Chapter 71: The Buckman Group

Was this something I even wanted to do? Right now, I was worth just shy of $50 million. By 1982 standards that qualified as ‘Fuck You!’ money. If I worked at it, I could see myself at $500 million, which was ‘Fuck the World!’ money. With a team behind me, we could add another 0 to the number. When you get to $5 billion, it’s ‘Fuck the Universe!’ money! Yet to get that kind of money, and not spend my every waking hour thinking about it, I needed a team. No man, not even one with knowledge of the future, can do it by himself.

I didn’t tell Marilyn what the meeting was about, preferring to keep my counsel on it. Besides, she had very little interest in investing or Wall Street. She was much more of a hands-on practical minded person, and not one for high finance. As long as the bills were paid, and I was around to nag, she was happy as a clam.

Instead, I called John the next day, and arranged to see him for lunch the following day. We met at a steakhouse in Timonium.

“I was wondering if you were going to give me a call,” he said.

“Were you aware of what Jake Junior had in mind?”

“No. I’m not surprised, but he didn’t ask us ahead of time, or swear us all to secrecy or anything like that,” replied my friend. “What did you think about his idea?”

“I was going to ask you the same question,” I answered.

John smiled. “It’s your business, not ours. It’s your opinion that’s important. Do you have a problem with it?”

I shrugged. “Not in any moral sense. I mean, it’s not like I would have had a problem if any of you had hung on my coat tails on these trades.”

“I think that’s a violation of SEC regs, for Melissa, at least,” commented John.

“Huh. Really? I guess that makes sense.” I thought about that for a second, then asked, “So, what did you think about the idea?”

“It depends. I’d be in favor of the idea, but I need to know the cost and how it would be structured.” I nodded; it was a nice and safe lawyer-like answer, but it made sense. John continued, “The question is how we eventually get the money out? How do we earn any income without selling shares or stocks? As it stands, the vast majority of your money is tied up in equities. Your personal expenditures are relatively low compared to the amount you have invested. You have to juggle your portfolio to buy different stocks, but it’s relatively low key. You don’t actively trade, day in, day out.”

I shook my head. “Not my style. That just sounds like a great way to rack up trading commissions. I would much rather buy a quality stock for the long term and hold it and watch it grow. Or the opposite, find a company in trouble, and ride it down the chute. I’ll make more from the steady rise or fall than what I’ll make playing the market daily, at least on a net basis.”

“Exactly. The devil is in the details here. I’m most concerned with the structure and reimbursement details.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Well, take me and Jake - father, not son - we’re both of an age, we’re stable, we’ve got some cash or stocks, we can probably come up with a buy in figure, as long as it isn’t in the millions. Melissa, too, for that matter, although she’s not as old as Jake and me. I’m curious, though, on where young Jake is going to come up with the buy-in. If he plans to use his income from the company to pay off a loan to buy his share, then how does he make a withdrawal to pay for the loan?”

I gave a bewildered look. “No idea. Here’s another question - can we all get along and do this? If we do this, it’s going to be fairly small and tightly held. Can you get along with everyone? Missy? Can the two Jakes?”

He nodded. “That part I’m pretty comfortable with. We’ve all known each other for years now, except for young Jake, and I don’t see him as a problem. He’s ambitious, that much I can tell, but that’s not a problem for a young man. You young fellows are supposed to be ambitious!”

I snorted a laugh at that. We talked a little more about how we could structure the Buckman Group and make it more than just a nice name on a business card. I was already starting to get some ideas of my own. By the time we finished, we were dawdling over coffee and tea, and we broke apart. I drove home, found Charlie was taking a nap, and then chased Marilyn around the bedroom until I caught her. She didn’t run all that fast.

Two weeks to the day after Jake brought up the idea, he called for another meeting over at John’s office to discuss his ideas. I suspected that John had called him and gone over some of the questions we had raised that day at lunch. He had been a busy little beaver in the meantime. Like John said, Jake Junior was ambitious.

I wasn’t terribly surprised by this. I remember thinking, back on the first trip, how I was the same age as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and why was it them and not me. Now, Jake was looking at me and seeing somebody who was only a couple of years older, and he was wondering how to get his hands on the goose with the golden eggs.

I listened as he laid out his proposal. Some of it was enough to make the toughest accountant’s eyes glaze over. There was stuff about S corporations and C corporations and capital gains taxes and distributions and shares, and God only knows what else. After about an hour and a half, I made the time-out sign. “Okay, so we can do this, have it be legal, not go to jail, and make a few bucks. Let’s go back to the questions I posed a couple of weeks ago.”

He nodded. “Okay, correct me if I’m wrong, but the percentage of shares would be based on the amounts we have invested. If I have $49 million and you have $1 million, then I have ninety-eight percent of the votes, right?” I asked.

“Right.” He tried to expound on this, but I just waved him off.

“Okay. So, it doesn’t matter what our titles are. You can call yourself the Queen of the May, but I still get ninety-eight percent of the vote, right.”

He grinned at that. “Right!”

“Okay, ground rule two - everybody coughs up some dough. Did you have a figure in mind?”

At this, Jake got a little more nervous. He was almost stammering, as he said, “Well, I wasn’t sure what you had in mind, but I would imagine we can all come up with about $100,000.” He almost said this as a question. I simply gave him a half smile and made a thumbing gesture, indicating ‘ Up!’ “$150,000?”

I smiled again. “Let’s make it simple. I want to see a real commitment from anybody involved in this and setting this up will take some cash. If you want in, let’s make the buy-in an even $250,000, a flat quarter million.”

That woke them up, but nobody ran screaming from the room. Well, Jake Junior looked like he was about to puke. John and Jake Senior slowly nodded; Missy nodded even slower. Jake Junior started sweating. His father had to put his hand on his arm and say, quietly, “Don’t worry, we’ll handle this.”

Missy asked, “What did you mean by setting this up would take cash?”

“Well, if we are going to do this for real, make the Buckman Group a real company and not just a business card and a mail drop, we’ll need an office, some desks, furniture, computers, a bunch of stuff. Stuff like a real company.”

She nodded in understanding. “Anything else? You had three rules.”

“Well, it sort of goes with the real company, idea. No man can serve two masters, that sort of thing. You can’t work for other people, too.”

She nodded easily. “That won’t be a problem for me. To be blunt about it, you are far and away my largest client. They already tried to take you away from me last year, remember?”

I remembered getting a phone call from somebody at the investment firm’s Private Investment Group (PIG, nice acronym!) last year, suggesting how they would be better suited to handle my accounts, rather than a mere broker. I had turned them down, and then called Missy to ask what was going on.

Missy continued, “My bet is that I can save you enough on commissions to cover any salary I might get, as well as what I’ll lose out elsewhere. The capital upside is worth it in any case. I’m in.”

John was a touch slower to respond. “I have enough savings that I can convert some of it to cash. However, I do have a problem with suddenly dropping all my other clients. I can certainly agree to not take any more on, but I will need time to unravel the rest of my practice.”

Jake Senior agreed with John, although he had a partnership to transfer clients to, and would need to unravel his part in the partnership. His son looked like he was swallowing a turd; he didn’t have clients beyond the accounting partnership, and wasn’t a partner, and he had nowhere near a quarter-million dollars to invest.

I nodded in understanding. “Okay, here’s a counterproposal. John, you and Jake have two years to unwind everything outside of the Buckman Group. Missy and Jake Junior, you can start immediately. Your shares vest immediately; theirs vest fifty percent now, fifty percent in two years, or whenever they are fully with the Buckman Group.”

Jake and John nodded slowly at this, and I could see the gears working in their minds. I kept on. “Here’s something I’ve been thinking about. I think that $49 million figure for me is probably accurate?” Jake Senior nodded and shrugged. “Okay, that makes the $1 million buy-in equal to two percent. Let’s make things sporting and give everybody here an incentive to do this right, and not just ride along. Over the next five years, we will automatically increase that two percent to ten percent with a stock option program. Does that sound interesting?”

There was dead silence at the table. Everybody was running numbers in their head, but the gist was simple. They cough up a quarter million now; they make many, many millions down the road.

“Sign me up!” breathed Jake Junior quietly. Missy gulped and swallowed and nodded wordlessly. Jake Senior nodded.

Only John said anything, “So in five years...”

I smiled at him. “So, we do this for real. What happens if we grow this company to $1 billion in assets? You guys are splitting ten percent, or $100 million. That makes you each worth $25 million. Are you in?”

Suddenly it was my old friend sweating. “Sweet Jesus!” he muttered.

Jake Junior smiled broadly. “I’ll start doing the paperwork!”

John muttered, “Unbelievable!” and then he put a hand on young Jake’s arm. “Okay, start your paperwork, but until we do this, I am still legally Carl’s lawyer, and so are you. This violates about a zillion ethics rules if we don’t get a third party to vet the paperwork.”

“Agreed,” said Jake Senior.

Missy solved the problem. “I know some guys who know some guys. I’ll get somebody from New York to review it all, an outside source.” The others all agreed with this, and we broke apart. In the meantime, we would continue going as we had been, and the others would start making their plans for coming up with the buy-in.

In the meantime, something interesting happened. I was contacted by the State Department! It seemed that the Bahamian government wanted to give me an award or a plaque or something for helping their police catch that gang of robbers. They wanted me to come down to Washington to receive the award. I told them I’d let them know.

They had contacted me through John, who I had listed as my contact back when I was talking to Assistant Superintendent Javier. He asked me what I was going to do.

“Ignore it, I think. I have zero interest in going to Washington,” I told him.

He gave me a disappointed look and shook his head. “Don’t be silly. If you ever want to go back to the Bahamas and not be persona non grata, you go down to D.C. and make nice. You should know better than that!”

“John, this is all blown way out of proportion to what really happened.”

“So what? You go down, you make nice, you come home. Everybody is happy. Take Marilyn. Smile. Do I have to do all your thinking for you?”

I just rolled my eyes. “Yes, Dad, I’ll behave.”

I called back the under-under-under-assistant who had called me and arranged a date to come down the next week. Then I called my wife. She was kind of excited about it and hung up on me and called Tessa. Tessa and Tusker would watch Charlie for a night, and we would go down and spend a night in Washington. I wasn’t all that thrilled by the concept. Washington was built in the middle of a malarial swamp following a tug-of-war between Maryland and Virginia; Virginia won, and the capital was carved out of Maryland. (It’s more complicated than that, but it’s still a malarial swamp!) It would be very warm and humid the day we stayed.

Taylor got us a suite at the Hay-Adams Hotel, very nice and swanky in an old school sort of way. We drove down on a Tuesday morning and met the Bahamian Ambassador and a State Department flunky Tuesday afternoon. There were some kind words said, a few photographs taken, and then we left with our plaque. Afterwards, I took Marilyn to dinner and chased her around the bedroom afterwards. Wednesday, we slept late and then came home to rescue our friends from our son.

Then it was back to work for me. It turned out that by the time the papers were drawn up, reviewed by everybody, reviewed by a Wall Street lawyer, and people coughed up the cash, it would be at least three months, and this was considered moving swiftly. In the meantime, we would keep going the way we had been. Meanwhile, the Buckman Group’s first client/investment called me.

It was Tusker. He and Tessa asked me to come over to their shop about a month after I had seen their new location. Only it wasn’t theirs yet. They were still at their old site and were looking rather grim.

After the usual greetings, I asked, “So, what’s up? How’s the move going? Did you ever figure out some better financing?”

Tusker looked like he was sucking a lemon, and Tessa answered dejectedly, “I don’t think it can happen.”

“What! Why not?”

“We can’t get any financing! Even the commercial banks won’t loan to us!”

That surprised me. “Okay, truth time. Are you missing payments? Have they said your business isn’t big enough to handle the payments? They must have a reason.”

Tusker loudly protested, “Hey, we make all the payments on time! We always have!”

I just waved him down. “Hey, great, but it’s a question that has to be asked. So, it’s not your credit rating then?” They shook their heads. “So, what is it? You can’t make the payments on a new loan?”

“No, that works out, too. It’s us; we have no assets other than the business. Everyone wants loan guarantees or for us to sign our house off as a guarantee. We don’t have a house! We wanted to invest in the business first,” cried Tessa.

I rubbed my face for a second. I had run across this before, way back when. Typical banker behavior. My friends were doing everything they were supposed to, but it still wasn’t enough.

“Well, nothing new, I suppose. There’s an old statement about bankers - the only time they’ll be happy to lend you the money is when you have enough money not to need it. Which bank had the best deal?”

“Maryland National.”

I nodded. Maryland National was a decent sized business bank; they would grow to become much larger, but for Tusker and Tessa, it was a good bet. “Give me a few days to sort this out. Give me a copy of their latest proposal and tell Andrea not to let it slip away. I’ll have some answers in a day or two.”