Season 3, Episode 15: Selling Out

Keegan and I were down in New Orleans, in the conference room of RDS' regional offices, talking about his all-in-one business app.

We'd held that back in the initial sale of my company to RDS. I figured that the app would be something we could sell separately, either to RDS or somebody else. We knew it was better than anything RDS had, but we hadn't realized how much better it was until Amber and I had to help them onboard my clients - which was part of the sale - with their new consultant.

That was the better part of the last two weeks, and nobody was happy. I wasn't happy, because the point of selling the business was that I could get out and not think about it anymore, at least for a while. And here I was selling people I'd originally sold on me, on behalf of people who weren't as good as I was.

It was miserable.

It was miserable because all of my clients were pissed. They ended up reupping with RDS, because they were really the only game left where it came to getting multiple consulting services in one place, but they didn't like it and they told me so.

And RDS wasn't happy, because they could tell that my clients were generally spoiled by the fact that we'd go the extra mile for them, when RDS' model was to undercut consultants like me on price and then make it back on a la carte fees. This was a transition from the extra mile to a price per inch, and for two weeks these poor corporate suits were getting raked over the coals by my people.

The number one source of that heat was the idea that they'd have to transition from Keegan's all-in-one business app to RDS' clunky system you needed a PhD in computer science to understand. Client after client would tell me, in front of RDS' people, that if they had the choice they'd go with no consultant and keep the app.

Steve Mills from Sunrise Trucking flat-out told me, when I said that wasn't an option because I'd signed a non-compete and selling him an app subscription would violate it, that it was a bullshit deal I was feeding him.

"Why don't you people just use his app?" he told the lady from RDS. "You can see how much better it is."

After a few days it was obvious what they needed to do, and Keegan had been right that they'd make an offer on the app separately. He was wrong about turning the app off, though - we decided we didn't have to. So we were sitting at that conference table and Pete Guerra from RDS, who was the regional manager in charge of the New Orleans office, was introducing us to a bunch of people on a Zoom call at their corporate headquarters in northern Virginia somewhere. Falls Church, I think it was. They had this big 90-inch TV screen on one wall and there were nine different people split up on it.

Anyway, Guerra finished the introductions, and then he was going on about how our clients in Baton Rouge and New Orleans were so well taken care of that the transition was more difficult than they thought, which I could tell wasn't sitting all that well with the suits on the screen, and then Guerra said the number one sticking point was that we'd put all our people on the app, which was super-intuitive and easy to use, and it contained an AI chatbot that eliminated a whole bunch of work so that small companies could do paperwork of big companies through the app, plus it would customize itself for each client...

On and on and on.

The CEO of RDS was a guy named Win Harrison. He'd been a Silicon Valley tech bro at one point, but you wouldn't know that now. He had the tie pin and the cuff links, and he'd done the hair plugs and the fake-bake; Harrison looked a lot more like a politician than a tech bro. And he hadn't smiled at all since the meeting had gotten started; I got the impression that he was pissed off about the fact that this little out-of-the-way business expansion his New Orleans office was pushing for had turned into such a big mess that he'd been called in on a Zoom.

And my two weeks essentially working for these people so that I could get my check and fuck off to the beach or the golf course or the fishing camp or wherever I wanted to go had taught me that Harrison's company wasn't about helping small business. It was the blob. It was a soulless corporate plague of locusts which went into a market and wiped out all of the local business consultants on sheer cost alone, and then imposed one-size-fits-all solutions which barely worked for anybody. If you wanted better than that, well, then they showed you their real rate card.

Win Harrison gave not a single shit about RDS' clients. He was a conqueror. A pillager. And I felt like an asshole for selling out to this guy. Here was Guerra showing him a way that he could improve the services his crappy company could offer, so that RDS might not actually suck quite as badly as they did, and he acted like he wanted to go and read Popular Mechanics on the shitter instead.

So finally, Guerra turned this thing over to me, and I gave a quick summation of how the app got started. I left out the part where we'd broken open a previous version of Quickbooks and built the app off that, but I talked about how it had grown on the basis of providing the functionality that our clients had specifically asked for over the course of our business.

"This thing is bottom-driven," I said. "We've spent two years beta-testing it in real time with real clients as we built it. I think that's why it's as useful as it is."

And then I turned it over to Keegan, who took the Zoom suits through the app. He did 20 minutes, and then for the next 20 minutes he and I took questions - which were mostly hypotheticals and case-study type stuff. We knocked that out of the park pretty easily.

And then Win Harrison, who'd gone from disinterest to irritation to outright fury for some reason, stopped the meeting.

"I'm going to fly down," he said. "Can you meet back at the New Orleans office at nine tomorrow morning to talk about this app?"

"I can't," said Keegan. "I've got a business lunch in Baton Rouge that can't be moved."

He was meeting with Richard Lang and some investors from Austin who were going to buy into the company Lang had set up to market Keegan's other apps.

"Is Baton Rouge all right?" I asked Harrison. "We do have a perfectly functional airport, after all."

Harrison smirked, and then he broke up the meeting by saying Keegan and I would each get an e-mail with an offer sheet by the end of the day.

I gave Guerra Drew's contact information and told him to make sure Drew got a copy of that e-mail.

And then it came, and so the next morning we were in the conference room at Drew's law firm. Harrison's corporate counsel was going through the paperwork, most of which was boring.

I just kept staring at the last page of the offer sheet.

$1.25 million up front apiece for Keegan and me, plus a five percent royalty apiece on subscriptions sold to the app through RDS. They had a financial projection sheet as part of the document which advertised this thing was going to be worth somewhere between $750,000 and $900,000 per year in royalties to each of us.

With what I'd already pocketed from the sale of the company, I was looking at hauling in about $2.5 million in my first year.

And that was about 10 times more money than I'd made in any year prior to this one.

So why did it feel like a loss?

I sat there with my mouth shut, thinking that there had to be an alternative out there. After all, Win Harrison got on a plane at five in the morning to fly to the airport in Baton Rouge, Louisiana with an entourage of corporate suits to try to buy this app from a couple of local yokels. If this app is as good as they obviously think it is, I was thinking, we're sitting on something that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. They want me to give it up for a half-share in $1.5 million a year in royalties? Why would I do that?

Finally, the lawyer was finished, and before Keegan or I could say anything, Drew jumped in and said we'd go and confer and then come back.

And he dragged us into his office.

"Well?" he asked.

"Well, maybe there's a better deal out there," I said.

"Really?" said Keegan.

"It seems like it's kind of a lowball offer like the one they made for the business. Do I take two lowballs in a row from these guys?"

Drew looked at Keegan.

"I think we take this offer and run," Keegan said. "We sign it."

"Dude, Keegan, you said yourself this is the best business app there is," I said. "The RDS people obviously agree. What the hell?"

"Yeah, well, WordPerfect was a hell of a lot better than Microsoft Word, too. Look at what that did for them. Oscar, you have to be able to market an app. Doesn't matter how good the product is. And that's the one giant hole you have in your business - you couldn't find a marketing guy."

"Or girl," I muttered.

I wasn't being woke. One of the last clients Rachel had brought in happened to have been one of Michelle Flanagan's marketing clients, and she wouldn't shut up about how great Michelle was.

Michelle was that smoking-hot redhead I'd met a couple of times who was in a relationship with Chad Beckstrom, Stafford's field operations manager in Midland. Her client was telling Rachel about how Michelle's business was struggling with her now so far away, and it was a shame, because she was terrific.

And what seemed like a million years ago, I'd given Michelle my card and told her to call me because I probably could put some clients her way. She never had, probably because Beckstrom would kick her ass for doing it.

It was a shame. Maybe that would have been the extra element - having a subcontractor who could offer solid marketing strategies and services - which might have warded off RDS in the first place.

I was thinking about everything but the sale of the app, and I was doing it on purpose.

"So if we can't market the app, how is it worth so much more than RDS will pay us for it?" Keegan was saying. And I was getting more and more irritated.

"What about your Richard Lang thing?" I asked him. "Let's see what Lang would pay for this app."

"No, dude," Keegan said. "It took me six months to get where I am with Lang. I mean, yeah, I can get him to look at it, but he isn't gonna pay us anything up front. And then he would want us to go on the road pitching this thing to businesses and fronting it on CNBC and all of that, and honestly, they already want me to do that with my other apps and it terrifies me."

"I could do that," I said. "Hell, I'd be great on TV."

Then Drew spoke up.

"No. No, Oscar. Look, I love you to death, you're my best friend. But do yourself a favor and shut the fuck up."

"Damn," I said. "You too?"

"You aren't going on the road to sell that app to businesses across the country. You want no part of that work and you know it. That's why you sold your business. Oscar, you will make $2 million this year off that app and it's all mailbox money."

"Yeah," I said. "Taking the easy way out."

"What's wrong with that?" said Drew.

"Because I worked all my life to get an opportunity to hit it big, and this is..."

"OK, stop. That's bullshit."

"What?"

"Oscar, you didn't set out to be a billionaire. Come on. You haven't done the work to hit it big. You did restaurant sales, and then you had a corporate restaurant job. And rather than move up the ladder by pretending you believed all the stupid HR diversity seminar shit, you punched out and started a little consulting business you deliberately kept small because it was easier that way. You were happy being small time. You've only been motivated to go big since COVID rolled you out of your comfort zone, and look what you've accomplished in two fuckin' years!"

"Yeah, well - maybe I can accomplish more."

"Be a lot easier with seven figures in the bank, don't you think?"

"But to these guys? Come on, Drew."

"It's too late for that! You already sold out to them. Now's when you make it worth your while. This is the finish line. This is you winning the race. Cross it. Go run another race if you're not satisfied."

I looked at Keegan. He was nodding intently at me.

I still didn't like it. But I went back into that conference room and signed the offer sheet, I shook Win Harrison's well-manicured hand, and I went home feeling like a Judas to the small business world.

Though on the other hand, giving that app to RDS meant there actually would be benefits to the thousands of clients they'd been ripping off, assuming they didn't charge confiscatory rates to those same clients to use Keegan's app.

Which I knew wasn't a very good assumption.

The money felt like a consolation prize, and I felt like a prick that I couldn't even be happy for having signed a deal that made me independently wealthy to the point that nothing I ever really wanted was now out of my reach.

Why was that such an empty feeling? Why did it feel like I was settling?

Then I was home. And nobody was downstairs.

But the bedroom was occupied.

"Hi there," said Amber. She was not really dressed. "Are we rich?"

So I plopped down on the bed and told her what I had signed.

"I'm confused," she said. "You just told me that you're about to get a wire for one point two five million dollars, with like sixty or seventy thousand bucks a month coming in for the foreseeable future, and you told it to me without a smile on your face."

"I guess I did, yeah."

"That's confusing, Oscar."

"It just... I dunno. It feels like I'm giving up. I mean, you saw what RDS is. I basically just packed my life's work off to those guys, and..."

"OK, stop. Stop! This is you being in shock, and after all the work you did getting your company off the ground, you're deflating. It's normal. But I will not let you do this to yourself, all right? This is a huge win."

"You sure?" I said.

"Look, I know that you're built for the struggle, OK? But be happy! Sometimes you win the struggle! And you have, baby. I'm so proud of you I can't stand it."

"But you're always proud of me," I said.

"Maybe so, but not this proud."

"You're just happy that you don't have to work anymore."

"Oh my God, yes! Oscar, you just turned me into a domestic goddess and you know that's what I'm built for. I mean, when I first got here I would go shopping and you would lose your mind over me spending a hundred bucks and now, it's like you're gonna make a hundred bucks every... like every hour."

I did the math in my head and, yeah. It was something like that.

"Oh my God!" she said. "I mean, now I can have my fur coat - you can't tell me no now. And we can get a big, beautiful house and Caroline and I can have our own room, and..."

"You want your own room?"

"I mean, I'll sleep in your room, but yeah! Not to mention that you will have real girls absolutely fighting over you. But I don't know if I'll make that promise again. It was really hard, and it's gonna have to be somebody really worth it..."

"We might be getting a little ahead of ourselves here," I said. "What am I gonna do now?"

"Play golf! Go fishing! Take some trips! You're gonna have to take me somewhere other than New Orleans or West Texas, you know. Oscar, there's so many things we can do and now you'll have the time to do 'em. Be happy, baby. Please?"

"I'll work on it," I said.

She gave me a big hug and kissed me on the cheek.

"I love you sooo much," she said. "And I'm so proud of you I feel like I'm gonna break open."

I looked in the closet. Caroline's body was in there and she had Band-Aids on all of her fingers. And then I looked around the bedroom at all my ordinary middle-class stuff which had been perfectly fine, before... now.

And I realized that everything was different. Everything but me, I guess.

"I ordered your sister a new body," I told Amber. "A new head, too."

She pulled back. "Why a new head?"

"Because we don't have to do the bargain-basement thing with her anymore. She doesn't have to be... limited."

"Why do you think she's limited?"

"Because she... is?"

"OK, fine, but if you get her the top of the line neural net thing, she isn't going to be Caroline."

"Of course she will," I said. "She'll just be more, that's all. Don't you want a whip-smart little sister who you don't have to baby all the time?"

Amber didn't say anything and I knew the answer was no.

"OK," I said, "how about this. Maybe Caroline can learn how to cook."

"But I'm a good cook!"

"Maybe Caroline could actually help you in the kitchen without it being dangerous or messy or a hilarious failure."

"You're going to win this argument. I get it. But I love Caroline like she is."

"With Band-aids on all of her fingers and glue scars from head to toe?"

"Well, no. I'm the one who insisted she get a new body. But Oscar, what if she's all new and she decides she doesn't like me?"

"OK, now you're the one who needs to stop."

"So anyway," I said, "that's the story of me being independently wealthy now. I guess this makes me cool. I don't really feel very different, though."

"Because you aren't different," said Erica. "You're you. But now, what are you going to do with yourself?"

"I dunno. I'm still on your board, so I guess I'll read the emails and show up four times a year, but other than that, I honestly don't have a clue. Amber wants me to take her places, so maybe I'll finally go buy a new ride and we'll get out on the road and see the country."

"You're gonna be bored to death," she said.

"I don't know what I'll be. Who knows? Maybe I'll have the time of my life. If nothing else I'll have some experiences I can carry with me, at least until I turn senile and forget everything."

We were sitting in the bar at the Pearl House, which was one of those downtown restaurants that everybody always thought was crowded but it never was, except maybe for around lunchtime and, surprisingly, just then. Erica had been at Stafford Oil's offices and had asked me to meet her at happy hour.

I'd said yes. I think I would always say yes to her unless it involved business, and then it would be a maybe.

"I think it's gonna be really hard for you not to have a project to work on," she said. "I worry that you'll become tame."

"Tame?"

"Yeah. You'll get comfortable just playing all the time and it won't be good for you."

"I hate to tell you," I said, "but before COVID screwed up my business all my clients were restaurants and playing was what I did most of the time."

"But that was before we started seeing each other regularly again," she said. "Ever since I really got to know you again, you've been doing big things, and..."

"What?"

"I don't know. It's been a turn-on, I guess."

"Oh," I said. "So I've got to be under stress or I'm not attractive."

"No, that's not it. I don't know. I'm just used to seeing men who chase a purpose, that's all. And if you're not doing that? I... worry."

"Well, you are forbidden from worrying for the next six months. I forbid it. So there."

"And your noncompete means you can't re-up your consulting contract with Stafford Oil."

"Yes, that is in fact true."

"I wish you hadn't signed that."

"I mean, it wouldn't stop Stafford Oil from hiring me as a full-time employee. I just can't be a hired-gun consultant, that's all."

"We can hire you?"

"Nope. Not right now."

She sank into her seat a little.

"Why?" I asked.

"We have a second buyer. Potentially. It's more money than Voss Energy was offering, but there are complications, I guess."

"Is that right? Who is it?"

"It's PetroItalia."

PetroItalia was, essentially, the state oil company in Italy. They'd just had a giant scandal come down over their purchases of sanctioned oil from Iran and Venezuela, and the CEO had gotten fired over it. Safe to say that wasn't the best buyer out there for an American oil company.

"Michael is going to let you sell the company to the crooked Italians?" I asked.

"The new management isn't crooked. But no, he's not very happy."

"What about Voss?"

"I don't know yet."

"So you might not be able to get to 10 votes."

"With your vote, I probably can."

I rolled my eyes.

"Great, Erica," I said. "Thanks a lot."