Chapter 1

BRAD

Imagine being told you’d lose everything unless you married someone who hated you. That’s what happened to me.

I’m Brad—Brad Berenger. I’m 27. I’m a software engineer, working for Berenger Solutions. No, it’s not my company—it’s Dad’s. He’s Paul Berenger. He build this place. We do software solutions for retail companies—warehousing, point of sale, inventory, that sort of stuff.

I’ve been working with Dad ... well, I’ve been working with him since I was something like 12, but I’d been working full-time for him since I graduated from the University of Illinois. But things were not going well.

Dad promoted me to the head of development about 3 months ago—by sheer necessity. Look, I’m only 27. I don’t have an advanced degree (but I’m working on it). And, at first glance, I was the ultimate nepotism promotion. But Dad didn’t really have a choice. The guy I replaced was dropping the ball. Our main inventory management software was obsolete, and this guy had delayed development of the next one—and, also, kept me on busy work rather than developing the thing. I think that’s the part that pushed Dad to make the change. Dad knew we needed the new version to keep competitive. If this idiot had done his idiot things but let me just do my own thing, it might have worked. But it didn’t.

The problem is—it might have been too late. I desperately tried to design the new version, but the problem was that so many places were opting out of the older versions—and they’d become buggy—that we were having a cash flow problem. I knew we could do this. I know what I’d done on the new version was a solid start. But we needed time—and, to get that time, we needed money.

Dad tried everything. He pitched to every venture capital firm he could find, but no dice. He talked to banks, but we were already in debt.

Then he found a solution.

And it sucked.

His solution was Alex Olson, the owner of Olson Machinery. the biggest company in our area. We had done well over the years—before recently—but Olson basically owned our county. He had built up a huge company that made money hand-over-fist. He was also a first class, grade A asshole, and everyone around knew it.