So I begin to tell him of one of the most harrowing telephone conversations I have ever had thus far in my short but adventurous life. I will not prose this because I have already spent too much time thinking about it. turns out that the Ferret recently spoke with Cleopatra about our little shared business venture, a fledgling spinoff of another company we had started a few years earlier. In our youth and inexperience we gave Ferret 5% ownership in the company, not understanding what 5% of a company could mean. a year or so later I told both of them that I changed my mind. I had been crunching numbers and it turned out that five percent of a large company could be quite a fortune. I could see from the current business model that we were soon going to become a large business. the problem with large businesses is that through you may be earning large bank on the books, in reality you may not be doing so well. all the money needs to be put back into the company. So you may show a profit of say half a mil. but you may have spent it all on capital reinvestment and loan payoffs. But that five percent owner may still want his five percent and that’s twenty-five grand a year right there if you stay at the same place.
Well my decision to take the shares back didn’t go over well with Ferret and Cleo at the time just didn’t understand what I was saying. she now regrets that decision more than any other for so many reasons. Ferret has been most unpleasant to us over the years never lifting a finger to help in the business or even pay much attention to it except to ask every year, where’s my money? and now that we are about to sell this little spinoff for a very small amount of money just so Cleo and I can get out of business with one another, Ferret is most concerned with his share of that pie. It turns out he is offering both of us to buy him out. but not for what his shares are worth but for double because he sees there is a premium for the shares that will yield the buyer with the majority shares in the company.
Now because Cleo and I cannot see eye to eye on things yet and still unfortunately we are constantly arguing and have even taken as I have written about earlier to taking up our own individual attorneys to battle each other to the despicable demise of all of our life’s earnings. Uncannily we still speak as friends on the phone all the time but over certain business matters we just cannot get it together. so I say to Ferret casually, well you wouldn’t sell your shares to her would you? “at this point I will sell them to whoever gives me the money first,” he tells me. “but if you sell your shares to her she will gain majority control of this company and could vote on all sorts of matters that I will have no say in. in fact you know as well as I that she has every intention of taking almost all of the proceeds of the impending sale and leaving me with very little.” “I know. so why don’t you buy them.” “I’ve already told you, I don’t want to buy them for double what they are worth if we are going to sell in two weeks. it would be foolish.” “well then she might.” “well if she buys those shares you know the scenario is going to be the company is going to sell, she’s going to walk away with just under a million bucks, your going to walk with a hundred thou and I’m going to get next to nothing for a company I started. Bro you know I founded this company. This is my baby. you can’t sell me out. you would sell me out after fifteen years of friendship knowing what would happen?” “Look man, at one time we had a friendship, but this isn’t about friendship. This is about money. and I have to start thinking about myself.”