“Oh, um, well, I’m in L.A. and it’s going great,” I say, dodging the questions.
My ethics professor appears, smiling at me. “Madison Banks.”
“Professor Osaka. How are you?”
“Great. I forgot you were in Los Angeles. That’s perfect.”
“It is?”
“Yes. I’m a visiting professor at UCLA. How would you like to do some mentoring for me? I’ve got some students who could really use your kind of influence. They can intern for you. You’ll enjoy it. I’ll send you the info.”
Before I can utter a word, Osaka shakes my hand. No wonder he had a Guinness-like world record for deal closing—it was done before you knew what hit you. But how would Lynn Isenberg he contact me without having my business card? Of course, at that moment, I wasn’t thinking about the guest registry I had signed or Osaka’s superb research methodologies. Clasping my hand, he does note a lack of jewelry. “What? No ring? A catch like you?”
“I’m practicing risk management. Besides, you’re the one who taught me never to merge without the right value proposition,” I quickly reply.
An unmistakable voice, sardonic tone and all, pipes in, “Nice way to get to the dad, Mad.”
I turn to face my archenemy, the handsome, pretentiously charismatic Derek Rogers, as he cuts in to the reception line. I’m shocked he would be here. But of course he would—any opportunity to climb a corporate ladder and Derek Rogers is there. He would stop at nothing to find his success and do whatever it would take. The Tower of Babel had nothing on Derek Rogers. I’m mortified by the comment, remembering now why I lost respect for young, ambitious men, all because of Derek Rogers. But before I can counterpunch, he moves past me into the reception line to pay his respects to Arthur Pintock. I have no doubt that Derek Rogers will use this moment to insidiously work his way into Arthur’s professional life, no doubt at all.
Outside, I’m about to climb into my rental car when I hear the familiar, soft, sweet voice of Sierra D’Asanti, a beautiful Polynesian mulatto girl and old flame from my first year of entrepreneurial studies. I turn to face her. She’s beautiful and appears wiser and more mature than when we last saw each other seven years ago.
“Hey, Maddy…what you said about Tara was beautiful,” says Sierra. “You made her memory a gift and we all needed it.” She pauses, about to say something more but stops herself.
“Thanks,” I reply. “You don’t think I was out of line?”
“You’re never out of line. You’re Maddy.”
“Guess I should take that as a compliment.”
“Yes, you should.”
“I’m going to miss her.”
“I know…me, too.” Sierra offers a hug.
I hug back for the loss of Tara’s innocent life and for the grief I know I have yet to face. We break apart and she looks at me.
“I don’t know what you’re up to these days, but if you ever need my services, here’s my card,” she says, handing one over. “I’ve got a digital production studio and Web designing firm. You look…great, Maddy.” She pauses, and then turns and leaves.
I watch the beautiful Sierra walk off, her colorful scarf floating in a whipping wind as it trails behind her. I remember how tumultuous our relationship was and how Tara was always there to lighten our load. Tara, Tara, Tara. I realize that I am going to miss Tara more than I could possibly have known from my small dark closet in the heart of L.A.
Missions and Visions: The Genesis of an Entrepreneurial Idea
I drive to my brother Daniel’s place on the outskirts of Ann Arbor, unable to stop fuming about impersonal funerals.
How many funerals employ ministers and rabbis and clergy who never even knew the deceased? How many people stop to think about how they want to be buried, let alone how they want to be remembered?
In an aging society where baby boomers dominate the demographics, I think I’m on to something. After all, the cost of a casket—who knows? The cost of a burial plot—not sure. The cost of the funeral experience itself—priceless. Like all businesses that sprout from the kernel of an idea, I know I just have to be patient and trust that it will reveal itself in time.
I park, but am considering the irony of the day—attending a funeral and bris hours apart. The former occasion represents the departure of a life, the latter the arrival of one. Both capture a full house. Hardened snow crunches under the weight of my steps. I’m still stomping frozen ice off my boots in the muddy foyer of the small, quaint Victorian when my mother, Eleanor, greets me.
“Maddy! How are you? Let me help you with your coat.” Without missing a beat, she asks,“How was the funeral, dear?”
“Can we talk about something else, Mom? Like, how was the bris?”
“A bris is a bris. One cuts, one cries,” she says with a singsong delivery. My mother’s a classical pianist, renowned as a woman of tremendous grace. “How would you like something to eat?”
Before I can answer, my debonair father, Charlie Banks, age sixty-two, and professor of mythology at the University of Michigan, arrives on the scene. “There she is! The redeye girl. You must be exhausted. Do you want a big fluffy pillow or a glass of merlot?”
“I’ll start with the merlot, thanks, Dad.”
“You must be hungry, though,” adds Eleanor. “I’ve got your favorite gourmet Neshama sausages.”
I lift a brow. “You’re serving sausages at a bris?”
“Well, I thought it was humorous. But Uncle Sam brought some bass, too. Can I get you some?”
“Uncle Sam is here?” My face brightens.
“He’s at the park building a toboggan run with Andy,” offers Charlie.
“Lucky Andy…where’re Daniel and Rebecca?”
Before anyone can answer, my younger brother Daniel, age twenty-eight, a published poet whose entire wardrobe consists of nothing but black Levi’s jeans and black T-shirts, saunters into the room holding his sleeping newborn son, Keating.
I walk over to my new nephew, cooing,“Wow. He’s so little and so cute!”
“Thanks, we think so, too. You missed Keating’s heroic display of exceptional strength and courage. Not a tear!” Daniel states proudly.
“I thought Mom said there was some cutting and crying.”
“The crying was on the part of the less-heroic father,” adds Rebecca, Daniel’s wife and high-school drama teacher. She’s simple and bright in her sweats, plaid flannel shirt and moccasins. “I’ve a good mind to put him in my students’ next play where theatrics are needed,” she adds, chuckling.
“Was I that bad?” inquires Daniel.
The entire group nods.
Rebecca laughs. “What marvelous timing! I should make you all part of the chorus!”
Laura Taylor strolls in and greets me with “Hey, cousin!” She’s holding a glass of pinot grigio in one hand and an inconspicuous digital camera in the other. “I have to come all the way to Michigan to see you! You look awesome.”
“So do you!” I reply, delighted to see her. Laura is a total inspiration for me. She knew nothing about business, yet through risk and determination capitalized on her acclaimed adult-entertainment writing career by transforming the experience into a novel and television series.
“Hey, come hither anon, quod ik, and bare thy teeth that I may capture your-e essence with my digital camera.”
I give Laura an odd look.
“I’ve been hanging around your poet brother all afternoon learning Chaucer—what do you expect?” she says as she snaps a shot.
“Yes, but blending Middle English with modern poetry?” I ask. “Sounds like a bad merger to me…pun intended.”
Charlie chuckles. Baby Keating lets out a wail as if to comment.
“So is Laura a good student of Chaucer?” I ask. “Which of the Tales did you teach, pray tell?”
“‘The Reeve’s Tale,’” answers Daniel. “What else?”
“I thought perhaps you might have strayed from the blanket.” Rebecca winks.
“And, Laura, what did you learn?” asks Charlie.
“Well, after some serious word-tripping, I learned that the deceiver is finally deceived,” she responds dutifully. Daniel smiles at his student’s success.
Arrested by the implication of the words, I gulp my merlot. Language may change, but immoral behavior remains the same. I wonder if the deceiver knew he had been deceived. Because otherwise, what’s the point? And if he did know, would he care? Or would he simply look for the next line of defense? Someone, say, like Derek… Before I can finish my thought, I am interrupted by my father.
“So, how was the funeral? Tara’s parents must be beside themselves with grief.”
“It was…the usual from what I can tell, Dad. Kind of a prefab funeral. They could have been talking about anybody. So I spoke about what Tara was like in school. It seemed like everyone appreciated it.”
“That’s beautiful. When I go, please sit around a campfire and tell stories about me,” instructs Eleanor. “And for heaven’s sake, have a good band.”
“What about rugelah and Neshama sausages?” asks Charlie. “After all, Neshama does mean ‘soul.’”
“That, too,” Eleanor replies. “Oh. And make that a klezmer band,” she laughs.
“Duly noted.” Charlie grins.
“Well, since that’s far off and Maddy’s in town, tell us, what’s the latest venture you’ve got going?” asks Daniel.
“I’m in between things,” I mutter. Explaining that my latest venture had met an early death, as eulogized via the FSJ article, is something I don’t have the energy to go into.
“Uh-oh. Something went bust,” adds Rebecca.
“Honey, did you have another failure?” asks Eleanor.
“If you did, I hope it was as humorous as the laundry service debacle in college,” quips Daniel.
“Right. After all, Daniel, you seemed to have benefited with a resulting lifetime supply of black T-shirts and black jeans, if I recall,” says Rebecca. “In fact, I recall it every day you get dressed.”
“Not to mention the financial benefit from a wardrobe savings, which supplements your children’s college education, I might add,” I say.
There’s a long pause. “Well,” Laura asks,“isn’t anyone going to tell me the laundry service story?”
“It started with Maddy’s first year of entrepreneurial studies,” explains Eleanor. “Her class was given the challenge of actually starting a business.”
How quickly the past catches up to the present. A barrage of memories resurface. The student who could create, implement and execute the most successful bottom line during the semester would win the “Challenge a Vision” prize of thirty-five thousand dollars to pay back their investors for seed capital, expand and/or begin another venture.
Deciphering a need for a convenient quality laundry service on campus that included pickup and delivery, I made it my business, and turned the desire for hygienic attire into an overnight success. My venture rapidly took off and soon I had multiple locations throughout Ann Arbor and investors wanting to talk to me about franchising the operation. This threatened Derek Rogers’s success, so he blackballed me in order to win the competition. How did he do it? He snuck into my launderettes in the middle of the night and injected black dye into every load. The next day became a campus legend dubbed Black Tuesday.
Only later did the truth come out, and by then the prize money was long gone. And so was Derek, with his degree in hand and a stellar reputation as long as prospective employers didn’t dig too deeply into his past. And they never did.
After that, I channeled my resentment into a successful campus prankster business. Students would spare no expense to have my company devise clever pranks to perform on friends, colleagues and professors. That worked out great—until liability insurance became a necessity and costs climbed too high to make the numbers work anymore—a classic case of market risk gone awry by greater margin pressures.
Following that I developed Dustin & Destiny Discover, a line of children’s educational video packages combined with arts-and-crafts merchandise. The prototype consisted of two videotapes in the shape of a lunchbox. It included both a story on video and the parts to assemble a product organically integrated into the storyline, such as a homemade bird-feeder. I wrote and produced the story on videotape with the help of Sierra. Unfortunately, that failed due to an issue of real estate. It turned out that the video stores, art supply stores and children’s bookstores didn’t want the product because of “space.” Two videocassette tapes packaged together as one at $19.95 cut down their profit margins as opposed to two single videocassette tapes each selling at $14.95. So in essence the space was worth $29.90 in sales instead of $19.95. That meant a loss of $9.85 in potential revenue to the retailer and subsequent brokers in between. Unfortunately, this was just before the adoption of the new DVD technology, which might have changed the outcome…but then, timing is everything.
It seemed that Derek Rogers and his black dye cursed every subsequent effort I made at launching a successful business venture.
“So what was the name of the laundry business?”
The question floated in the air, riding on the smells of broiled bass, transporting me back to my brother’s kitchen. Though I’m not sure who asked the question. “White Mondays,” I say, finishing the last of my merlot.
“I always loved the metaphor,” says Eleanor. “Top of the week hygiene.”
“What was the result?” asks Laura.
“An endless supply of Black Tuesday remnants for me,” chimes Daniel.
“For about two years it looked like the homeless population of Ann Arbor was in constant mourning,” adds Charlie.
“So what happened to your latest venture, honey?” inquires Eleanor.
My entire family stares with expectant eyes, waiting for me to deliver the details. I take a breath. “For the past year I was commercializing an international-art business online.”
“That’s a multi-billion-dollar a year industry,” pipes in Laura.
“A multi-billion-dollar industry? That is unfathomable,” states Rebecca.
My family gets the “art” part, but their eyes glaze over when it’s attached to the words industry, business, capitalism, or commercialization. But who can blame them? One relative made tenure in the Architecture department of NYU, another joined the Cleveland Symphony as a violinist, a third joined a modern ballet dance troupe, a fourth ventured into art therapy and there was talk of one cousin who lived on an island with a bunch of llamas from which she wove and sold scarves. My language of P&Ls, bottom lines and distribution channels is absolutely foreign to them.
“What happened?” asks Laura.
“Maddy didn’t make it to market first,” I say, trying to give myself a spot of distance.
“Sounds like a new line from ‘The Three Little Pigs’ in a revival twist,” says Daniel, preferring to hear his own wit over how I might be feeling about the whole thing.
Go ahead, add another dent to my psyche, I think. These are my babies and they were constantly being aborted by outside forces. “You know what? I’m really tired. Where’s that pillow, Dad?”
“On the couch in Daniel’s office.”
“If you’ll all excuse me for a minute, I’m going to lie down.”
I’m like a beloved black sheep, I think. Everyone else in my family is a writer, performer, artist or academic, following intellectual pursuits in art history, architecture, film theory and basket weaving. No one knows anything at all about business, nor do they care to, except for Uncle Sam.
But business was all I could think of from an early age. During art classes in kindergarten, other kids drew pictures of houses and birds. I drew pictures of one-hundred-dollar bills. When I turned eleven I begged my parents for a subscription to the Financial Street Journal and religiously read it every day thereafter. Meanwhile, my family members admire Van Gogh, Rodin and Stravinsky, while I desperately want to follow in the footsteps
of the Rockefellers, the Warburgs and Jack Welch.
My family is also made up of storytellers. They love to tell stories, but I always wonder why none of them ever feature a tale of how to build a business. Instead they focus on how little Daniel got his foot caught in a jack-in-the-box and the firemen’s rescue, or how Aunt Susie lost her paintbrushes in the fishpond and the fish took on rainbow hues.
Not that those stories aren’t wonderfully witty and entertaining, but they don’t provide the experience or knowledge I crave. The only family story revolving around business I have ever heard is the one Uncle Sam told about the fishing lures.
So when I enrolled in entrepreneurship studies, I had the passion but lacked the experience of most of my peers—born into families who lived and breathed business. I risked being a disappointment to my family as I entered a world they did not understand. In turn, it made me even more determined to succeed.
There’s a knock on the door. “Maddy, you up?” asks Charlie.
“Yeah, come on in, Dad.”
Charlie enters and sits on the couch beside me. “So how are you doing, hon?”
“A little wiped out actually. Dad, what are some of the myths around funerals?”
He takes a deep breath. “Tara,” he says.
I nod. He takes a moment and pauses to consider his answer deeply before speaking like Gregory Peck in the role of Atticus Finch. “Well, let’s see. Did you know most funeral homes’ owners started out as furniture makers? People would ask them to build a wood casket, so they began to assume the role of the local funeral director, as well. They used to have professional mourners, too. I remember watching them when my grandmother passed away.”
“Really? Women in black providing canned weeping on cue?”
“All day long, next to my grandmother’s deathbed.”
“How do people regard funerals today?”
“Well, there seems to be a trend away from funeral rituals. Symbols representing death in art and literature are diminishing, too. Used to be, people would wear armbands or hang wreaths on their doors to indicate that a loved one had passed on. Those kinds of rituals are fading.”
The Funeral Planner Page 3