Chapter 18
The eager beaver fool
When I joined Up Up and Away Canada it was new to the Canadian marketplace as an investment manager. When you join a new player in the market your enthusiasm can be extremely high particularly when you start winning business in a significant and impressive way.
Up Up and Away Canada required a client to have an asset base of $600,000,000 but its initial wins were accounts in the billions. The local investment management firms in Toronto were getting blasted off their feet by Up Up and Away Canada. As Up Up and Away in New York had many clients with subsidiaries in Canada those subsidiaries were flocking to Up Up and Away Canada. It was easy money!
So why was Up Up and Away Canada kicking ass in the market? Primarily because it had a small, highly motivated and driven Canadian employee base willing to go the extra mile and be part of a winning and growing corporation. This contrasted with the Canadian investment management firms that were rather clubby and old boyish and took savage competition as anti-Canadian. They realized rather late that Up Up and Away Canada was a powerful, aggressive and competitive force. In a matter of years Up Up and Away Canada had established itself as a major player in the market. The Toronto old boys club were caught with their pants down! Their mismanagement in failing to realize the threat of Up Up and Away Canada in the Canadian marketplace resulted in them losing many accounts and then terminating hundreds of jobs.
When you work for a gangbuster firm new in the market and you had a charismatic and down to earth CEO that gave a damn about employees and did not hesitate to promote and praise employees you give it your best.
I will admit I was caught up in the euphoria for 5 or so years staying late often arriving home in the early morning. I was negotiating big time high value contracts and getting a pat on the back and a promotion or two and was participating in the incentive plan which was of course chicken shit in comparison to what the Canadian and New York Senior Management Team was raking in. I was enjoying myself. I felt I was contributing, so I busted my butt.
I recall initially how small Up Up and Away Canada was. We all knew each other and celebrated our successes. We had regular quarterly update meetings with a free lunch thrown in. We would celebrate wins. We would celebrate promotions. There were separate adult and children’s Christmas parties. There were golf tournaments with clients. Money and success were flowing. Then the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008 suddenly changed everything.
By 2008 Up Up and Away Canada in Toronto had expanded to Montreal and Vancouver and was becoming a Canadian largecorp. Up Up and Away in New York had decided to outsource to Up Up and Away Canada a whole host of administrative functions due to the cheap Canadian dollar. India was not quite in fashion then as an outsourcing destination. Unfortunately after a few heady years Up Up and Away’s Canadian CEO had been terminated. His generosity and spirit were a bit alien to the tough New York boys particularly as Canadian operations had somewhat peaked and Up Up and Away Canada had little room for growth after capturing so much of the marketplace.
The mass terminations started a few months after the Lehman Brothers collapse. In one particularly spooky moment I was talking to my Up Up and Away American friend, Anne Kolodny, who had a solid Up Up and Away American Human Resources Department contact. That contact had advised her a big termination event had been planned in New York and Philadelphia for the next day. Offices were being booked for hundreds of New York and Philadelphia terminations. We said we would touch base the next day. Anne was terminated before we could have our conversation. I was devastated. A long-term friend and brilliant lawyer gone in the bat of an eyelash. I suppose in your late 50’s you have a bull’s eye on your forehead.
Morale at Up Up and Away started to plunge. I gave a moment’s reflection about my performance which was always solidly rated yet my boss Sally Self had never acknowledged or thanked me. Not only that I had filled in for her maternity leave and for those of colleagues ( and three disability leaves) without so much as ever receiving thanks for that hugely stressful feat. Can you imagine playing outfield on the baseball diamond on the parent’s association baseball championship for my son’s school with a Blackberry stuck to my ear trying to close out a deal in Scotland while filling in for a maternity leave?
My attitude began to change quickly. I felt abused and manipulated let alone massively overworked. I decided to be 9-5. And like when I was working with CRAP it really didn’t make a difference. Perhaps it was because our new hire, Shalla Makmood, announced she was pregnant several weeks after we hired her. Sally and Shalla were both young mothers and that sort of left me with no common connection to Self and Shalla really played that connection up. If Shalla was 9-5 I was going to play that game. What a fool I had been to fritter away my time for 5 years on late night deals. I felt I had cheated my children out of a father. No more. Fuck off Up Up and Away!.
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