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“By working my ass off. By staying late. By giving people the option of keeping up with me and getting rich or finding somewhere else to work. And look where we are. Fabulously wealthy and on the top of our industry.”
“Which industry?” he scoffed. “We are in several now.”
“All of them,” I said. “And the ones we aren’t in the tops of, we will be. That’s what I do. That’s why I need the best assistant possible. Not some flake who can’t stand the heat.”
Bobby sighed again. He knew he couldn’t argue. Everything I said was the absolute truth.
My father had built this company, at the time a simple investment firm, into something that was reliably serving small businesses in the Boston area. But he invested with his heart and not his brain sometimes. He made questionable choices. Mom brought her friends to him to help them get their vanity consignment shops open and restaurants open where no one there had ever run a restaurant before.
But when Dad had his first heart attack, he brought me on as COO and I changed the whole game. When his health declined, he sold his portion of the company to me and I was off to the races. In a year I had grown our portfolio, diversified our interests, and we were making tens of millions. In two years, we were making a hundred million. Now, six years in, the twenty-eight-year-old kid had become a thirty-six-year-old man, and a multi-billionaire at that.
Our investments ranged from small shops to massive corporations. When companies defaulted on loans, we bought them out and ran them ourselves. I had personally seen to the acquisition, turn-around, and sale of several companies that netted us millions and millions of dollars apiece. Tech companies were especially prone to this. Unable to swim with the sharks, they fall apart when they are no longer a group of eight nerds in a shared workspace.
Then I come in, solve their debt, wait for them to fail again, and then gobble it all up. In a year, it’s unrecognizable as a company, and I have sold it off to the highest bidder or gone public with it, divesting myself once it was worth over a billion and taking huge profits home.
It was a game. And I was good at it. Really, really good.
But it was hard work. Maybe not physically, but mentally, it was taxing. I was constantly reviewing new documents. Product reports, profit reports, employee reviews, customer reviews, the personal social media of the company’s managers and staff, all of it. It all was part of the game. I kept up with it, I kept track of it, and I made decisions based off it.
“Well,” Bobby said, “I have a stack of résumés for you. Whenever you’re ready.”
“I’m ready now,” I said. “I’m always ready. Hand them over.”
“Good,” he said, laughing. “Because I might have already brought some of the more promising ones in for an interview.”
I stopped, looking over the desk at him in shock.
“Wait, you went and already fielded a set of these people to come in for an interview before I even knew the last assistant quit?”
“Yes,” Bobby said with a grin.
“Jesus, Bobby, why aren’t you my assistant?”
“Because you’re an asshole.” He laughed. “And I’m an old man. That said, some of these are pretty impressive. There’s one in there I really like, but I’ll let you look through them and see if you see what I see.”
He handed over a manilla envelope with a stack of papers inside. Part of me was still reeling at Bobby moving so quickly, but I really shouldn’t have been. Bobby was the COO under Dad for most of his tenure and had become my own COO. He was a viper. He struck quick and hard, and with zero hesitation. I loved that about him. He was as good as any operating officer a person could have. He ran the place like a ship and he was the captain. I didn’t mind him seeing himself that way. He still answered to me.
Bobby had pushed Dad to expand many times, but it had taken until I took over for it to happen. Dad was content to be wealthy and happy, but he was married and fat and enjoyed golf. I was single, driven, and detested that dumbass game. Instead, I worked out. I sculpted my body to be as perfect as I tried to be at work. The result was what people described as looking like a Viking. I didn’t run from that description. I dared to look how I looked for a reason.
Intimidation.
It certainly didn’t win me favors with other board members in companies I took over. It didn’t make me popular with the stock market guys and their clean chins and wiry frames. I had muscles. I had tattoos. I had hair. And I was as cold as the water off the Icelandic shores. As far as anyone else was concerned, Iwasa Viking, there to invade, to dominate, and to subjugate anything in my way.
The whole world was mine. Most of it just didn’t know it yet.
“So, where are they?” I asked.
“Just outside,” he said.
“We do it like we did the last batch?” I asked, raising my eyebrow as I thumbed through the first of the résumés.
“The corral and hot room concept?” he asked. “Did it really help last time?”
I laughed.
Putting all the candidates in the assistant’s office, a small cubicle inside my own office with glass windows that could see into my office unless I shut the blinds, meant they could see the other people interviewing. They could see when the conversation went well or went poorly, and I usually asked them to stay and do a second round of interviews afterward.
That meant they went back into the “hot room” and sat with the other candidates, who inevitably either asked them questions or became snarky about things. People bragged. People complained. I’d seen a fist-fight nearly break out once. It was fun.
