Chapter 4: Dan

Alex and I started officially dating. It was weird, funny, strange, odd and just wonderful all at the same time. We had so many things in common but also a lot of things that we just couldn't come to terms with. Usually, we just laughed and found a way to work around those issues or I gave in, or she did. The age difference was never really a factor. Mostly because I'm old and she's an old fashioned girl. We both had issues with trust and giving our hearts because of our pasts. We were kind of like 2 broken winged birds, who on their own, could never fly again but together, flying was not only easy, it was magical.

Our company DanAlex Inc. started as a class project. We were assigned to come up with a way to modernize an existing business plan or to make it more flexible.

We decided to set up a faux Temp agency. It would be a partnership between Alex and me. By this time we were beyond dating, but not quite intimate. We hugged and kissed a lot though. I guess we were both kind of gun-shy at that time.

The difference in our temp agency though was that we would make usage of an ever renewing resource. Our resource also had an extremely broad base to draw on. We were using college students to fill the jobs. Alex would handle the administrative aspects and I'd handle the management duties. She took care of the payroll, payments, taxes, billing, records etc. I took care of scheduling, meeting with clients, meeting with workers and arranging and making arrangements to secure both customers and workers. We had spread sheets, flyers, our business plan, and sample reports. We even went so far as to make letterhead and business cards. It was brilliant.

When we went to our pre-submission review with our professor, he reminded us that this was a group project. A group needed four members, 3 at the very least. But he liked our idea. He suggested a couple of bright students in our class who were in underperforming groups. We spoke to several and picked Darla Martin to work with us. We didn't make her a partner but she became a full part of the team. Our meeting with Darla was really funny. She was tall and thin and had a very bubbly personality.

Her first words to us were, "So the professor told you two to actually have a group, huh?" She smiled and said that she wanted to work with us anyway.

"But you guys are hard to talk to. You're so, "us against the world." Are you guys, like married or something?"

"Or something," said Alex. "But we'll keep you posted."

The thing that made Darla great was that her range of skills covered an area that neither, Alex or I, excelled in.

Darla was a genius in marketing. Alex and I were so busy designing and creating our business plan and procedures that we hadn't considered how we'd market it. Darla took over marketing. We got our A. We must have lost some of our cards or flyers somewhere though, because the very night that we saw our posted grade, we got a call. Someone had found one of our cards and tried to hire us. We called Darla and told her about it. She laughed with us.

Then Alex turned to me with a serious look on her face and asked me. "Dan, what are we going to do next?"

"Whatever you want Alex," I said.

"Oh that's so cute," said Darla.

"No seriously," said Alex. "What are we going to do, after all of this?"

"I don't want us to drift apart and you work for one company and I work for another company. Then we never see each other, we grow apart, our sex life goes to hell and you start cheating on me." Darla and I looked at her crazily.

"And we get a divorce," she said.

"Alex, I'd never cheat on you," I said. "I'd die first, and we don't have a sex life anyway."

"You guys aren't fucking? You're kidding me, right?" said Darla.

"What's your answer?" I asked.

"Let's do it for real," said Alex.

To make a long story short, we did. Our plan was to find situational workers or temps for a wide variety of businesses to supplement or complement our customers' existing workforce. If a business needed secretaries or clerks, we gave them business majors. If they needed designers or draftsmen, we had engineering students. We had chemists, medical technicians and lab techs. Almost any job they needed to fill, we could. It was a triple win situation. The businesses got a steady supply of highly skilled and easily adaptable workers, some of whom got permanent positions. College students everywhere need money, so we had no shortage of students volunteering. And we made money, lots of money. Let's face it, our startup costs were next to nothing. We already had everything made for the project. It was pure profit. Alex started on the books, I started calling on customers and Darla started a marketing campaign, with flyers, free radio and internet spots and word of mouth.

After a while I found a far more organized way of selecting the proper applicants for positions. I set up a referral system of professors in each of the disciplines we needed. The professors got a small percentage for recommending their best and brightest students. This also made the students work and study harder in hopes of getting those recommendations. Being one of our faculty advisors was a highly sough after position. If you were a math teacher who worked with us, you got a lot more students in your class because lots of students wanted those jobs.