Chapter 13. Sex for Resources

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation

In time we exhausted, and dominated the market in our part of the state, and I decided to enter the market of a major metropolitan area about 170 miles away.  

I spent about six months doing market research on the cheap, which meant asking what local fast food restaurants were paying their help in order to get a frame of reference what the current wage rates were in this new city.  At the time most fast food restaurants were paying $3.45 per hour, so I based my quotations on that wage rate.  What I did not know, was that at the time, there were over ten million square feet of new office space under construction in this city.  When all that office space was completed and was occupied, there was going to be a major surge in the demand for new housekeepers.  With the supply of labor more or less fixed, and the demand for cleaners surging, the result was quite predictable:  a surge in the price of labor.  Which meant that all those new contracts I had just sold in this city were going to lose money, because we were going to be unable to staff the buildings at the wage rates we had quoted, and if we raised the wages, we could not raise the prices, and so were going to take a serious financial hit.

 We tried to hold the line on our wages at the level we had quoted the new business at:  remember we were in the cleaning business, and labor is by far the largest cost of doing business.  As we tried to hold our wages at the levels we had quoted the business at, the competition for labor was intensifying in the city, and our competitors were slowly offering more money.  And so were the fast food restaurants, and every other enterprise that operates with entry-level labor.  I would often pass the same Wendy’s unit on my way to work, and they constantly had Help Wanted signs in the window, and I noticed that the offered rate of pay went up about $.25 per hour every two months or so.  The significance of this had not quite seeped into my consciousness, but I woke up at a trade show in St. Louis later that same year.  I was talking over cocktails with one of my Jewish competitors from back in my home state, and he said about one 22-story office building we cleaned:  “My cousins run that building.  Don’t you think I’d have that contract if I wanted it?  Why do you think I don’t have it?  Because I don’t want it, because I can’t make any money at it.” 

In the early days in this new city, we attempted to stick with our anticipated wage rates, although such were no longer realistic.  The only people who were responding to our Want Ads in the newspaper were the dregs that no one else wanted.  You tend to lower your standards when you are desperate for warm bodies.  We used to joke during this period about subjecting our applicants to the Foggy Mirror Test:  hold a mirror up to their mouth and ask them to breathe on it.  If it fogs up, they’re hired.  Of course, you pay quite a price when you hire these people.  In one city, we had a contract to clean a 22-story office building, and one night when I walked in about 5:30, my supervisor was standing in the lobby, freaking out, because not one of her nineteen employees had shown up.  I took off my suit jacket and tie, and my supervisor and I spent the next 14 hours removing the trash from the trash baskets in that building and restocking the paper supplies in the restrooms.  I remember we hauled out 112 large bags of trash between the two of us.  We finished up as the tenants started pouring in the next morning.

I had been thrilled with all of our new business in this city.  I was thrilled with the rising numbers of our revenues and employees.  I had felt a rush of pleasure at our successes.  It came as a stab of pain when I realized we were like the man selling millions of oranges, and losing 1/4 cent on each orange, but he was going to make it up in volume.  Another lesson learned:  It’s the money left on the table when all the dealing’s done that matters.  Don’t get too impressed with the wrong numbers.

At the very inception of the business, I had worn all the hats:  cleaner, supervisor, sales rep, buyer, management, bookkeeping, secretary, you name it, I did it all.  Little by little as the enterprise grew I had to take off more and more of these hats.  One of the last hats to come off was that of sales rep.  This was partly because as the founder and organizer of the enterprise, I was its best promoter, and also because I loved doing it.  Eventually though, even that hat had to come off, and it was time to find a sales rep.  As always, I looked around at my existing employees to see if there was anyone with potential sales ability.  I thought I had my answer in an employee we’ll call Peggy (not her real name).  She had been with me for several years, as cleaner and then as supervisor.  I spent several months organizing our sales effort for someone other than myself, and then teaching her, taking her with me, teaching her how to put the numbers together, etc.  Peggy worked partly in our home office territory, and partly in this new city where we weren’t doing too well.  I needed for her to find new business to replace some of our existing business we were sure to lose, and needed to lose if we couldn’t negotiate new, and higher prices to reflect the rising cost of labor.

Peggy faithfully turned in her reports, and developed close relationships with our existing clients, which was important because she would need them as references in order to get new clients.  She did this quite well, in fact much more so than I ever expected.  She frequented our clients in their homes socially and got to know their families.  Peggy was attractive but not beautiful.  She was married and had kids at home.

One day Peggy called to say she had been to the hospital because she had been in an automobile accident.  Someone had rear-ended her while she was stopped at a traffic light.  A short time later, Peggy  showed up with a neck brace on and informed me the small truck that had hit her was owned by a company, and she had found a lawyer and was suing this company for a million dollars.  She assured me she was not filing a Worker’s Compensation claim, which would have damaged our company’s rating and raised our costs.  Over the course of the next few months, she continued to ask me to assign her exclusively to the city 170 miles from where she lived, and I continued to tell her I couldn’t financially justify doing that, since we had territories to consider much closer to home.  Finally one day Peggy  asks me to go to lunch with her, and she shows me a photograph of her and the contact person for one of our largest clients, a middle-aged married man, both of them partially clothed in a bedroom.   She then tells me she has been having an affair with this man for some time, and this was the reason why she continued to ask for reassignment to the large city, for this would provide business “cover” with her husband as to where she was for such extended periods of time, and why.  So she was asking for my complicity, not for business reasons, but a very personal one.

A few days later I declined her request.  She promptly filed a Workers Compensation claim.  Eventually I met with her new boyfriend, my client.  We met in a restaurant, and he asked if I had any tape recorders on me.  I told him no, and then he said he was sorry Peggy  had ever told me about their affair and put me in the middle of it.  He said he was acutely uncomfortable doing business with me because if I reported him to his boss, he could lose his job over this.  He said he would honor my existing contracts, but when they expired he would not renew them.  In exchange for this, he asked me to promise I would not squeal on him.  I agreed, but I felt that I had been fucked and not even kissed.  A few months later he broke his word and canceled our business, so I went to his boss, a major player in a Fortune Five Hundred company, and handed him my paperwork.  He sat there for an hour and a half reading it all, looked up and asked me two questions:“One of our officers has compromised the corporation.  What do you want me to do about it?”

In my judgment, he and his subordinate were tight, and apart from this behavior his subordinate was competent and would not easily be replaced.  I therefore responded to this man that in my opinion if I requested disciplinary action, I would create resentments at several levels in my client’s organization which would in time cost me the loss of the business anyway.  So I was not requesting any action be taken, and I was going to terminate my contract.  I was being a realist about the matter, but I wanted ”the boss” to know the real reasons I was leaving, and that it was not due to performance problems on my organization’s part.  Obviously there was no way his subordinate was going to tell the truth about why a reliable contractor was walking away from valuable business.  The subordinate was going to have to fabricate a cover story, and the cover story would not be favorable to us.

The second thing this executive wanted to know was, ‘Had I banged Peggy too?’ I hadn’t.  I just thought it was interesting that he asked.  I hadn’t expected that.

So we lost the business, about $200,000 per year.  For a long time I never heard from Peggy.  Then one day she called to tell me that in the judgment of her attorney, she was going to need  a strong character reference from me as her last employer of record in order to successfully conclude her lawsuit.  I asked her who was representing the defendant, and she told me.  A short while later, I went to see the defense attorneys, and seated around their conference table, told them Christmas was about to come early for them. 

I met with Peggy, armed with a hidden microphone and small recorder.  We had a long chat in which she told me many details of her lawsuit and her personal life.  She told me her lawsuit included $50,000 for compensation for loss of consortium with her husband due to the accident.  It didn’t seem to occur to her as significant at all that the accident had not interfered with loss of consortium with her lover.  She spilled her guts, and I took the tape to the defendent’s law firm, they transcribed it, and presented the transcription to Peggy and her attorney.  The parties settled quickly out of court for an undisclosed amount that I was informed may have covered her “medical expenses.”

After Peggy was gone, I put the sales hat back on myself and started making prospect calls.  One prospect told me about the last time Peggy had called on him, wearing a very short skirt with a deep slit on the side.  He said Peggy spread her legs suggestively and asked what she had to do to get the contract for his building.  She then told him anything he saw that he wanted was his for the asking. At the time I learned of these developments, I remember being surprised.  The world has changed a lot since then, and it takes a lot more to shock me these days.  And let’s face it, sex for resources is one of the oldest games known to the human species.  Peggy hardly invented that behavior.