I could see the wheels turning in her head again.
Finally, she nodded. “Yes.”
I believed her – and I felt a lot more relief than I would have expected.
“LMGK already did their own appraisal of Teramore. I told – uh, we convinced Teramore to let you guys make a pass at it, too, to see your numbers and compare how Exerton would evaluate the situation.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Wait – you mean, this is a test for Exerton Consulting?” she asked as she pointed at the monitor.
I nodded.
“It’s not an actual job – it’s just a test?”
“Well, Klaus thinks it’s a job, and Teramore will actually pay the bill as though it were an actual job. ” Once my check to Teramore clears, I thought. “But yeah, it’s a test.”
“One we didn’t know we were taking.”
“We didn’t want you to go to more trouble than usual. Like how the food critic doesn’t want the restaurant to know when he’s visiting or who he really is.”
“But why – ”
It was a beautiful thing: I could actually see her thought process play out lightning fast on her features. I saw all the gears turn and lock into place as she grasped the entire situation – that this was one of the final tests for the buyout, and Klaus had bungled it.
She gasped. “Oh…”
“Yup.”
She winced. “I guess we didn’t do so well.”
“No, you didn’t. Your appraisal of the market is waaay off.” I glanced over at her, not wanting her to think I was criticizing her personally. “Not you, of course – Klaus’s.”
But she hadn’t taken it as a personal slight. She just gave me a Hmmph, it figures expression. “Well, he always does that.”
Wait – what?
I stood up, suddenly a lot more interested. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve proofed all his reports over the last six months. I have to double-check everything, and, well… he tends to tell the client what they want to hear. Not necessarily reality.”
Whoa, whoa – time out.
She was a secretary – and she knew that the head of the Exec Comp Division of Exerton Consulting was an idiot? Not just an asshole, but incompetent?
“Wait – wait, wait, wait,” I said, trying to wrap my head around this. “Do you know about – ”
And for the next five minutes I hit her with every question I could think of on cash compensation, option grants, deferred compensation, long-term incentive plans, retirement packages, and perks.
“What’s the typical long-term incentive plan for a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, lower end, market cap $1 billion?”
She knew it.
“How can you manipulate stock option grants as part of compensation without running afoul of the SEC for backdating?”
She gave me three examples – two more than I was expecting.
“What’s the best way to structure long-term incentive plans?”
“It depends on what you want to incentivize,” she said.
Right answer. Then she proceeded to give me examples.
HOLY SHIT.
“You didn’t go to school for this?” I asked, stunned.
“No.”
“How did you pick all this up?!”
“I don’t know… just while I was doing my job.”
And she shrugged like it was no big deal.
When it was, as Joe Biden would say, a BIG fucking deal.
The secretary was better at the job than the VP. In fact, she had probably kept his ass from being called out and publicly humiliated on several occasions.
And they probably paid her 2% of what he made.
Not to mention he was an absolute prick to her.
It completely boggled my mind.
I shook my head in wonder. “Incredible.”
“What?” she asked nervously.
“That you’re an assistant and not a junior executive, at the very least.”
She stared at me with those big brown eyes and blushed. “Well… it’s nothing really, just what I’ve picked up in the last six – ”
“STOP,” I snapped. “Don’t do that. Don’t be modest; don’t lessen your worth like that. You’re an assistant, but you just showed a better grasp of the big picture than a couple of Harvard MBA’s I’ve hired in the last month.”
Which was absolutely true – and which was making me rethink what I was paying those MBA’s.
“Don’t play it off,” I continued. “It’s damn impressive. You’re damn impressive. Don’t ever make yourself out to be any less than what you really are.”
Situations like this always infuriate me. She had so much potential – so MANY people have so much potential, like that Stanley guy down in the lobby – but they just threw it all away because they didn’t believe in themselves.