Chapter 3

From what Paul told me about the old CFO I expected an old wrinkled butch crone with hairy warts on her nose. I definitely did not expect a forty something woman wearing the current style of women's business attire. If she took off her jacket and undid the top button, she could go out clubbing with the college kids. She was all business when it came to the company's money.

After formally introducing myself to her, since Paul did not bother to do it, I asked what questions she had. I made sure to note them right on a chat window that would send it to my boss directly, well at least seem like it did. I only hit the real send button if I could not sell a client myself. He would get the big guns up here to take over tomorrow. It was kind of an escape button for me if things just went bad.

Smiling at her I clicked on yet another custom presentation tool button that fed right off the quote and enhancements in the current proposal.

"As you can see here, I have taken the list of enhancements we have already included for free in the discounted priced proposal you have been discussing. This chart shows the average market rates for C, Java and.Net programmer hours in this area. Green represents FTEs, blue for onsite contractors, red for India based contactors and yellow for our standard rate for customers with active support agreements," I told her. "By nature of full disclosure I have to note that my FTE number is based on an average salary of a programmer in this area times a 2.5 multiplier. I based that on the best estimation of the true costs of benefits, equipment and associated costs a company has to fund for an FTE versus a flat hourly contract rate."

She was smart and her tongue was sharp when she stated, "You employee Indian contractors to write your code."

"A very astute assumption, if we were based out of Philly," I replied. "I am told my CEO had a very good mentor. He chose not only a right to work state, but also negotiated significant tax breaks to base our company in Georgia just north of Athens. That places us just about two hours out of Atlanta, three from Research Triangle Park in North Carolina and close to the University of Georgia. Low traffic, near zero taxes combined with a plethora of CS and CIS college grads, carrying huge student loans, makes us a very desirable company in the area. Another brilliant move by my CEO was that he pays interns twenty dollars an hour. If they prove they are good enough we hire them on after graduation. He pays off five percent of their student loan balance, from when they started, each anniversary. Those without student loans get five grand, after the company has paid all the taxes, each anniversary for their first five years at the company. After ten years at the company they are eligible to begin getting a percentage of every enhancement they code that year."

We were interrupted by a secretary coming in to tell Paul, the CTO and CIO that their daughters had arrived here after school instead of heading home as expected. Paul looked pissed for a few seconds as he went out to deal with it. When he came back I continued.

"So instead of having to start paying market rate for seasoned programmers, we get kids right out of college that are hungry for experience. They make enough to cover their loans, rent, an entry level car, and car insurance, plus have some extra to start to build up their lives," I told her.

Then before she could start to ask anything I quickly added, "I almost forgot to explain that in this business, any enhancement we charge you to write is added into our product offering. Semi-annually we provide you a link to a self-contained virtual machine that has your current production release plus all enhancements available for purchase. A quick series of setup questions connects it to your live production data to allow you to evaluate any enhancements that you desire."

"So you are going to corrupt our live production data that force us to pay exorbitant consulting fees and purchase these enhancements to keep your software from crippling our company," the asshole CIO said. "A ransom we cannot refuse to pay?"

Ah he finally got to show off in front of his peers that he was listening and appear to have some value. Dick! I am glad I fucked your daughter and I hope I knocked her ass up.

"On the contrary, the database connections are initiated read-only. During setup we pull in five hundred rows of sample data that is stored locally on the Virtual Machine. This protects my company from customers trying to use the demo as a live production system. To keep from wasting your staff's valuable time by doing a semi-annual sales presentation, you are able to make as many copies of the Virtual Machine image as you like. Each will have the same subset of your production data while allowing the freedom for your staff to each evaluate new features as time permits."

The CFO jumped in to say, "So your business model will charge us the full cost for enhancements as paid by the commissioning customer."

Got you now! Hook, line and sinker!

"Quite the contrary," I explained as I pulled up the gold support agreement, which I already included at twice list price. "With the gold support contract, you are entitled to pick three enhancements each year, free of charge and with no cost limitations. The only costs to you are those of your internal staff to install, test and validate the enhancements in your test and QA environments. If you wish for us to do the implementation, standard consulting rates would apply."

Now I see it is time for the CTO to jump in to show his stupidity.

Slamming his palm down on the table, to make sure he had everyone's attention, he boomed, "There is the catch you are trying to gloss right over Joe. You hand us the patch for our staff to hang us so you can charge a king's ransom to fix it."

Did the CFO just shake her head in disgust? Yeah asshole I fucked your little girl too!

"Unless you discontinue your support agreement, our tech support team is available 24x7 to assist with any problems with our software, including all upgrades," I replied calmly as I looked him in the eyes.

Then looking at the CFO, I said, "We would not stay in business very long if we did our customer's upgrades for free? Our tier-1 support desk is manned by our first year interns. Tier-2 is our second year interns and junior programmers. Tier-3 is senior programmers and engineers. If they can't solve it over the phone, then we will cover the cost of sending a senior engineer up to a customer's site to troubleshoot the problem for as long as it takes. We never release an enhancement to a customer until it has been installed by every intern, administrative assistant and any janitorial staff that can send emails, regardless of their native language. Our business exists to make money, just as yours. We do everything possible to ensure we generate as much profit as the market will bear. Requiring us to send an engineer to a customer's site to fix an enhancement or code level problem directly impacts our bottom line. Should your internal staff royally hose up the install and you need us to come onsite to work at recovering your systems, then we would be charging that king's ransom."

Just in push that point home to everyone, I kicked up my slide showing five years of publically available business information from our tax statements showing profit decreases tied to code problems where we had to go to customer sites to fix the issues.

Yep. Told you Paul. I have your CFO nodding at what she understands best.

"What benefits do the higher support levels offered provide," she asked.

Got a slide for that! It has real numbers based on the current proposal on the table. This is going to be fun!

Once I had that slide up, I explained that at the highest tier, Titanium, all available enhancements were included. Changing their proposal to Titanium support had us back at twenty and a half million for a five years, prepaid contract. I then went on to add the bullshit "plus" rider for another five hundred thousand that covered us coming onsite to handle upgrading one development server, one QA and then their production server to the latest version with all available enhancements they desired. Their CFO was still nodding happily and Paul looked like he was about to come offer me a night with his wife. He wanted this so badly.

Paul asked if I minded taking giving them a few minutes to discuss things. I took ten and went to the can to take a long needed piss. He was waiting for me when I got back with a huge grin on his face.

"This still includes those fully customized projectors, right," he asked in a whisper.

In a conservatory whisper I said, "Only if you show me how to run that damn light board and let me have a few hours so I might get a chance to get laid tonight."

"Done," he said with a handshake.

Back in the room, the CFO had that look like she was actually ready to sign the deal up on the projector before I found a way to screw them out of more money.

"Joe we have discussed your proposal and believe we have no issues proceeding as it is now. I have already contacted the board for their approvals. As soon as you have the paperwork ready, we will get it sent through legal," Paul said officially.

I wonder how fast Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb are going to take to jump up this time.

"Excellent, except," I said slowly.

Right on queue!

Mr. CTO jumps up to get into Paul's face saying, "I told you he was going to screw us once he found out we liked the price."

Faking near rage I got over next to Paul, made it sound like I was about to go off and said to the CTO, in a flat even-toned voice, "If you want my company to screw you over on price, I can leave now and let you negotiate with my Sales team. By nature of my employment I am the lead engineer and my paycheck does not get a dime in commissions. It is their job to be self-serving to charge as much as you will pay to line their pockets. It is my job to show you what our product can do for you and not canned marketing presentations off our website."

Shoot yourself in the foot, please. I can wait.

Paul showed he at least learned something from his father. He kicked out everyone but the CFO.

"I am embarrassed you had to witness such a childish display from a corporate executive at my company. If you are willing to keep from throwing us to your sales team, I would appreciate continuing the negotiations with you directly," Paul said sounding like a real CEO.

Shit I could add two million for that little stunt by his CTO and the CFO would think they dodged the bullet.

Taking a minute to look like I was getting my composure, I picked up my laptop and opening up my customer pricing interface.

"Let me start again," I said now sounding calm and collected. "I have a lot of pull on the pricing and this is a very big contract for us. So here is what I propose as changes."

Starting with the big ticket support costs, I told them I was going to give them the Titanium support with the Plus rider at the original sixteen and a half million we started at earlier.