I poured my coffee, sat down on the patio, and told my lawyer to stand down.
He did not like it. Ted has been my lawyer since 1994 and he has been right more often than I have, and he took twenty minutes to explain to me what I was giving up, and I let him, because he was doing his job.
There is a conversion in that note. If Derek’s company hits certain numbers, and it just did, I can take a piece of it that is a good deal larger than the piece he thinks I have.
I am not going to.
Here is what I did with that Monday instead.
When I sold to the national outfit in 2022, there was one thing I would not move on, and it held up the closing eleven days and cost me money.
It is section nine. My lawyer drafted it off a page I wrote out longhand at my kitchen table.
Buyer shall retain all eleven named crew members at not less than current wage for a period of thirty-six months, and shall not reclassify any of them to subcontractor. Seller will reduce the purchase price by whatever amount is required to make this acceptable. This term is not negotiable and the Seller will walk away over it.
Thirty-six months ran out in March.
So that Monday I called Ted back and asked him to find out where those eleven men were, which took him about a week.
Nine are still with the company. Two got out and one of those two, Efrain Godoy, runs his own four-truck outfit in Gilbert now and has eight men of his own.
Six of them are making more than they were. Two are flat. One got moved to a route that has him driving ninety minutes each way, and I made a phone call about that one, and it is fixed.
I spent that whole week on the telephone and I have not enjoyed a week that much in three years.
Now Derek.
He had a bad spring. That happens and it does not mean anything yet, and I am not going to lay out his business on the internet.
He came to the house in June and sat on that same patio and asked me how you keep men. Not money. Men.
I put him in a truck with Efrain for two days. Derek Wexler, in a company polo, riding with a man who used to work for his father, and he came back sunburned and quiet, and he has called Efrain about nine times since.
He apologized in there somewhere, badly, the way they all do. He has not made a speech about me since and I do not expect a public one and I do not want one.
My wife has forgiven him faster than I have, which is how she is.
He called me a dirt farmer who got lucky, on my money, in front of his investors.
The luckiest thing I ever did was hold up a closing eleven days over one paragraph about eleven men, and it cost me more than his whole seed round, and there is not an investor in that room who would have understood why.