by Bill WENHAM
a real ‘growing’ business and getting bigger every day.
Even so, it was still just a small business but located on a huge plot of land, almost a half mile square, that I had inherited from my grandfather.”
Factor paused again and looked across the table at Elaine Reid. She smiled and gave him a small rolling motion of encouragement with her hand for him to continue.
“It was a great little business, easily managed by the two of us. Dellie ran the retail and plant growing side of it with two young girls to assist her and I looked after the stock acquisition, heavy work and deliveries with my two young guys to help me. I also looked after all of the business side of things. It gave us a good and steady income.”
He looked across at the lawyer again. She nodded and Factor carried on with his narrative.
“I know now that we should have left well enough alone. We were doing just fine as we were. Dellie and I were well satisfied with our little business, our lives and with each other.”
He paused again and scowled at the tape recorder as if expecting it to record his facial expression as well as his words.
“- and then along came Jim Willoughby!” he added bitterly.
Chapter Two
Elaine Reid gave him a sympathetic glance and restarted the tape. Factor took a deep breath and continued with his story.
“Dellie and I had been invited to a pool party at the home of our good friends and neighbors, Paul and Patti Thatcher. It was Patti’s birthday and Paul had arranged it as a surprise for her. Patti was a pert and bubbly blonde and today was her thirtieth birthday. It was July 4th, 2002. - Independence Day.
Paul called her his little Dandy Yankee Doodle, especially since she was originally from New York.
As usually happens at this kind of do, some of the women had gravitated into one group in the kitchen whilst another group of them kept Patti busy out on the patio.
I had joined a group of guys who were deep into a discussion of the pros and cons of golf, all of them insisting there couldn’t possibly be any cons to golf at all. As for me, I think golf is a really stupid game. It just doesn’t make any sense at all to me to hit a little ball as hard and far as you can and then go hunting for it amongst the dense trees and long grass.
Obviously the golfers neither wanted nor appreciated any of my views on their favorite pastime so I just drifted away over to the poolside.
A couple of minutes later I was joined by another man, a stranger, and perhaps he wasn’t a golfer either. He was tall, around six two, blonde, good looking and probably weighed in at about a trim two hundred pounds even.
Over a beer or two, the stranger, who introduced himself as Jim Willoughby, asked me about our business. So I told him.
Instead of congratulating me or praising what Dellie and I had accomplished, as I expected, he just frowned.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Willoughby just shrugged and then said dryly.
“Nothing, I guess. Not if you’ve already reached your ultimate goal in life.”
His comment and tone irritated me intensely.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” I asked tersely.
“Nothing. But I think, from what you’ve just told me, you’re wasting a huge amount of your potential for growth, that’s all. Especially if you own all that land.”
I was about to retort angrily when I remembered I was a guest at Patti’s birthday party so I just said, a little stiffly,
“Thanks for your opinion.”
I picked up my beer and walked huffily away leaving Willoughby standing alone by the pool.
I spotted Patti and Dellie looking at the Koi in the Thatcher’s fish pond and walked over to join them.
Dellie glanced at the anger clearly visible on my face.
“You okay, Dean? What’s wrong? Your face looks like thunder.”
“New guy doesn’t seem to think too much of the way we’re running our business, that’s all, Dellie. What the hell would he know about it anyway?” I muttered irritably.
“What new guy? Do you mean Jim Willoughby?” Patti asked.
I nodded and Patti grinned at me.
“Well, Dean, I’m not sure if you want to know this right now but he should know how to run a business. He’s just moved here after selling his huge manufacturing plant out west. The guy is absolutely loaded. A self made multi-millionaire too, according to the local scuttlebutt. Not too hard on the eyes, either, right, Dellie?”
Dellie smiled, then reached over and put her arm around my waist.
“Maybe you should listen to him, Dean. He might be a good potential investor if we were to expand even more.”
I glanced back at the poolside where Willoughby was still standing alone and I nodded, a little ruefully. I had to admit I’d been a lot too hasty with the guy.
“Excuse me, ladies,” I said. “I think I might just have a little crow to eat right about now.”
The women both laughed.
“I don’t know what kind of menu Paul has planned for the party, Dean, but if crow is on it, you just go right ahead and enjoy it!” Patti laughed.
I grinned, picked up a couple of fresh beers and headed back to join Willoughby. I handed one of them to him.
“Sorry, Jim,” I said. “That was pretty rude of me. Very childish too.”
Willoughby smiled.
“No harm done, Dean. It’s just that I hate to see such a huge potential as yours going to waste, that’s all.”
I shrugged since I’d never thought of our little garden center as having a huge potential. I had just never realized until later that its potential was not so much the business it did but in the type of land it sat on.
“Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions about it?” he asked.
“Sure, go ahead.”
“Okay, then. First question. How many other garden centers are there in, say, a ten mile radius of yours? That’s not counting the ‘big box’ stores like Walmart.”
“Just one other, apart from us.”
Willoughby gave me a satisfied smile.
“Second question. Is it bigger or smaller than yours?
“Smaller,” I said. “It wasn’t, but it is now.”
“Third question. Is it run by a friend or a competitor?”
“Competitor,” I answered.
“Right then. Fourth and last question. Are you capable of operating twenty miles or more from your base?”
“We already do.” I replied. “Even more than that, actually.”
Willoughby gave me a wide grin.
“Buddy, we need to talk.”
“I thought we were already talking,” I said.
Willoughby’s smile broadened even more.
“This is just party chit chat, Dean. We need to talk business. Serious, big money making business. But not here - not tonight. Let’s meet for lunch tomorrow if you’re available – my treat, okay?”
I agreed and looked back over at the girls. They’d moved from the fishpond back on to the crowded patio and both of them were watching us very intently. When Dellie saw me looking at her, she smiled and beckoned us over.
“Come on over and meet my wife. I assume you’ve already met Patti, the party girl.” I said.
Willoughby nodded and we walked over to the patio to join the ladies.”
Factor scowled up into Elaine Reid’s face and she immediately stopped the tape.
“And that’s when all the trouble started,” Factor said bitterly.
“Do you want to take a breather?” she asked.
Factor shook his head.
“No. Let’s get this bloody thing over with,” he answered.
She pressed the record button and the session continued.
“Before going to lunch, I gave Jim Willoughby a grand tour of our little Easy Green garden center operation. Although Dellie and I were proud of what we’d accomplished, I soon realized, trying to see it through Willoughby’s eyes, that, as a business, it really
wasn’t very much at all.”
Factor stopped again just momentarily to organize his thoughts and then said:
“Over lunch, Willoughby’s pitch to me for a partnership was a very convincing one. Although I didn’t know that was what he was after when we agreed to meet.”
“You’re in the driver’s seat here, Dean, as far as landscaping goes and that includes any kind of landscaping, not just trees, shrubs and flowers.
People come to you first and you’ve got to take advantage of that.”
I frowned, not knowing where he was going with this and then he expanded on it.
“You need to be the total contractor, Dean. You must handle everything on their entire property.”
“For instance?” I said, a little dubiously.
“Okay, as an essential part of the expansion, we need to hire a very good designer. Male or female, it doesn’t matter, just so long as they are bloody good at sales as well as design. That person is the key to your whole operation, and why, Dean? Because they have that essential first customer contact, that’s why.”
Willoughby paused and looked at me.
“I hope you noticed I just said designer and not landscape architect there, Dean, and why do you suppose that was?”
I shook my head at him. I had absolutely no idea.
“It’s because the title of ‘landscape architect’ suggests to the potential client that they are about to pay a huge bundle of money just for those design services. They aren’t stupid. They know they’re going to be paying big bucks for the guy’s title as well as for the plan.”
“Well, a designer’s would be expensive for them too, wouldn’t it?” I asked. So far I had done all the design work myself.
Willoughby gave me a big grin.
“No, it won’t, Dean.”
“And why not?” I asked.
“Because that’s what we use to close the deal.”
“We use what to close the deal?”
“The fact that we don’t charge them for the design at all!”
I must have looked astonished because he continued with:
“It’s very simple, Dean. We become the total contractor for everything that appears on the plan, whether it’s a plant or a pool, a bush or a barbeque. We do it all and we control the sales and oversee everything that goes into the project. The design is just the sprat to catch the mackerel, as they say.”
I had to smile. I had noticed how the ownership of Easy Green had subtly changed from ‘you’ to ‘we’, but I still listened intently as Willoughby continued with his pitch.
“For example, we contact the pool company, with the sale already completed. For them, the pool sale is a gift. With another company, we arrange for the gazebo, the cabana and any other buildings to be constructed
and any brickwork to be laid, steps to be built and so on. Someone else builds the water features and stocks and maintains the fish ponds. Another builds the berms, plants the trees, shrubs and flowers. Yet another is under contract to us to fertilize and mow the lawns, trim the shrubs, weed and maintain the flower beds, clean up fall debris and do the snow removal in the winter.
Our organization will sell and do everything you could possibly need done in a garden or property. If it can go in a garden, we’ll sell and service it.
In short, Easy Green will be what the name implies, Dean. It’s easy because we do everything for them!”
“We’re doing all of that?” I asked incredulously.
Willoughby grinned again.
“No, pal, of course not,” he said.
“Then what do we do?” I asked.
“I just love your company name - Easy Green, Dean. It also means something else – Easy Greenbacks, my friend. Piles and piles of lovely money! And we, Dean, you and I,” Willoughby said smugly, “just have to sit back in our brand new mansions and count it all.”
In spite of his enthusiasm, I must have looked rather apprehensive because he said:
“I’ll put up all the necessary expansion money, Dean – in exchange for an equal partnership and that includes the land, of course. My initial investment is to be returned with interest out of future profits.”
Now it was my turn to grin.
“You’ve given this quite a lot of thought already, haven’t you, Jim?”
Willoughby nodded, also grinning.
“Of course I have, and we’ll start by buying out the only competitor in your sales area. Then, as part of that deal, we bring him and his people into our organization.”
I laughed.
“So, it’s an organization now, is it?” I said.
“Bloody right, it is, pal, and it’ll be run like one, I guarantee it”
“That it?”
Willoughby shook his head.
“Just one more thing. One that you didn’t even question me on.”
“And what’s that?” I asked.
“We don’t do any of the major work, not like you do now, not any more. We choose one supplier and one only, for each product we promote and sell. Our preferred supplier. We negotiate for much lower prices than anyone else could get in exchange for guaranteed sales and their exclusivity with us. Then we take a sizable commission as the selling and managing contractor. Our one supplier will have no fear of competition because we won’t deal with anyone else. We’ll own the entire sales area.”
I frowned.
“I can see a potential problem with that, Jim,” I said dubiously.
“Thought you might. So, what do you think it is?”
“What if the customer doesn’t want the product of the supplier we’ve chosen?”
Willoughby grinned at me.
“That’s an easy one, Dean. We just don’t want them as a customer either.”
I gave him an astounded look.
“We’ll lose a few initially, sure, but give us a year or two and we’ll have a total monopoly over a hundred square mile radius.”
“What about the antitrust laws governing monopolies?” I asked.
“Not a problem. If another garden center wants in, we let them in – but as a franchisee of ours or not at all. Just like MacDonalds, Dean.”
I nodded. He seemed to have all the bases covered and it was his money being invested, after all. At least, that was what I thought at the time. I found out later, in fact, none of it was his. The sale of the ‘manufacturing plant out west’ had been a carefully constructed myth. The expansion money had come from a very different source altogether!
“So, what do you think? Apart from the repayment of the initial financing, we each own half of everything from here on in. Is it a deal?
I grinned at him.
“I think you’re a hard nosed S.O.B. but I like you, Jim, so put it there.”
We shook hands and for better or worse, we were now partners.”
Factor stopped speaking and once again Elaine Reid stopped the tape as well. Thinking that he might now want a break, she looked askance at him but he shook his head.
“I’d like the next few comments to be off the record, please, ma’am, because I think they might tend to incriminate me in some way, okay?”
Elaine raised her eyebrows again and sat back in her chair as Factor continued.
“If I’d known at the time that Willoughby wanted a lot more than just half of everything, I’d have cut my own hand off rather than to shake with him on that deal! I was also told, way too late, he hadn’t just been a casual birthday party guest at the Thatcher’s at all. I’d been neatly targeted.”
Factor shook his head angrily.
“Its now almost eight years later and to reluctantly give him his due, the business expanded exactly as he said it would.”
Factor paused again for a moment and then continued:
“Now, several years later, I regret what I now believe had been a rather hasty and foolhardy decision of mine even though both of us were now very rich and with no competition to speak of in several states. Our Garden Worlds were in a class of their own.�
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Factor lifted his head and gazed at the ceiling for a moment as though he was looking for inspiration. Elaine Reid switched her recorder off. She motioned at it and he nodded.
“It’s okay. Just keep it going” Then he said, “The Easy Green prototype was built on our own land. I knew I had the deed to it somewhere but at the time I first spoke to Willoughby, I wasn’t sure of the actual acreage.
I just knew it was a half a mile square with good road and highway access on two of the sides. Even with the expansion we’d done we hadn’t even used a fraction of it.
Dellie cried when the bulldozers, dump trucks and wrecking ball arrived to flatten and remove our little bungalow and greenhouses. We now lived in a small rented house on the eastern outskirts of Saginaw.
Even as adults, we’d had winter toboggan and hot dog parties on our big hill with our good friends, the Thatchers. I had gone to grade school with Paul and we’d remained friends. They lived in a sub division in the suburbs and Patti laughingly referred to Patti and me as ‘The Country Folk’.”
Factor smiled momentarily as he thought back to those good times Then he scowled and continued.
“Usually, Paul and Patti would have pool parties two or three times a summer at their home. We did the winter parties and they did the summer ones. For Dellie and me, it was good to socialize and inevitably we did a lot of business with their friends and neighbors as well.
Neither of us pushed our business at these parties but we were often asked about it. If we were asked, we discussed their project but never the prices. We just took their names and numbers to follow up with later.”
Elaine Reid put up her hand in stopping motion. Factor stopped talking.
“Sorry to interrupt your chain of thought, Dean, but I need to change the tape,” she said.
“That’s okay,” Factor replied. “It will give me a chance to think about what to say next.”
The lawyer replaced the tape and motioned for him to continue.
“It took Willoughby and me almost a full year to plan and implement what was going where inside our new Easy Green Garden World. Next we selected our preferred suppliers.
A few of those we approached were skeptical while others told us outright we were just dreaming and told us we’d probably go belly up in the first year. Fortunately there were others who immediately recognized our huge potential and signed up right away.