As August drew to a close and my leads and interviews in the New York area and Omaha did not amount to anything solid, I started to spend more and more time focusing on opportunities and contacts elsewhere in the country.
At the beginning of the summer I had willing to move almost anywhere for the right opportunity—but by the end of the end of August I was willing to move anywhere for any opportunity.
Cindy and I wanted to live in New York City or Omaha, but it came to a point where we were willing to go wherever a job would take us.
In mid-August, I had been contacted by a Sloan School of Management student who was doing a summer internship in Plano, Texas at an entrepreneurial firm that was a private equity fund, venture capital firm and hedge fund all rolled into one. He had told me to get in touch with his boss, Charlie Gallamore, the founder of Southwest Texas Capital.
I called Charlie and we had a great conversation which ended with him inviting me to Plano for a meeting.
Coincidently, that same day, I came across an article in the news touting Plano as the most affluent city in the United States—measured with respect to per capita income versus cost of living. I had never thought about moving to Texas but I was suddenly intrigued.
In early September, within days after leaving my sublet in Manhattan and moving to my sister’s house in Larchmont, I took an early morning flight from Westchester Airport to Dallas to meet with Charlie and the gang.
When I walked in the door of the Southwest Texas Capital’s offices in Plano, I was in for a real treat.
Charlie quickly offered me a can of Loco Tonic, an energy drink he had invented and was promoting for the Latino market—and things took off from there.
One by one, I met with Charlie and his entrepreneurial partners. As awkward as I felt being in an environment very different from what I was used to in corporate New York, Charlie and his gang made me feel right at home. Their charm and charisma were enticing—or was it the Loco Tonic?
Besides Loco Tonic, the firm had several other interesting projects in the works, including a startup called RX HBO which sold hyperbaric chambers for chronic wound care and a municipal bond hedge fund.
At the end of a long and interesting day, Charlie astounded me when after flying me in for an interview, he told me he would love to hire me but did not have any money to pay me.
“Would you consider working for commissions?” he asked.
I was already in touch with several boutique investment banks in New York City who were considering giving me a platform from which to work but no base salary. It was called eat what you kill.
It was typical in some industries for sales-people to live off commissions—but was this the new paradigm for financial services?
No one, it seemed at the time, wanted to increase their overhead with the economy looking so bleak.
I had not given it serious consideration at the beginning of the summer, but with half a dozen of my potential employers talking about revenue sharing with no base—and nothing else working out—I started giving such arrangements serious thought. Nevertheless, it did not seem practical to move from New York to Plano for such an arrangement.
From Dallas, I flew to Omaha to spend a few days with my family.
While in Omaha, I had hoped to meet with the CEO of Mutual of Omaha Bank, a new division of the well-known Mutual of Omaha Insurance Company, but unfortunately the CEO had to leave town on urgent business. He was buying a distressed bank in Arizona.
I returned to New York having had a great trip to Plano and Omaha, but I still did not have a job.
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