I set up a last minute business meeting for the morning. A guy I had spoken with before. He is a great example of the sort of successful business people I want to keep surrounding myself with. He has a new addition to his business that looks really interesting and we worked out a trade where I’ll get promotion / advertising through his new thing and I’ll help with the email side as well as brainstorming marketing for the new thing. I’m happy with that.
I also set up the first of several batches for next week. I now have 4 meetings on Tuesday, plus the two on Monday and my mastermind group on Monday.
During this I realized I had gotten a voicemail from Debbie at my old company. I eventually called back.
Last I had heard with my old company, their life sustaining business contract with their only real customer was coming to an end. So they need to do something different. And they had found unnamed investors into the new part of their business: computer controlled lighting. (The same computer controlled lighting for which they did an only ever so barely successful kickstarter campaign, confusing highly technical consumer focused marketing campaign, and almost a handful of barely paying customers. Anyway). So they have investors. They’ll spin that off into a new thing. Get the narcissistic partner even more out of the way. And it will be awesome. Ok, cool. Whatever.
So that was the last episode.
Now, it turns out the narcissistic partner doesn’t want to go along with the new plan. So now that plan is for the board member creditor to foreclose on the company and shut it down. Then the IP for the barely interesting computer controlled lighting thing will somehow get back to existing staff and they will start something new and exciting with that.
On and they would love to work with me again.
???
So I of course said, sounds great, let me know how it goes.
I also mentioned I had seen one of their main programmers had taken a job with a different company so I had presumed the whole thing was folding up.
Ah, it was explained, many have jobs. We are all contributing time for free on this to make it go.
I paused and said, that is an interesting business model.
Debbie paused longer and I think laughed nervously.
Anyway, I said sounds great, let me know how it goes. It was a pleasant conversation. I’ll probably hear back from her in 4-6 months.
I don’t understand the “they would love to work with me again” part since as I recall they were the ones who asked me to leave. (I was unhappy with how things were going and was unpleasant to be around. Also a co-worker stabbed me in the back. But that is another story).
But here’s the thing…
I like what I’m doing. I’m done working for free. Or if I want to work for free, I’m more than capable of doing that on my own.
And the people would keep driving me crazy. Because they are disconnected from the reality of running a business that makes money. Yet somehow convinced themselves that they have something really great despite the kickstarter campaign being mostly a failure and, you know, no customers.
Anyway… not happening. Plus they can’t afford my consulting rate.