Tim could feel his blood pressure rising. “OK. Look, I’ll catch you later today. I need to get going here.”
“Right. No problem,” Ben replied. “We need a strategy. But first we need more information. See you later in the office.”
Tim snapped shut his cell phone and threw it into the trunk of the car along with the sopping Huggie he had been clutching in his other hand. He climbed into the driver’s seat and headed home. Under these new circumstances, he’d be damned if he was going to work for a meeting with potential new vendors, even if they were Jeffrey Elkins’ golfing buddies. He would alert his secretary to call and cancel, or if they were already sitting in the lobby, send them on their way. And no, he would not be rescheduling, he thought as he anticipated his secretary’s questions.
At that moment, what angered Tim most was realizing he had given up a very demanding but good career with his former employer. In its place he was now in a position to be laid off after half a year in his new job. As he guided the gimpy car back toward home Tim pounded the steering wheel and ranted out loud, “Damn it, someone has some explaining to do!”
Taking Care of Business
Bing Sullivan had a reputation for being an extremely fun individual. As senior vice president of marketing for The Easton Company, Bing often bragged to friends and relatives that he had the best job in the whole corporation – he got to think up crazy ideas and go out to play with the clients.
Bing was the longtime marketing genius behind Easton’s new property rollouts. He knew how to put together the right mix of flash, splash and wow-factor to ensure a successful grand opening. Over-the-top was usually just the beginning when Bing was involved. His address book included entries for the Ohio State Marching Band, Cindi Crawford, the CEOs of FTD and Balloons Over America, the manager of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, the IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees), Rod Stewart, and the Ringling Bros. Circus.
At fifty-six, Bing had seen it all, done it all, and was ready to do it all again. He was always on the go. Bing’s colleagues swore he couldn’t sit still for more than eight consecutive minutes. Bing rode his Harley and wore his favorite leather jacket to work every day – and he claimed the jacket was the original worn by Brando in The Wild One, acquired at a Christie’s auction.
Over the years Bing had lived his job. He still put in a lot of hours, but these days he spent most of his time traveling around the country entertaining clients and spending his massive travel and entertainment budget. His expenses, however, trended toward the nontraditional. His was not the land of dinner, drinks and theater tickets. If you were the type of client who expected to be entertained at the best restaurants in town, Bing would line you up with one of his senior marketing reps. He would see to your happiness, but you were definitely not his type. On an outing with Bing, you were more likely to hit the best barbeque spot in the area, drive race cars together at the regional NASCAR track, and then visit a small but energetic bar on the outskirts of town with the best local bands and outstanding home brews on tap. If you were one of Bing’s clients, spending time with him was like getting caught up in a small tornado. There was no stopping Bing once he got going and if you were on his calendar, you were going with him. He had talked clients into everything from hang gliding lessons to Karaoke performances.
Once, when Easton’s director of risk management had approached Bing with his concerns about the liability the company was taking on in Bing’s entertainment budget, Bing just smiled and slapped the guy on the back.
“Not to worry, Chris. I haven’t lost a client yet.”
Conversations like this one were always on the go. If you wanted to talk to Bing about anything, you had to be a fast walker and a short talker. You had to catch up with him as he was walking by, walk at his fast pace long enough to have your conversation, and finish it before Bing reached his office door or his motorcycle, depending on whether he was coming or going.
Bing’s enthusiasm for whatever he was working on was so contagious he could convince almost anyone to do nearly anything. He was the person who convinced Don Asher, one of Easton’s senior executives, to dress in drag for a fashion show fundraiser long ago. Back then, some of his peers couldn’t believe Bing had managed to talk Don into doing it – some even believed it had cost Don a shot at the CEO slot – but Bing’s response was straightforward.
“Hell, that was one of the easiest sells I’ve ever made. What guy wouldn’t want to get into a dressing room with the hottest young models from New York’s legendary Ford modeling agency.”
When anyone asked Bing why he enjoyed marketing so much, he explained that the job let him try on different hats. He meant that both figuratively and literally. Bing had a weakness for anything that involved wearing a costume or uniform, or using some special equipment. Whenever he had an opportunity to try out something for the first time, he usually managed to walk away with some part of – if not all of – the garb and gizmos. A sampling of the stuff in his closet at home included outfits for Texas line dancing (he especially loved the boots he had gotten in Austin); his parachute pack from his first solo jump; a laser gun smuggled from a laser tag arena; a clown costume; NASCAR jacket; stethoscope and black doctor’s bag (embossed with someone else’s gold initials); a hang-gliding helmet; a putter from Arnie’s bag; a Taser from a police ride-along program; his flight suit from sitting in the copilot’s seat of an F-16 jet; even an autographed apron Emeril had given him to wear during a cooking show.
But his favorite keepsake, as he referred to his acquisitions, was the Elvis costume he once wore at an impersonators contest in Las Vegas. For Bing, there was something extra special about all those rhinestones on white leather with the yards of fringe, the white silk scarf, and the gold Elvis aviator sunglasses with EP molded in the nose-bridge and TCB on the arms.
Bing was in the thick of directing the setup for a grand opening in La Jolla when he got the call about the sale of the company. He was standing amidst a white chaos that in twenty-four hours would be a full-scale snow-tubing venue with a Christmas in August theme. The freezer trucks and snowmaking equipment were rumbling loudly in the background when he took the call from Lee Martino, Easton’s chief operating officer.
“For real?” he shouted into his cell when Lee told him the merger news had hit the wires three hours earlier on the East Coast.
“You’ll be needed back here on Monday morning for the change in control group meeting.” Lee informed him.
“Anything else I need to know before then?” Bing asked.
“It’s going to be a short timeline. Pratt-Miles wants to close in less than twelve weeks.”
“Guess I better start looking for a new job,” Bing joked.
“Probably not necessary. It’s not like you’ll be pressed for cash you know.”
“Yeah, but I’m not ready to walk the beach 24/7 just yet either,” Bing replied. “Maybe it’s time I called Jeff Gordon about those driving lessons he’s been promising me.”
Lee laughed and told Bing he would see him on Monday.
“And do us all a favor, Bing. Don’t decide to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel between now and then.”
PART TWO
A GLANCE BACK IN TIME
A Clandestine Game of Pick-Up Sticks
Fletcher Johnston became a millionaire before his thirty-second birthday. As a young attorney fresh out of law school, Fletcher joined his father’s law firm. Fletcher’s charismatic good looks and demeanor, combined with the firm’s established name and reputation, made him popular with his father’s clients. He quickly became the divorce attorney to high profile clients in Georgetown and the Virginia hunt country – clients who were willing to pay generously to settle affairs quietly with attorneys who didn’t leak stories to the Washington press. In his first five years of practice Fletcher doubled the earnings of the family’s thirty-year-old law firm.
But it was his father’s sudden death that made Fletcher a millionaire. In
the early hours of an unforgettably cold Monday in February, Fletcher discovered his father’s body slumped over West’s Annotated Code of Virginia. A widower, his father often went to work on weekends when the office was quiet. Sadly, he had expired with no one around to find him until Fletcher opened the senior partner’s office door. The old man died of a massive stroke while sitting at his desk, leaving Fletcher the firm and his amassed fortune.
Six weeks after the funeral, Fletcher named himself partner emeritus, sold controlling interest in the firm to the remaining senior partners and left town. There were lots of ways to kill oneself, but working to death was not a choice Fletcher wanted to inherit.
Leaving behind his brief but successful work history, Fletcher spent the next eighteen months following every boyhood whim he’d ever imagined, including his dream of skiing the highest slopes in Europe. He drank martinis and played roulette in Monaco, lounged on the Med’s elite topless beaches, hung out with artists on the Cote D’Or, and ate his way through the Michelin starred restaurants in Paris. When Bobby Kennedy was assassinated the American jet-set tide in Europe ebbed stateside, and it seemed the days of Camelot were truly coming to a close. Fletcher followed the flow and returned home. Using his previous Georgetown connections, he took a position as a corporate attorney for a small but growing development company. On his first day working for the new employer, Fletcher stowed his snow skis behind his office door as a reminder to make time to play.
And play he did, but not on the ski slopes. Fletcher’s new responsibilities focused on land deals – an area he had dabbled in as an offshoot of his divorce practice for a handful of his clients – buying and selling rural real estate in the Virginia countryside. Land deals were easy compared to divorce settlements. To Fletcher these land development deals seemed like child’s play – a mix of capture the flag, red rover, Jenga, and hide-and-seek. He loved all the planning and pretense that led up to the surreptitious parcel purchases. Researching land records and analyzing owners made him feel like a detective or a secret operative. The challenge of buying up land quietly and quickly reminded him of an undercover version of pick-up sticks.
By the time The Easton Company made its announcement to the residents of northern Virginia that it would build a new city in the rural landscape west of the nation’s capital, Fletcher had managed to successfully accumulate for his employer 15,000 acres from 150 separate owners. It helped that the landowners Fletcher was dealing with were unfamiliar with his employer. Fletcher and his growing staff had done a good job of stealthily acquiring a number of large tracts before anyone got suspicious. But in the five months preceding the release of development plans by Ed Easton, the company’s owner, the community was rife with rumor and speculation. The cat was out of the bag; residents just didn’t have any idea what the cat actually looked like. So Ed’s announcement about building a new concept city from scratch put to rest various rumors which had run rampant through the rural community: that the mysterious land acquisition was for a giant amusement park, a nuclear waste facility, or a secret bio-lab to study highly infectious diseases. Then, near the end of the initial land acquisition process, as the natives realized a single buyer was purchasing all this land, conspiracy theories started to circulate. The most popular one asserted that Russian communists were attempting to establish a foothold near Washington, D.C.
Fletcher was proud of his accomplishments. He had acquired a large portion of the land for less than $1,000 an acre and managed to keep the average per acre price to $1,500, with the last sellers getting nearly double what the first ones were paid just twenty months prior.
As it turned out, this would end up being the most exciting period of Fletcher’s career, although he didn’t know it at the time. He had made plenty of new friends as he swapped stories with, entertained, hunted with, dined with, rode with, drank with, sang with, and got to know a large percentage of the families in the vicinity. He had attended a funeral and two weddings and managed to evade three matchmaking schemes with landowners’ available young daughters. These people liked Fletcher and he liked them.
Of course the friendships couldn’t last and most dissolved before Ed Easton’s announcement was made. When people found out what the future of their valley was going to look like, they were both relieved (the Russians weren’t really coming) and angry. Fletcher was no longer a popular guy.
When he received the first death threat, he turned it over to the authorities and shrugged it off. Two weeks later a man with a shotgun – someone Fletcher had never seen before – appeared at his car window outside a local diner late one night and suggested Fletcher leave the area, permanently. The next day, after a call to the local sheriff and a brief meeting with his staff and then Ed Easton, Fletcher departed for a sabbatical in California to research some developable land in Simi Valley.
Upon his eventual return to the Washington area, Fletcher Johnston continued to work for The Easton Company until the day it was sold, but he never lived anywhere near the new city Ed was building. Instead, he established residence in the District of Columbia, buying a brand new condo in The Watergate.
Over the years, orchestrating new land deals around the country made time fly for Fletcher. His job with Easton grew along with the company. He often looked back fondly on his eighteen-month European travel break from employment. Even though he took an annual vacation, it was usually in August when business in the mid-Atlantic area slowed to a crawl and workaholics weren’t missed at their desks. So the snow skis stayed behind his office door and became more symbolic than functional as the years slipped by.
Simple Truths
Reviewing a corporation’s prospectus can often leave the reader in doubt about what the company actually does, and generally provides no clue regarding the organization’s definition for business success. When Ed Easton founded The Easton Company, he made it clear to those who chose to invest their time, talents, and money exactly how he measured success. He put it in writing and signed his name to it for all to see:
Like people, companies have personalities. Some are alert and efficient, others are sluggish and clumsy; some are warm and friendly, others are cold and self-centered. Personality is not an accident. It depends upon what goes on inside the person – or the company. “What does he live for?” “What does she want?” And with a company: “What’s its purpose?” “What are its goals?”
The answers aren’t easy for a person or a company. However, the goals of a truly successful company might be these:
To provide a useful service or product
To provide thoughtfully for the people who spend their days at work in it
To produce a profit
You can’t put these in any order of priority. Each is indispensable to overall success. Each of us in the company must keep his eye on each of these goals and chase them hard if we are to have the kind of company we really want.
We are fortunate that the very nature of our business so directly involves service to the community. We help build homes, stores, office buildings, factories, and all kinds of facilities that are important to the health, growth and vitality of a community. As a company, therefore, we will fulfill the first goal if we just do our jobs outstandingly well.
The second goal requires much of a company: fair salaries, pleasant working conditions, opportunities for growth and advancement, friendly associates, and continuing concern for the welfare of each individual in the company.
We cannot fail in the third goal for very long and stay in business, but if we can’t achieve the first two goals, and also earn a profit we are in the wrong business – our service isn’t really needed. On the other hand, if our business has the potential for useful service which we believe ours does; if the company cares about each of us the way it should and if we give back the same kind of concern about every detail of the company’s operations, then profits are bound to follow – for the company and for each of us who works in it.
Popular archived photos of Ed Easton
show a portly gentleman in a rumpled madras sports coat wearing horn-rimmed glasses. In the photos he is happily cutting cake and distributing slices to young and old at the company’s annual community birthday celebration. Looking back, outsiders might say Ed’s business doctrine was just the lofty ideals of a dreamer in the 1960s. However, for those who personally experienced working for Ed, it was the real deal.
The CEO Who Didn’t Love It Enough To Keep It
In the nearly fifty-year history of The Easton Company there were three CEOs: the Visionary Founder; the Pensive Caretaker; and the One Who Didn’t Love It Enough to Keep It. According to the Friends of The Easton Company, Jeffrey Elkins was the lowest of the lot. He was the CEO who didn’t love the company enough to keep it. Following the merger announcement, “Friends of The Easton Company” was the label Jeffrey Elkins sarcastically used when referring to members of the press, Easton employees, and people in the community who, after years of varying support and criticism, suddenly had an undying love for all things Easton.
As the initial shock of becoming a persona non grata in his own company began to wear off, Elkins gave up any remaining pretense of caring what anyone thought of him. When he arrived at work accompanied by two bodyguards the week after the merger announcement, some employees actually had the nerve to talk about his behavior within earshot.
“Bodyguards,” one secretary sneered. “He’s bringing bodyguards into one of the friendliest companies in America. Ed Easton must be spinning in his grave.”
Pink Slips and Parting Gifts Page 4
