Chapter 2 : Biz
Roman feigned disappointment, “Are you telling me that I missed the boat and you and me - there’s no chance left?”
Julia smirked and feigned a consolation, “Depends on how well you pursue. Who knows, I may divorce my old loser.”
Roman rolled in laughter. Then he announced, “Just kidding. I’m a married man, myself.”
He showed his ring to Julia.
Julia’s phone buzzed. She talked on the phone and declared, “My ride's here.”
Roman fished out his business card from the inner lining of his jacket and handed over the card to Julia. Julia took the card and left.
After she left, Roman saw that she somehow dropped a piece of earring while putting them back in her clutch. Roman picked up the earring and took the piece along.
A mysterious smile spread on his lips, in his eyes.
The award ceremony of TechBiz Consortium was held on a Saturday. Following Tuesday afternoon, Lindsey, from the marketing department of LeanTech LLC, Julia’s company, informed Julia, “Boss, your PR worked. You got seven emails through the website.”
Julia reverted her decision to fire her PR. One evening at an event brought her seven potential customers. That’s quite a hit. She said, “I’ll ask Danielle to write a letter of appreciation to Your Business Relations.”
Danielle was Julia’s office assistant, personalized on Assist You, an AI application that Julia has developed with her team, for assisting the small business owners with their chores of scheduling, drafting emails, drafting documents, initiating chat with target and potential customers.
Assist You was still on beta stage. The app was going through rigorous testing. Julia had plans to build holistic office management software application packages powered by artificial intelligence and to sell those applications to small business owners so that they can cut off the overheads and increase their profit margins.
Lindsey quipped, “Don’t forget to check the draft before sending and don’t forget to send them as soon as possible.”
Julia could not help but smirk. Lindsey could not see Julia’s face. She heard Julia was saying, “What’s the rush? Let’s see how much we could reap in the whole quarter through the connections I could make in the party. Then, I’ll decide if the letter of appreciation should be sent or not.”
She continued, “Can you send me the information of the seven companies? I’ll check on them. No rush. Just send them one by one. I’ll get back to you by the end of the day and we’ll compare our notes on the subtexts on the research material that you would send me. After that, we’ll decide on the strategies to get back to each of them.”
Lindsey hung up. The conversation made Julia happy. She started to plan for enhancement of efficiency of Assist You. She checked her schedule. She never scheduled any meetings on Mondays. Mondays are the days to check on the past week’s performance and reschedule works in the week and in coming weeks to compensate for the lacuna of the past week. She never scheduled meetings on Fridays, either. She used the Fridays to scramble all the delays of the ongoing week so that the weekend breaks on Saturdays and Sundays could give her team members complete rest.
The routine worked for her since she started her LeanTech LLC when she was still a Junior in the undergraduate class of Princeton University. She kept planning for enhancement of Assist You till Lindsey sent her the information about the first company.
She started to check on the company’s details, their products, their clientele, the testimonies of their clients about their businesses, the business news about them for the past few years, their annual statement, their board of directors, if they were big incorporations then who were their major shareholders, if they were limited liability companies then who were their members, their business mission, their goal and their geographic reach.
Julia and her LeanTech LLC needed all that information to expand their own business. The goal was to reach more clients through word of mouth publicity from the existing clients. If she could convert all the seven interested clients into regular and returning clients then the client companies of the clients of LeanTech LLC could know about LeanTech LLC.
Besides, Julia needed to know if LeanTech LLC could cater to the businesses of the seven companies that showed interest in doing business with her company. She had not started for long. She had just a thirty person development team, two persons marketing team, two persons finance team, two persons human resource management team and two persons administrative team. She was working at all of the three leadership positions - the chief executive officer, the chief technology officer and the chief financial officer. Including her, the employee strength of her whole company was less than fifty people. She needed to know if her products and services could cater to specific marketing needs of the products and services of the businesses that were seeking to buy her products and services.
The global reach of the interested business could pave the way for LeanTech LLC to go global. The size of the client business could hint how messy it could be doing business with them. Julia was running a lean and mean kind of operations, administrations and marketing strategies at LeanTech. The identity and business records of the seven interested businesses might give a hint if LeanTech LLC would be eligible to do business with the interested company.
Julia sifted through too much information. She made pages of notes and put her notes in separate portfolios labelled with the names of interested companies that contacted LeanTech for doing business corporations. The whole work took her the entire day. She spent ten hours sifting through all the information - from nine-thirty in the morning to seven thirty in the evening. She ate her chicken wrap while going through an annual report.
Julia and Lindsey met at BizTalk cafe after one more hour. They took a break to stretch and to eat dinner. Lindsey had a six years old daughter at home and the daughter’s father, her husband, who used to return home at around six-thirty Monday through Friday. She had to spend at least half-an hour with them.
Julia was interested in meeting all the companies but one. Lindsey pointed out something important in the profile of the company. The name of the company was FinanceAI Inc. Julia believed that the products and services of LeanTech were not suitable for marketing products and services of FinanceAI. But Lindsey argued, “I understand they don’t sell shoes or condos and our apps specialize in consumer durables and real estate. But LeanTech can give them the products and services free to test how LeanTech needs to check its codes to cater to the Finance Sector. Besides, their clients are the people who are interested in the business of artificial intelligence. We would have a better chance to thrive with them compared to our chances to find the right match from someone who sells potatoes to restaurants.”
Julia was about to tease Lindsey with, “Little manager is no more scared of arguing with the CEO of the company!”
Yet Lindsey’s arguments brought new ideas to her head. She picked up her phone and reached out, “Arti, can we have a seven o’clock meeting tomorrow morning.”
Lindsey could not hear what Arti said. After hanging up, Julia explained, “I am thinking of putting new conditions in the contracts. We would offer Assist You free of cost with our all other products and services and we will collect data from their usage of Assist You.”
Lindsey reflected her enthusiasm, “Yay. We can do the same for all the new and upcoming products in future.”
They decided to reach all the seven companies that showed interest in doing business with them. Lindsey took a cab to return home early. She had to fish through all the new letters of interests the next day. She was expecting more businesses were about to knock on the door of LeanTech LLC so that they could learn how to save on their overhead expenses and make profit by reducing the cost of doing business. Before that she would pass on the details of the seven companies to Laura so that Laura could start necessary communications with those businesses and could start making trips to meet their executives at cafes and at other places.
Julia strolled back to her apartment. She found that the last company that she studied was FinanceAI. Their webpages were still on the open tabs of Julia’s computer browsers. She scrolled through the page a little bit. She had a feeling that she would not do business with FinanceAI. So she skipped a few details of the company while making notes about the company. But she had changed her decision after talking to Lindsey. She delved into skipped details as she thought of trying doing business with FinanceAI.
A line in the description of the CEO’s profile caught her eyes, “Winner of the TechBiz Youth Talent Award.”
Julia looked at the photo. The photo was of a younger version of Roman Coppola that she met the other day. She decided to go meet Roman in person to talk about Connect You, LeanTech’s marketing product, about other products and services of LeanTech and about Assist You.
Next she closed all tabs from the browser and logged off for the night.
She opened a different profile on the same laptop. She looked at the trails of offline messages on Puzzle Platform, the mathematics puzzle forum that kept her alive for the past five years. Those messages were five years chat history with Rho97.
Julia never met Rho97. She had no idea whether Rho97 was a machine - a very intelligent machine that could imitate human expressions like a true brain, or a human with profound knowledge of mathematics and the universe. All Julia knew was that after exchanging thoughts with Rho97 she felt elated every time.
Roman was asking his business development team if they received any reply from LeanTech. He logged off with a sigh. He fished out the earring that he picked up a few nights earlier at the TechBiz Award Ceremony from a silk purse from the top drawer of his workstation.
He opened a different profile on his laptop browser and looked at a dormant chat history with Zeta00. He was wondering why the chat threads turned lifeless after three years of vibrant communication everyday. The chat was becoming less frequent for the past two years. For the past three months there was no exchange of ideas.
He felt suffocated. Since he started FinanceAI this chat room was his connection to his younger carefree self, rich with revolutionary ideas that could change technology and business together. Zeta00 was his perfect companion. It used to nudge him, tickle him with ideas and puzzles and used to rescue him when he felt that he was in real jolt. This chat room used to be Roman’s escape from all the real world troubles and his rejuvenation hub.
For the past three months, the chat room remained cold. As if Zeta00 was no more in the forum or in the cyberworld or in the world. Roman thought of waking up the chat room with a new puzzle.
The more he delved into creating an interesting puzzle, the more he found that his head went dry of all ideas that could create a fresh puzzle. The process and exercise of creating a puzzle could have distracted him from his longing to meet Julia or from his longing to touch her earring, or from his longing to roll the earring all over his face or from his longing to sniff the earring, every now and then.
Roman never felt so helpless, so smitten in all his life.
The following morning Lindsey handed over a plan to Julia, “I’ll take four of them. You must take the rest of the three.”
Julia saw that she not just got Roman but also got the sons of the fathers who talked to her in the TechBiz consortium. She asked Lindsey, “How did you divide the targets between you and me?”
Lindsey giggled, “Simple. The stingy ones are yours. You are the boss. It’s your job to keep the dice rolling and give us paychecks on a regular basis. You must crack the tough nuts to get business.”
Lindsey ended her call with, “Laura told me that there are three more and some more are coming. Gear up for more jobs.”
Julia calculated in her head that she could scramble her per client six member developers’ teams to four member developers’ teams. That way she could limit hiring in the developers’ team to a minimum of two people if there would be an addition of three more clients from all the ongoing communications. She found that she would not need to extend the marketing and Human Resource Management teams unless LeanTech would reach an employee strength of fifty people.
Julia started searching about the reputation of her three clients in the business world. Julia found that the father son combo companies were described by their contractors as habitual defaulters of payments. Julia decided to work with them through an escrow account. The FiananceAI was not described as defaulter but the feedback was that FinanceAI was aggressive about snatching data about client and employee information from the vendor company. Besides, they pay the lowest among all the businesses in the industry.
Later in the day Lindsey pinged, “This three day meeting schedule is kinda hot. It makes LeanTech look busy meeting people throughout the week. This notion makes the businesses kinda desperate to reach out for the core of LeanTech.”
Julia replied with an emoticon of blush.
She wrote then, “A pretentious ‘hard to get’ business.”
In the evening she went to BizTalk cafe. The stalls in the cafe were designed to cater to the business owners who could turn a casual meeting into a serious business talk and yet could maintain privacy from the peeping folks. She met there with a son of one of the two fathers whom she talked to in the TechBiz Consortium.
Julia was disappointed by the attitude of the son. He came in casual wear with a sports bottom, matching jacket over a round neck tee-shirt, showing off numerous pendants and necklaces, and a few bracelets over his wrist. He said, “I don’t like talking business in the evenings. I could not refuse meeting you because you are a woman and my father found that you have earned over a hundred million in just three years. He thinks if we - you and I - are married, you can add to our family fortune.”
Julia tried to douse the enthusiasm with wagging her left ring finger, “I’m already married.”
The son winked, “You can get divorced. Besides, we can have an open marriage. You can date your husband but legal -”
Julia cut him short, “I’m not interested in discussing social and personal life like dating and marriage. LeanTech is interested in offering you our main marketing product Connect You at a ten percent discount as we belong to the same business community. Also, I can offer you a free tool Assist You for running your office. In return, we would like to get all your information, including business communications that you create with Assist You for research - for betterment of Assist You and for getting ideas of creating new products and for enhancing the service of Assist You. Are you interested?”
The son put his body in a laid back position and belched out, “You are a typical sales person. There’s nothing special about you. My old man should start using his specs. He thought that a little girl like you must be struggling to get clients and investments for new projects. We thought of investing in your project and earning dividends. We even thought of acquiring your little company later on. But -”
Julia asked with a smirk, “Invest with a marriage alliance - holding the marriage as a collateral so that profits and losses could be divided at divorce?”
The son reverted the smirk, “You're intelligent. About that, my old man did not make any mistake.”
Julia stood up and stretched her hand, “Perhaps, a little too intelligent for your pig brain.”
The son already started shaking Julia’s hand before she opened her mouth to make the remark. When she finished, the son’s jaws dropped and rage clouded his eyes. Julia concluded, “If you ever have pure business - buying and selling - in mind, then please do not hesitate to contact.”
The son muttered, “Bitch.”
Julia heard but did not turn her head. She always avoided replying to barking dogs, even if she understood their languages.
When Lindsey got the summary of the meeting in writing, she called Julia, “Outrageous! How dare they harass the CEO of LeanTech?”
Julia appeased her, “I’ve circulated the minutes of the meeting throughout the company with annotations from the HR team that LeanTech does not entertain this kind of aggressive harassment and all the employees should feel free to report their inconveniences if they are harassed by the client.”
Lindsey asked, “Will the HR contact our lawyers?”
Julia answered, “Could have. I have a video recording of the meeting. That would bring LeanTech into prominence in the media. I can fan that fire with the PR partners, too. With our current situation of getting more businesses in the current quarter, I will take a few more days before reaching out to our lawyers.”
Lindsey grumbled, “All these kinds of practices have been taken so far as conventions in the business. Nasty.”
Julia remained silent. Next Lindsey peeped into the most sensational part of the meeting, “When did you get married?”
Julia’s answer was quite phlegmatic, “Five years ago.”
Lindsey almost screamed, “All these years, I thought, you’re very very single and have no time to date.”
She finished, “Good for you.”
Julia muttered underneath her breath, “Ugly, obnoxious, poisonous, ruinous for me … What do you know, lady?”
Then she swallowed the bitterness with a candy.
She was preparing to meet Roman Coppola, the CEO of FiananceAI in the same cafe that evening.
The chapters will be updated every day on -
Blog : https://projectionofnaught.blogspot.com/
On this Page : https://www.facebook.com/WrigglerSan%20hita2000s
Snippets on Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/sanhitamukherjee3478/
~~~~
Each book costs less than ₹ 90/-
The whole series less than ₹ 800/- Here’s the series : https://www.amazon.in/dp/B0F6KTSMPY
