One Way to Succeed (Casas de Buen Dia Book 1) (11 page)

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s see if we can get some work done.”

“Agreed,” she said. “After all, that is what we’re here for.”

“Right,” he answered, stretching the word out while holding her eyes. “We have to figure this out sooner or later.”

“So, hey,” she said, opening her notebook and finding the address she had written down. “I found this property this morning. I think it would be an incredible location for a small hotel, and it’s greenfield. There’s nothing there now but dirt and some nice palm trees.”

“Where?” He looked pleased.

She read the address.

“Oh.” His face dropped. “Yes, I know the property. Every developer in town does. We’ve all been trying to get our hands on it for years, but the old lady who owns it lives in Mexico, and no one has been able to get her to sell it. No one knows why she’s hanging onto it.”

“Money, perhaps?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Rick sat back. Finally, they’d both come back down to earth and could practice, if not actually perform, some semblance of businesslike decorum. “I understand some of the offers people have made for it were pretty astronomical. It seems she just doesn’t want to part with it.”

“Or do anything with it?”

“Neither.”

“Well, maybe I can look into that,” Amy suggested.

“No, it isn’t worth your time.” Rick shook his head. “I’ve been around long enough to know when a seller isn’t going to sell.”

Amy frowned. Was he making a comment on her naiveté? Yes, she was new to the business—brand new, in fact. But she had been so excited about her discovery, she couldn’t help feeling deflated. Maybe this job wasn’t going to work out, she thought. Maybe the emotional highs and lows were going to be too extreme, now that she cared so much about what he thought of her.

“Hey, don’t take that wrong,” Rick said, apparently noticing her despair. “I’m glad you’ve still got an open mind about these things. Perhaps I’m a little jaded after doing this for more than a decade. So, don’t stop looking. Just believe me, that property isn’t going to work.”

“No, I don’t mean to question your judgment,” she said, waving off his concern to convince herself. “And besides, I’ve got plenty to do.”

“Any chance I could see a list of possible COO candidates today?” he asked.

Amy nodded. “I’ll work on that first.”

“Thanks,” he said and turned to flick on his computer. “Let’s meet again this afternoon.”

He sure seems good at turning his emotions off and on
, Amy thought, walking back to her office and sitting down. She needed to develop a little bit of that skill. She’d never had to use it in an office setting before, but now was the time. If they were going to convince everyone in the office that nothing was going on between them but work, she needed to get good at keeping her feelings at bay.

Later that day, she had the list of potential COO candidates ready, and they met again in his office, this time with the door open. She handed him a thick file, filled with summaries of each candidate she’d located, their resumes and print-outs of any news stories she had found about them on the Internet.

“How did you find all of this stuff?” he asked, clearly impressed with the amount of information she’d been able to dig up. “Did these guys give this stuff to you?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “None of them even knows we’re looking at him or her. I used a few data services I have used in the past. You’d be surprised how much you can find out about people without them even knowing you’re doing it. Resumes are easy. It’s the personal stuff that’s harder.”

“These are legal sources?”

“Absolutely, but you do pay for them,” she said. “Surprisingly, less than you might expect.”

“Well, let’s take a look,” he said. He gestured toward the big work table, and Amy felt an involuntary smile cross her lips. Suddenly, she could imagine using that big table for …

No!
she told herself.
Don’t go there. Focus!

They sat side by side, and he flipped through the first few pages slowly. She had put the material on the candidate she thought has the best choice on top, and he seemed to consider the guy worthy as well. He looked at the next one slowly as well. When he got to the third choice, however, he glanced at the first page of her summary, and didn’t even pull off the paper clip holding the information about the candidate together before flipping past it.

Amy leaned over and turned over a corner of the rejected packet to see who it was.
Too bad
, she thought,
I thought Diana was a good possibility.

He continued through a few more of the candidates, and then flipped another one over, unread. She glanced at it as well.

The two packages he refused to look at were both about women, she realized. But she held her tongue. There was one more woman toward the bottom of the pile, but still worth considering. When he got to her, he flipped it over, too. He then pulled out three of the packages, and handed them to her.

“Let’s look into these three,” he said. “I think they all look promising. Good job.”

Amy accepted the pile and glanced at the names. She had been right. All three were men.

What the hell?
She got up, turned on her heel, and took the papers back to her desk. She closed the door of her office, sat down, and fumed.

Was his mother right? Was he incapable of working with a woman in his office above the level of an admin? If that was the case, what did that mean for her future?

Rick had to figure out how to keep Tom happy and on his construction team before he could concentrate on the three candidates for COO he’d chosen out of Amy’s pile. He made some phone calls to the people he usually used to put up signs at his construction sites. He explained that he needed something smaller than usual, something appropriately priced considering the low visibility it was likely to have on a street with so little traffic. The off-the-cuff bids he got still seemed expensive for the value the sign would bring.

“Guy, could you come in here?” he called over the intercom to his part-time marketing guy.

“Sure boss,” Guy answered and walked through Rick’s office door a half-minute later.

“I’ve got this problem,” Rick said. “Sit down.”

Rick explained the issue, the challenge of finding a way to give Tom a little publicity without spending wasted money on an expensive sign in such a low-traffic area.

“Any other ideas come to mind?” Rick said. “How can I help this guy out and keep him on by crew?”

Guy frowned and thought for a few long minutes.

“Nothing comes to mind,” he said. “It makes even less sense to spend more on newspaper ads than on the sign. No one even reads the newspaper anymore. Except online. I could check online ad costs, but even those will likely be more expensive than just going with the damn sign. And if that’s what Tom wants, at least you know you’ll keep him happy that way.”

One Guy was gone, Rick decided to ask Amy about it. How quickly she’d become his go-to person, he realized, even as he regretted the admission. Still, she’d done some PR before, hadn’t she? He walked into her office, asked for permission to interrupt what she was doing, and sat in the chair across from her desk. He explained his challenge with Tom.

“Let’s create a Facebook page and feature Tom and the Corona Inn project on it this week,” she said quickly, as if she’d been working on coming up with the solution for days. “I’m thinking that once he saw it, Tom would love it. He’ll have no idea whether it will do him any good, but my guess is, it won’t matter. He’ll just love being the star of the page for a week.”

“Just the week?” Rick was trying to catch up. “The page would only be up for a week?”

“Well, every week, you could do a different blog post—actually, I could write it for you, but no one would need to know—featuring one of your contractors,” she said. It seemed like she believed in the idea, but for some reason, she wasn’t excited about it. “It will give them some publicity, it will cost you virtually nothing to set up, and we’ll spread word about the page with a few early page boosts.”

“What are page boosts?”

“Oh, you pay Facebook a little, say fifty bucks, and it will post your new page on a bunch of other people’s feeds based on the criteria you give them.” Her delivery was deadpan.

“What are feeds?” he asked.

Amy rolled her eyes. “That’s the stuff a person sees when they look at their page. Basically other people’s posts, messages directly meant for them, new items, stuff Facebook’s algorithms decide matches their interests.”

Rick didn’t need Amy’s eye roll to understand how stupid he sounded: all of this social media activity was going on and he had no idea how it worked. “How do you know all this stuff?”

“How do you not?” she said it flatly, without any hint of humor.

Rick blinked and hesitated. Something seemed amiss. Her answers seemed wooden. Hadn’t they just exchanged a fairly meaningful kiss in his office? Hadn’t he just accepted three of her suggested COO candidates without question?

“Hey,” he said, reaching an arm across her desk, inviting her to give him her hand. “Is something wrong? You seem a bit out of sorts.”

Now it was Amy’s turn to hesitate. She neither leaned toward him nor took his hand. She sat back and then did that thing that women did: she crossed her arms over her chest and leaned away. He knew the gesture: it meant “I’m now taking care of myself, not you, and I’m not in the mood for your sweetness.”

“Nothing is wrong,” she said, using the same tone of voice Rick had heard women use since he was old enough to observe them—the tone that said, “Something is very wrong, and I’m sorry but you’re going to have to figure it out yourself, sucker.”

“Okay.” Rick knew he wasn’t going to find out any more for a while. These things usually took some time, and eventually he would figure out what he’d done wrong, or what had happened to her, or whatever. But he knew he couldn’t press.

“Do you think you can set up this Facebook page?” he asked, moving ahead.

“Yes, but shouldn’t you ask Guy to do it?”

“I talked to Guy a minute ago, and he didn’t come up with the idea, you did. Don’t you want to do it?”

“No, boss,” she said with a tinge of sarcasm. “I’m perfectly willing to fill in when the men in the office are unable to deliver.”

“What does that mean?” Rick said. “Is that some kind of reference to the gender imbalance here? Did you get that from my mother?”

“No, Rick,” she said. “I got it from you. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got plenty to do. I would like to get that Facebook page up by the end of the day. Does Guy have some photos on his computer I can use?”

~

Now that the issue with Tom was resolved—he’d been excited about the news of the upcoming Facebook page when Rick called him about it—Rick could get to work, looking for his COO. The candidates that Amy had found were all guys he didn’t know, which surprised him. After a decade in Palm Springs real estate, he thought he knew just about everyone in town who could possibly serve as a chief operating officer of a small construction firm.

Amy had done another thing he would never have thought of. Instead of looking for candidates who were already in construction or real estate management, she had created a list of a set of skills that she thought would be needed to do the job, developed keywords based on that list, and then looked for people whose resumes included those keywords—obvious things like “budgets,” “P&L,” “real estate transaction,” “construction,” and “building permits;” and some more general, less obvious terms that would get at the softer skills required by the job: “communication” (unmodified; she must have assumed no one would mention communication if they weren’t good at it), “independent worker,” “attention to detail,” “efficient,” and “extrovert.”

The results included the three men he chose for further consideration: a school superintendent, the general manager of a mid-sized golf resort down valley, and the locally based district manager for a national fast-food chain. All had listed experience in managing major construction projects and real estate transactions for their employers somewhere in Riverside County in the past few years. In the memo she had written to explain her process to him, Amy had added that each of the candidates she was recommending had applied for a new job in the past six months, indicating a willingness to move on. Further, she said, each of them might bring new ideas—having worked outside the real estate development community, they wouldn’t be as beholden to doing things the way they’d always been done, which in her opinion was a good thing.

“Obviously,” he agreed with that statement out loud. Clearly Amy was one who practiced what she preached: never settling for the usual solutions to problems.

What the hell!
Rick thought. How did she come up with this idea for a way to conduct an executive search? He couldn’t remember Amy ever mentioning past jobs as a headhunter or recruiter. She’d never mentioned social media marketing skills either. He shook his head and swung his chair around to stare at the mountain. It was too bad she would have to leave Buen Dia if they were going to have a relationship. In fewer days than he had fingers on one hand, she had proven she was capable of helping the company out in so many ways. But, of course, that also meant that she was probably capable of the same kind of coup his mother had pulled off some twenty years earlier.

~

It was couple of days later before Rick remembered that he had seen Amy sitting in her car in front of the Corona Inn project, watching him. 

His paranoia about what she was doing there had disappeared as soon as she came into his office later that morning. She had been dressed in a plain white oxford shirt and navy khakis—nothing nearly as revealing as that little black dress from Friday night. But it hadn’t mattered. He still felt the crotch of his pants tighten and his heart rate rise the instant she walked in and asked him she should close the door.

She had been so eager, so helpful, so … well,
willing
that first week. And then they’d had that incredible kiss in his mother’s casita. Further, the second week had started out well, with her presenting a good list of candidates and coming up with a virtually free solution to Tom’s publicity issues—the Facebook page.

But, now, she was starting to worry him. Sometime on Monday, things had changed. A cloud of tense air had descended on the office, and she had turned sullen and distant. She had rebuffed his invitations to “work late” Monday and Tuesday, quietly and efficiently, as if she had no idea what he was hinting at. What he had hoped would become a relationship may have turned out to be a couple of kisses that would simply leave him wanting more.

Was there some connection between the way she was spying on him on Monday and how cold and distant she had suddenly become? Had their embrace on Friday night been part of some plot he was too dense to figure out? But if that was the case, it didn’t make much sense that she had accepted his embrace so warmly Monday when he came into the office.

Rick shook off the memory. He had work to do. He couldn’t let a woman, an administrative assistant, distract him from moving forward with his business. He had always avoided bringing smart, ambitious women into his company. This was proof he had been right, although he certainly didn’t need it. His mother had provided proof enough.

He was in tenth grade when she had met him gliding on his bicycle into the driveway of their suburban home in Palm Desert one day after school. Waiting there for him was completely out of character for her. She was always the one working late at his father’s construction company, arriving home just before he went to bed, asking distractedly if he’d found something to eat for dinner. His father was the one more likely to be home, sleeping on the family room couch with ESPN blasting on the TV. Three-martini lunches were required in his business; they weren’t fun, his father had explained to Rick, they were essential. He had to schmooze with union officials, entertain county and state bigwigs, lubricate relationships with subcontractors. Rick had believed him to a degree. He suspected that lunch without the martinis would have been just as effective, but what did he know?

“Your father is packing his things in there, Rick,” his mother had said that afternoon in the driveway, putting her hands on his shoulders and looking into his eyes with both sadness and purpose. “I don’t want you to go in there right now. Come on, put your bike in the garage and let’s get in the car and go out for dinner.”

“What do you mean packing?”

“He’s going to be moving out.”

“Why?”

“There are things you can’t understand, yet, Rick, and this is one of them,” she had said, reaching to pull his backpack off his back. Rick had pulled away. “I’ll explain what I can to you. Just get in the car.”

“No,” he said. “I’m going to go talk to him!”

“No, Rick!” his mother yelled as he dropped the bike at her feet. “Don’t! It’s not safe, Rick!”

She had been right about that. The second he stepped in the back door to the kitchen, a large ceramic plate whizzed by his head and crashed on the door jamb behind him. He ducked.

“Dad!” he yelled. “What are you doing?”

“I thought you were that bitch,” his father said. He looked at his son mournfully, and sunk to the kitchen floor. He leaned back against a kitchen cabinet door and slumped down farther. “You know what she is doing to me? She is taking my company away from me. She’s taking you away from me. She’s stealing everything.”

At that point, in spite of the lugubrious behavior of the past few years, his father was still Rick’s hero. He had taken the young Rick fishing, taken him to LA Dodgers games, and taken him to work so he could ride in the big dirt movers and back hoes with his employees.

“She can’t do that,” Rick said, sitting down on the floor next to his father. “She isn’t your boss.”

“Oh, yes. She is,” his father said, looking up at Rick with blood-shot eyes. “That was part of her plan. She’s been my boss for months, and now she’s sticking it up my ass.”

Immediately, Rick knew that the three-martini lunches probably had something to do with why his father was moving out. But he couldn’t see how they were so unforgivable that they could have cost his father his own business, his pride, his success.

Rick had only seen his father twice after that before he disappeared forever, and Rick could never forget how dejected, defeated, and deflated he had become. Ten years later, he was dead. Rick’s mother had taken his company away from and refused to explain to Rick why she did it. She said he wouldn’t understand. And when Rick came back to town after college to start his own business, he vowed it would never happen to him.

Rick had just turned back to focus on the COO candidates when Amy’s voice crackled over the intercom. Apparently, she had decided it was a better way to communicate in the office than meeting face-to-face after all. Or was this a further sign that she was pulling away?