Nothing particularly new in this one. Just my take on "We have to talk."
If you want something realistic, hit the back button hard. Actually you are on the wrong website if you want a realistic story. My story never happened. I hope you enjoy the ride as I enjoyed writing this one. Relax it's just a story and you are not paying to read this.
22K+ words. I divided it up into 3 clearly marked parts to make finding a spot to break easier. More good news is this is a self-contained story and you won't have to wait for the conclusion.
My Universe, My Rules. In my world, North Carolina divorces take 2 months instead of 12.
I recycle names. This has nothing to do with other stories unless specified.
Calling dibs = When someone says that they have dibs on something, they claim or declare rights to that thing before anyone else.
Yogi Bear was a US cartoon about a bear that could talk and schemed to steal picnic baskets in a park. Yogi said 'pickinick' (pick-eh-nick) rather than (pic-nic)
Three Stooges is a 1930s to 1960s comedy series that featured three men doing slapstick violence in their misadventures.
Shiner = black eye.
Oscar = award for good acting in film.
Kitchen sink = an American idiom meaning something has everything in it. 'Everything and the kitchen sink'.
I met my wife Brittany while I was attending community college. She was there for the first two years of a bachelors degree in management because going the first two years at community college was one way to save money over four years at a full university. Her plan afterward was to follow up with the last two years at the local branch of UNC. I was there for an associate degree in business so that I could run my father's electrical contracting business with enough basic business courses to not run it into the ground. My father wanted to retire early and his uncle had died childless.
My father was the sole heir and beneficiary of his deceased uncle. Two and a half million is not billionaire territory, but Dad wanted to go full-time in an RV at age fifty with my mom. He offered my brother a half share which he declined, but understand, there was not much to the business at that point. It was literally a man and a van who did local electrical work so there was no value to anyone not willing to actually be an electrician. My brother worked as an ironworker doing some of the larger buildings going up in North and South Carolina. He was a big guy with a big attitude and if you were patient, a big heart. He was my big brother who constantly gave me wedgies and Dutch Ovens... and beat the shit out of the much bigger bully who knocked me down and sat on me while beating me black and blue with a fraternity paddle he had found in the garbage.
As Brittany and I got more and more serious, we started talking about marriage. There was a prenup. Nothing all that controversial and very limited. She and her family only wanted to exclude her family trust, it was a few million, but I get it. I was in love and we are not talking about elite-level riches. In return, I got to exclude my business. Those were the only two items on the prenup and I was good. Family money. I get it, plus, each of our legacies stays with us no matter what happens in life.
Once I was a journeyman electrician and I had passed the state exam for a full license, I took over my father's one-man and a van electrical contractor company in May of 2012. I was twenty-two and a journeyman with the license and something my father had no idea about; knowledge of the internet. I put my business on Facebook, Linkedin, and Instagram. I made a website and researched search engine optimization enough that I usually showed up in the first five results. Business took off nicely so that I was busy the vast majority of the time and it even became difficult to keep up on occasion.
By the time I turned twenty-six in 2016, I had seven employees besides myself. Three were in the office; Margaret, my office manager, Hank, my shop foreman and parts manager, and Amanda, my PA and bookkeeper. I have four electricians besides myself; Ed, Javier, his brother Manuel, and Mike.
We do residential and light commercial wiring, doing very well in those bids that the big guys ignore and the smallest ones cannot handle. I have a side business going in our warehouse where we sell and ship branded high-end quality electrical parts made in the US, UK, or EU. Not cheap, but the parts all have a small following. It adds a bit more than two million in sales volume to the company and helps even things out between jobs sometimes.
I have a rule in my business: The boss takes home zero before I cut anyone a dime. It has only happened once, and only for two weeks, but someone found out that I had taken home nothing that week and they had not had a cut and they told everyone else. Sometimes respect is more important to the long-term health of a company. No, I was not the one that told everyone what I had done. My turnover is zero, excepting Herb who retired at age sixty-seven last year. I picked him up at age sixty-six and you would have thought I had saved his dog from a house fire. I hired him even though he was upfront about only wanting to work until he reached full retirement age at sixty-seven. It was one of those times I had too much business and could use a hand. I hired him with the agreement that he would retire, not claim unemployment on me. It worked out for both of us and I made a friend.
My first hire for my company was Margaret, part-time in August of 2012. She wanted to work from nine to two to be home for her kids until her youngest was in high school. I was still a one-man shop, but keeping track of everything was getting to be a pain in my ass so I went onto Zip Recruiter and trolled the admin section and there I saw it. 'Local mom looking for four or five hours a day in an admin role. I'm a mom first! No nights and no weekends!' Other employers saw someone unwilling to work. I saw someone with values I liked. Family IS more important than work.
The email was a clear throwaway on Gmail, but I emailed her the details. The job was not all that hard and I did not have a lot to pay at the time as I was just starting to ramp up the business. I got a response and a real email address ten minutes later. Twenty minutes after that, I was on the phone with her. I got a great feeling from her. She was sweet, passionate, and bragged about her kids and her husband. Those are good values of a quality person.
It was after four when I asked to meet her at the food commons at the mall for an easy interview. She told me she had to get her kids then make dinner and her husband was away on business. I told her to bring her kids and I would pay for a pizza. I took her and her kids to a good pizza place in an actual storefront inside the mall rather than the cardboard crap in the food court. She was grateful... and employed as of the following Monday. We were a match. I could only pay ten bucks an hour, but she took it happily and I accepted her limited hours happily.
I knew I had a keeper when I came on the first day of her employment. I came back after I had gone on an estimate at one and she had put a whiteboard on the wall with my upcoming week all scheduled out. I had only hired her to answer the phones and write stuff down. She never gave me less than one hundred percent.
Half a year in, I hired Javier out of a tech program at the county college. He was willing to work for peanuts to get some experience and that was all I could afford. His younger brother Manuel was next 6 months later then followed Herb and finally Ed and Mike.
In 2014 Margaret went full-time as her youngest kid went into high school. She is an amazing woman and a bit of a mother hen. She loves us all as a second family. Yeah, her cookies are insanely good. She makes batches for school fundraisers and the office gets the broken rejects.
About a year after I hired Margaret, I hired Hank to run the shop end of everything and help Margaret coordinate sending the guys out to various jobs. Herb retired as promised and I remained at seven employees as business leveled off at a nice pace that I could manage and control.
It was one of those chance things. I was at an electrical contractor's convention in Atlanta when I was in the smaller exhibitor section of the floor... You know, the one that everyone ignores in favor of the flashy big booths in the center of the floor. I was passing by some very nice-looking LED fixtures from a company called Stewart-Windsor Lighting LTD. We talked. I always liked the various UK accents so we talked about things to do and see. He was from Plymouth. I told him about The Atlanta Zoo and the aquarium and he told me about The Southwest Coast Path in Southwest England. He bought tickets online right then and there and I bookmarked the path and became a bit obsessed with a 600-mile-long scenic path along the coast of England. Anyway, Stewart-Windsor was looking for US distribution at four locations, basically one in each region.
My warehouse was just a prefab and a bit oversized and a deal was struck. I was officially 'Southeast' but could do internet sales if I wanted. It was not exclusive, but I had only 3 effective competitors for some actual UK-made, high-end electrical fixtures and we did okay with them. This was the first deal. I later made a deal with a German company named Baer, Brunn, Schultheiss for distribution rights in the US. They made very high-end fancy electrical cabinets and boxes. I was one of five places they contracted with. They ship containers to the US. I hold the merchandise and only pay upon sales. Prices are fixed and I get fifteen percent gross and most of the orders are generated straight off the internet. This deal also had me shipping enough to give me the rock bottom shipping rates with UPS and Yellow freight. I really like the Yellow freight rep, he buys me lots of steak lunches and I ship a lot of stuff on his trucks.
Amanda was my last hire in June of 2016. At eighteen years old, she was literally from the wrong side of the tracks in some coal town in Eastern Kentucky. She came to the Charlotte area with her long-term boyfriend and needed work. She had taken clerical electives in high school and knew enough about Microsoft Office to do the basic tasks in Word and Excel. She thought she was rich when I offered her ten bucks an hour to be my personal assistant. Mostly it involved answering emails and typing crap along with entering our sales data into Excel, but she will also head to Walmart for office supplies if I ask. I pay for gas and of course, let her fill up her car with the company credit card when she does it. Yeah, I make sure I check her gas gauge many days and if I see it's low, I find something we need at Walmart and send her out. It's a bullshit gift to her, I know it and she knows it but she gratefully takes the free gas. She drives a Corolla, it's not like it's a lot of gas.
Our first personnel crisis was when Javier was arrested for aggravated assault and attempted murder in Washington Heights. I went to see him in jail and he swore he was at home that night in Sheffield Park, but he was asleep so did not have any witnesses except his wife. I paid his bail and told him to get his ass to work which he did with a huge 'Gracias!'. It took me two days and three grand on a PI, but I was able to prove the shooter was five inches shorter and fifty pounds heavier when my PI found a business nearby that had a security camera facing the scene. I got him the name of a lawyer and he even got a settlement from the city over that false arrest. They did not want a trial where Javier looked literally nothing like the actual perpetrator.
I know Javier knows people who are not so nice, but I never believed Javier was a thug. In any event, After getting the charges against Javier dropped, I was basically adopted by his family. His mother, Luz, is always sending food for me with Javier or his brother and tells me that I am her third son. Her Spanish Rice is fucking awesome.
In July of 2017, we had our second personnel crisis. Amanda's boyfriend Travis hit her and gave her one hell of a shiner. Adding to being an abusive asshole, we get to add a liberal dose of drunk idiot as he did it in front of a dozen people at his employer's Fourth of July party. Travis got fired and Amanda became homeless after a big fight over his firing. I gave her the day off and she found a miraculously cheap and tiny efficiency apartment in Mooresville in a big old converted furniture factory
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