Chapter 18: The Numbers

The Kellerman Foodservice account had been with Mercer Industrial for twenty-six years, since before Robert had even taken over from his father, and losing it in January felt to Robert like losing something with actual roots, not just a line item on a spreadsheet. They didn’t go to Hawthorne — that was almost worse, somehow, a distributor two states over nobody had even heard of before, which meant it wasn’t even about competitive pricing anymore. It was about something else entirely, something Robert didn’t want to name out loud even inside his own head.

The bank called a meeting for the following week. First Ridge National had financed Mercer’s expansion loan for the Fairlane property, and the loan officer who called — a man named Dennis Farrow, younger than Grant, wearing a tie that looked more expensive than anything in Robert’s closet — used phrases like “reputational risk factors” and “customer retention metrics” and “market position concerns,” which was banker language, Robert understood well enough by then, for we’re getting nervous about lending you money to grow a company that seems to be losing customers instead of gaining them.

Robert sat in the conference room at the bank’s downtown branch, Grant beside him in a suit that fit a little looser than it used to, and listened to Farrow walk through a slide deck — an actual slide deck, projected on a screen, for a conversation about a family hardware distributor — that laid out, in careful corporate language, exactly how much confidence had eroded in Mercer Industrial’s stability over the past eight months.

“We’re not saying the loan’s in jeopardy,” Farrow said, in the tone people use right before saying something is, in fact, in jeopardy. “We just want to understand what’s driving the account losses before we release the next disbursement for Fairlane. Two major accounts in under a year, after — what, no losses of that size in the previous five? That’s a pattern our underwriting team is going to ask questions about.”