Season 3, Episode 3: Growing Complications

I had Rachel meet me at Bolero, the Cuban bar my friend Terry owned, for a happy-hour business debriefing. I'd been alternately ignoring her and apologizing for it, and we agreed the easiest way to break that cycle was to make a weekly happy-hour appointment at the bar both of us liked so much.

Rachel was my business development manager. I'd hired her in mid-December, and four months later she was more or less running my consulting firm, and pretty flawlessly.

Well, let me rephrase that. Rachel was running all of the smaller accounts we had, and at this point the bulk of those were clients she had chased down. Our three biggest clients - Stafford Oil, VS Industries and Senorita's Mexican Cantinas - were mine, and those three brought in considerably more revenue than the 18 other clients Rachel was managing.

Which made what she was doing no less impressive. Rachel was killing it. And she had almost no experience in business consulting work. She'd sold radio for iHeart in Houston for a little while, which carries with it a little bit of a consultative function, but nothing like what I had thrown her into. She just picked it up, and not with a ton of training. I'd spent a few days getting her up to speed on the all-in-one business app Keegan had built for our clients, and she'd spent a few more interrogating the hell out of Keegan to find out all the ins and outs of it that I didn't even know, and then she'd hit the streets basically just selling that app.

And promising our clients that she could fix any problem they had that was fixable.

A lot of that involved running to me for answers. Not so much because I was a guru but because I'd lived in this town since college and even several years when I was a kid, and I had people for pretty much any purpose.

And once Rachel had farmed my contacts, she basically had told me she had everything covered. And when I'd called my old clients that I'd turned over to her, the smaller ones, they had all confirmed they were in good hands.

Southland Interiors, Sunrise Trucking, Bergeron Industrial Fabricators - they were all happy as pigs in slop.

But Rachel's emails had taken on an increasingly frustrated tone, and that's why I'd agreed to the Bolero meetings.

"OK," I said, as I'd brought two rum punches to the table. "Your last email came off like you were pissed off. What's wrong? Are the subcontractors falling down on the job? Clients not paying invoices? What?"

"No, nothing like that," she said. "But I'm trying to grow this thing, because you told me that the Stafford contract is going to wrap up in three months and you don't know what the future of that account is. I want to give us some bigger clients that we can fall back on if, y'know, Stafford doesn't put us on retainer."

"Yeah," I said. "I know. And that's an excellent plan, one which I am utterly useless in fulfilling. I barely have time to breathe right now."

"You're not the problem," she said. "The problem is... external."

"I bet I know what you're gonna say," I said.