My boss, Todd, and I spent yesterday morning in a very heated meeting. The owner of Hot Boat Magazine and a client of ours who owns a shop called Absolute Speed and Marine.
We yelled the entire time we were there. An hour and a half of the 'f' word and pieces of documents proving that these people had been lying to us for the past 6 months. At first they lied and said, "Hey, none of this is true," but then we pulled out our proof and they got pissed that we were basically proving them to be a-holes.
We run a very kick-back business. We do all our deals on handshakes and lunch meetings. Most of the events we pull off are easy enough at this point that we can do it all with our hands tied behind our backs. But that's not because the work itself is easy, we just know what we're doing and we've trained the staff to know what they're doing.
One of our proudest events is a HUGE poker run in October, with enormous colorful boats driven by very rich people. These a-holes that we met yesterday are involved in that event to an extent, and this year they decided that they would go behind our backs and make the event their own. And they figured that we would just roll over and go, "Okay, you guys take this one over, since we're busy with other things." They didn't take into consideration that the Coast Guard only issues one permit for something like this, and it's already been issued to us. So once these dirtbags found out, they panicked. They thought, "Well, we're going to have to buy that permit from Jokers Wild." (that's us) Well, it's not like a liquor license, you can't buy it. The permit is our guarantee to the Coast Guard that we're going to have a safe event run in accordance with all the laws. People get killed at some of the big poker runs because these big boats race each other and do stupid things.
So we walked into the meeting with guns blazing. We won in the end, because we had enough leverage to shut them down. Very strange feeling, having leverage.
All week long, our phones have been ringing with people calling to tell us what they'd heard about all the drama. We were exhausted and felt beat up. Today, we're still exhausted but we have a very complex event to run this weekend and we gotta get ready for it.
Meanwhile, my baby Shay is getting packed for Hawaii. His dad and the future step-witch are going on vacation and taking him with them. He's excited, which is cool. I'm glad he gets to go because he has been a good little angel for quite some time and he deserves a nice break.
I'm getting last minute details together for Steve's birthday, and it all seems to be coming together nicely. I'll handle the catering today, and hopefully I'll find some tables and chairs to accommodate 60 people. I think I know where I can borrow them, I'm just not looking forward to being the one picking them up and setting them up. Yikes.
