’ed, aka each of us lay down on our respective sides of the bed, watching nineties sitcom reruns on Hulu as he periodically chuckled, not at the TV but at what had gone down in the living room mere hours ago. So how did we get here? I’m glad you asked. Welcome to my town hall, take a seat, and I’ll explain the journey to how my bootyhole doubled as a 16 Handles fro-yo shop for a night.
* * *
Unlike some people—no judgment—my boyfriend and I were early adopters of quarantining. Although, if I knew then what I know now, my last outing in the Before Times (aka pre-coronavirus) might’ve been different or, at the very least, I might have pressed my luck and not stayed indoors until mid-March. Ah, coulda, woulda, shoulda.
Anyway, I remember the transition of me walking past piles of garbage bags while pretending that kind of moment is what JAY-Z and Alicia Keys were talking about in “Empire State of Mind” to keeping my Black ass at home because people can barely be bothered to be sanitary before the threat of an impending pandemic.*
So, there I was with a couple of girlfriends, wrapping up February aka Black History Month by going to see Céline Dion perform at the Barclays Center. IS THIS SOMETHING MALCOLM X WOULD HAVE DONE DURING BHM? Of course not, but also? Dion’s “All By Myself” and her cover of “River Deep, Mountain High” are certifiable bops. I believe that if he had heard them, he would have put a pin in talking about Plymouth Rock landing on us in order to sway along, cup of white wine in hand, as she belts out notes. Cut to the end of the first week of March.
I canceled all my stand-up shows, told my employees that we’d work from home, bought three cases of canned tomatoes (Bae was convinced we were going to make and eat homemade chili exclusively) and decided that I wasn’t going to leave my apartment or see anyone I knew unless it was an absolute emergency.
Despite my fear of the ’rona, as evidenced by my boyfriend and me and our early quarantine—we started on March 6, 2020—we believed it would be only a temporary inconvenience. But as the days went on, the death toll increased, and the place I’ve called home for over half my life, New York City, became a coronavirus hot zone, I was no longer distracted by the hilarity of the now-disgraced Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo’s no-nonsense daily press conferences and I quickly sobered up to reality. Bae and I were going to quarantine in an apartment, possibly for months, with no end date in sight. Just the two of us. No change of locaysh. Just inside. With recycled air. No trees.
With that realization I was sad, although I couldn’t even name a brand of New York trees. Are trees called “brands”? “Strains”? “Makes and models”? Kidding! I’m not that dumb. But for real, I knew nothing about trees except to say “tree” like Jodie Foster in Nell when I see one—#DeepCutReference—yet I instantly mourned the end of ignoring trees on my way home from Target after capitalizing on a two-for-six-dollars face scrub deal. Of course, that’s a trivial thing to miss, but I believe that when soul-shaking, life-changing, world-breaking things like a global pandemic happen, your brain turns to anything that can help you self-soothe. For some, that might�
��ve been making a box cake and eating half of it in one sitting. For others, maybe it was buying three twelve-pack rolls of toilet paper. By the way, who were all these overly confident people who knew their shit schedule for the next six weeks? Y’all, I had a fruit salad and a fifteen-ounce green juice today and I’m still tossing up a prayer to the Virgin Mary that I’ll drop my first deuce before the sun sets. But that’s the point, isn’t it? No one knew what their life was going to be, so they acted out. Ate their emotions. Hoarded instead of shared. Fixated on the nonexistent, e.g., my “relationship” with trees.
Because I didn’t care about the trees. Wait, I did. I mean, I do. Like, I believe climate change is real. Viva planet Earth or whatever. But what I’m getting at is that I mainly cared about what those trees represented: my old life. Not being able to interact with those trees, no matter how superficial that interaction may have been, was symbolic of everything I was leaving behind in order to shelter in place. No more strolling across the Brooklyn Bridge, reading a good book on my commute to work, or going to my favorite bodega and complaining about the price of Dr. Bronner’s soap that the shop owner and I know I’m going to buy anyway. It was the end of sitting on rooftops with friends and eating sloppy breakfast burritos, flying home to Cleveland for a summer visit with my parents, or dancing my heart out with twenty thousand others at a concert. And work? Ha! In many ways, my work routine imploded. I wasn’t going to spend thirty weekends on the road like I did in 2019. Traveling internationally for stand-up as well as for pleasure was instantly a thing of the past. So were my day trips to the West Coast for quick-paying gigs. Simply put, having my lifestyle upended because of the lockdown was unsettling. It was also scary, but for a different reason.
Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes Page 9
