Page 15 of One Last Time?
Not good at all. Not good for me. It hadn’t even been a proper ten minutes, and this guy had worked me up the wrong way. How was I supposed to survive the next ten weeks?
Ten weeks of him.
Was failure really that bad an option?
Chapter 5
Dylan
* * *
Itried to get to my parents every Sunday for dinner. It was a thing we’d always done after Tommy and I left home. Everyone would gather here on Sundays, and Mom would make her famous roast beef and peach cobbler that rivalled any Michelin-starred restaurant.
Today’s visit was most welcomed because I’d had the week from hell with Taylor.
Of course, it kick-started on Monday at the bar, and on Friday it ended with us arguing. She was stubborn as hell, worked my last nerve because she outrightly refused to listen to any of my advice and found a problem with all my recommendations.
The worst thing of all, however, was the more she argued, the sexier I found her. It was fucking forbidden tension. The backward and forward disagreements, then me constantly reminding myself that she was off limits. Me reminding myself of that stipulation every day while she wore one sexy dress after another.
I’d been happy to get to the end of Friday when I walked through the doors of Cartwright PR to go home.
Today, though, was a reminder of why I’d worked so hard.
The minute I got to my parents’ house, I was sucked into their excitement.
Dad had spoken to Peter, and apparently, I’d made such an impression that Peter wanted to hire me to do the same assessment on the whole business. The whole Cartwright enterprise.
I absolutely never saw that coming. It was good in itself, but more than anything it got me back in my old man’s good graces.
When this project first came about with Taylor, I’d wanted him to trust me to do it, and he did. These results reinforced that, and I would say definitely put Patterson Inc. on the map. If Peter was using us, it would only be a matter of time before other big businesses used our consultancy too.
In fact, we hardly needed the exposure now that Peter had hired us—me—to look over the whole enterprise.
I’d had a good dinner with my parents and now, Dad and I were in the sitting room talking about the plans I had. Mom hated business talk on Sundays, but she allowed the exception just for today.
“What are your plans for this week?” Dad asked, running his hand over his beard. “I can’t think of what else you could possibly do. It’s just that I was expecting more digging to unearth any problems they had, but you’ve done it. You’ve found problems they never even knew about.” Dad chuckled.
He was absolutely right about that because Taylor didn’t know there was a problem, and she still didn’t. I wasn’t looking forward to tomorrow at all. To her, I was criticizing everything she did, but I wasn’t.Well… not in so many words.
“There’s a lot more to be done,” I replied.
“Dylan, you identified ways he could save two million dollars in just one area of the business. That’s a job done to me. How the hell did you do that?” Dad widened his eyes and held up his palms .
“I just went over the expenditure for the last year. I plan to restructure it all. That’s the plan for next week. Last week, I wanted to go over the issues I saw and help Taylor understand where she was going wrong. It looks to me like they’re using high-cost suppliers when they don’t need to. The focus next week, and probably for the rest of the time I’m there, is strategizing for more profitability in terms of savings. People overlook that. They think spending more means making more. Sometimes it does. Often times it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s spending the same, but you make more because of strategy and deeper research into the services you could be using.”
Dad nodded and seemed to hang on to my words. “Dylan, I have to admit that I wouldn’t have been able to identify all this myself.”
I laughed. “There’s no way that’s true. I’m just glad we can fix the problem and come up with something that can bring in a better ROI for the rest of the year. They’ll be amazed.”
Dad chuckled. “They’re already amazed. I never thought I’d see the day when you talked like this.”
I shrugged and smiled like it was nothing. However, it was everything.
I hadn’t always known I wanted to work for the company. I just kind of fell into working with him because it was a job.
It was the only alternative for me, who’d barely made it through college because I’d decided I had to be that guy who was the most popular on campus and had the most beautiful girls on his arm. I had to be the life of every party and the liveliest, wildest frat brother. Big man on campus. Classes were just nonsensical things I didn’t care about. So were my grades.
When I started working for Dad, I didn’t have to think too hard about anything, and Tommy always had my back. If there was something I didn’t know, I’d just ask him, and he’d tell me or help me in some way. That was how it started, then one day, we got a project with a property development company that had just been taken over by a firm of investment bankers. Tommy allowed me to take the lead because I’d had some great ideas and I loved it. I found I actually loved the job, and that was when my interest grew. The project allowed me to access what I’d learned from my barely-there passable degree in business and marketing. It was the first time in my life that I’d actually felt like I achieved something and found my niche. I liked the whole aspect of helping businesses be better at what they did. For me, it was knowing a little of everything and working with that. That was pretty much me.
