Page 18 of One Last Time?
He’d even gone as far as setting out the four steps to a good PR campaign. Research, action planning, communication, and evaluation.As if I didn’t know. This was stuff they taught on the first day of freshman year. Fuck, it was a thing that was widely available on the internet, and no one needed to go to a class to get it.
Yet, Dylan felt he needed to school me in the most basic of things.
His analysis of the plans so far was that too much of the budget had gone into services that cost far too much. It was the same critique as his comments on the report he’d given me last week.
All of it was bullshit and not helping at all. What it made me look like was some incompetent idiot who wasted company money and didn’t think first. I wasn’t stupid. There was a reason why certain brands maintained their excellence, and that was because of quality. Quality they could rely on because of loyalty and that solid relationship they’d built with all their stakeholders. Now, I was basically supposed to start from scratch and dig deep to outsource other companies who could give me the same for less. People I’d never worked with and would know nothing about. My six years of working for Dad had led me to this. Square one.
At twelve, when Dylan knocked on the door, I didn’t even answer.
He knocked again, and I still didn’t answer. He then pushed the door open with a frown on his face that lifted when he saw me sitting behind my desk.
“I didn’t think you were here,” he commented, coming in.
Of course, he would have to look better than he did last week. He’d had his hair and beard shaped up to give him a sharper edge. I must have been losing my mind slowly because I should have hated him enough by now to find his personality ugly.
He had some stupid document in his hands. It looked like a thick wad of paper.
I must have looked like I was ready to kill because he had the good sense to look cautious, especially since I hadn’t answered him or spoken. Yet.
“Did you get my email?” he asked, taking a seat in the chair in front of me.
“Yes.”
“And what did you think?”
I pulled in a deep breath and turned my head to face the window.
What did I think?
Good question. Damn good question, actually, since I was starting to think I couldn’t do this. My sanity was at stake. PR was me. I didn’t have to work for Dad. His company was just the best out there. The name said it all. Cartwright was known throughout the whole state for all that we did. So, I’d be an idiot to quit.
Or, was I the idiot to stay?
Just like my take on relationships, did I have this wrong too?
Maybe.
What this guy had attacked was my whole process. My process and way of thinking. Even now, I still couldn’t see where I went wrong. Image and brand, that was my focus, and I’d done it well.
All his recommendations were against me. They were against me, and this was all Dad’s doing. It was Dad finding an excuse.
“Taylor…” Dylan prodded, and I turned back to face him.
I’d actually almost forgotten he was in the room with me.
“What? What the hell is it?” I snapped and sat forward.
“You didn’t answer my question.” He blinked several times.
“Dylan, I’m not really sure what it is you want me to say. You want to reconstruct my events that I worked so hard on over the last year, and you want to do it in weeks. Yes, weeks because that’s all we have for three major events. Just because you want to salvage waste. There is no waste.”
He narrowed his eyes at me and frowned. We stared each other down until he straightened.
“Okay, okay, let’s do this.” He placed the paperwork he carried down on my desk. “Can you please, please not be so stubborn and look over this list of alternative suppliers I’ve curated? These are quality people.”
“Quality like how? Bargain?” I threw back.
He stood up. “They are reasonable, and that’s all you need to know. All we’re doing is going through the list, speaking with people, and looking at the reviews and recommendations. Once we have all of that, we can make an informed decision. We use them or not, but at least we know we looked into it and did the research.”
