Chapter 136.

I corrected myself immediately, “Sorry, I fumbled my words just now. What I really meant to say was our oh so valuable future scumbag business partners in crime. Ehem. All jokes aside, now that I have your attention, I'm sure you old-timers remember me, so I won’t bother to introduce myself. The fair lady over there is my present boss who has pitched this business proposal, and in the process of doing so, she’s decided to exploit me for everything I’m worth.”

“I’ll get straight to the point skipping the pointless hoobla and show you the numbers as I’m sure that’s all you care about. I know old-timers like you have a short attention span and only care about how much profit you can make from striking up a deal.”

“Here, you’ll find projections on the estimated annual revenue over the next five years.”

I gave them a brief rundown on the projected annual revenues then immediately switched gears into a quick breakdown of the proposal.

“The figure you see here accounts for all the benefits and costs associated with the deal we’re proposing.”

One by one, I went into a few details over each point in the analysis of the reports my boss provided. I posed a few questions of my own that I knew they likely had on their mind and answered them well in advance before they even had a chance to interrupt.

When I was near the last slide, I finished it, “As you can see, the benefit to cost analysis is overwhelmingly favorable to both parties involved in this partnership. With this, I conclude that It is in your best interest to take this partnership very seriously. You’d be making a grave mistake to pass on it.”

I’d flipped through the slides at a machine-gun pace and slammed them with all the specifics I knew they wanted to hear. I’d uploaded everything to the network, so they were able to pull it up and verify all the source documents via the touch screen monitors embedded on the table in front of them. I’d been here several times in the past; as such, I naturally knew exactly what equipment they had available in their meeting rooms, so I came prepared.

I was like the Light Yagami of presentations right now, totally killing it with meticulous preparations. If I had a potato chip in one of my hands, I’m sure I would have done it justice. If there was a strange magical glow effect added to my eyes right now, this meeting would have been an untold epic only spoken of in legends. I even visualized how the camera would pan in and out from various angles in my head with Low of Solipsism from the potato chip scene playing in the background. Whenever I occasionally slammed my hands on the table to grab their attention it felt like I actually saw the dramatic camera shakes. I was truly in awe of the scene I’d depicted in my head of this mundane, boring meeting.

I didn’t bore them for an hour by simply reading the slides one by one to them. I’d given them the most concentrated information. Anything else they wanted to verify was in the documents we compiled. The most important part in the presentation was predicting their final questions and having an answer prepared. Those were the slides that required the most foresight on our end, they were all planned out in advance laying in wait like a sleeping dragon at the end of the presentation.

Everything was to instill a sense of reliability and boldness. We wouldn’t let these big shots look down on or take advantage of us just because our company was smaller than theirs. I’d answered all the questions I knew would come up in the middle of the presentation, this greatly limited them on what questions they could ask to trip us up at the end. I’d utilized the art of planting suggestions to make them ask the final questions we wanted them to ask the most, it was similar to what mentalists did.

The key to success on this battlefield was how prepared you were. If you could ferment in the other party’s mind that forming a business partnership was both beneficial and potentially profitable with your demeanor alone, that was half the battle in itself. How much confidence you exuded and garnered in their minds was of utmost importance.

When I finally paused, and there was a bit of silence in the room, one of the big wigs finally posed the real concern on their mind. “Mr. Genovese, the reasons you’ve listed in the presentation are definitely noteworthy, but you should understand our position on the matter. This relationship is entirely dependent on us revealing trade secrets to your company which is a huge risk for us. Your side doesn’t take on any risk at all.”

“Yes, we understand that you may be concerned about the risk of any leaks, which is why I'll be the only one privy to those trade secrets. As I’m already aware of the finer details related to the firm’s various schematics, I’ll be teaching our technicians first hand how to fix the common faults in those circuits which cause each type of problem that crops up. Anything they aren’t able to take care of with the knowledge they’re taught will be sent over to me. They will never see the actual schematics themselves; only I will. Thus, your so-called trade secrets will still only be known by me.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“Of course… you can naturally turn down this business partnership... BUT... if trade secrets were to mysteriously leak from an untraceable anonymous source when we’re not partnered… well, you understand what I mean, right?”

The temperature in the room dropped by several degrees the moment the words left my mouth.

“Mr. Genovese... are you trying to blackmail us?”

“Blackmail? I would never do anything underhanded like that. In my new boss’s words, we’re simply talking business right now.”

“Do you really understand what you’re doing right now?”

“Of course, I understand. I’m certain there are quite a few trade secrets you wouldn’t want the public to be aware of, right? Considering how some of those ‘trade secrets,’ I was personally forced to put in against my better judgment in the name of profitability, right? Well, all we’re doing is trying to cut a deal here. If you don’t want certain things to come to light, things that could very well destroy the entire firm’s reputation that you’ve fostered over the years, it would be in your best interest to partner with us.”

“What we want is very simple, give our company exclusive rights as the only certified service centers for your brand. It’s a pretty cheap price to avoid a leak that could destroy the public’s trust and confidence in your products. Although our company isn’t as big as your firm, we do have a decent number of locations across the country and a few international locations as well.”

My expression turned disdainful as I sneered at them mockingly, “To begin with, your service center is already complete trash and an utter embarrassment to true repair technicians. They basically just tell people sorry, it’s not fixable, how about getting a new one instead? Since your technicians are so useless, why not just get rid of them altogether? Just hand over the job to real professionals who are actually qualified and able to get things fixed instead.”

“Your workers are even incompetent to the point that you like to claim you’re losing money on repair services all the time, right? Even when in truth you’re making a killing off of jacked-up repair costs you’ve inflated to extremes to disincentivize customers from seeking repairs and encourage new purchases instead. Could it be you’re afraid that the truth will come to light if you hand over the job to someone else? Are you afraid that your annual sales will take a hit if your products are properly fixed by competent repair technicians with years of experience under their belt?”

“Think about it this way, though costs charged to your customers are significantly reduced by partnering with us, you can save on all the money you pay to train those crappy repair technicians. With how they’re encouraged to be rubbish at their job in the name of boosting year on year sales, you’re doing them a favor by canning. Just admit it, you don’t even really care about all those poor saps at the very bottom. If you really did, they wouldn’t be treated like shit when they actually do their job properly.”

“Anyway, with our proposal, you get 50% of the profits earned through repairs on any electronics for your brand. It’s a lucrative enough deal if you ask me. You also receive profits from the parts we purchase from you, at a discounted price of course. With that discount, the overall cost of repairs decreases further which serves as an incentive for customers to flock to us instead of private repair companies that you get no piece of the pie as they get parts off salvaged boards from resellers.”

There were a lot of parts that you often couldn’t buy these days because the manufacturers had contracts that prohibited them from selling certain critical parts to anyone but the big players that held a monopoly on them. This drove prices up further due to artificial scarcity on the market and the little repairman was cut completely out of the loop. It made it impossible for a private repair company to repair these sorts of devices without purchasing a resold donor board. It was a direct attack on private repair companies to try and bleed them dry in the coming years. Fewer things would be repairable due to the many roadblocks set in place by these corporate giants. It was an extremely slimy tactic that I knew of all too well but could never stomach.

“My boss’s company is a rather reputable one and despite being smaller in scale when compared to yours, at least in terms of repairs, we get more business than your firm does. With such a partnership, as an added plus we can even recommend your brand to those in our customer base with little exposure to your brand. It’s a perfect opportunity to expand the size of your potential customer base. Our customers take the word of our repair company as gold after all. Once again, it’s definitely a business avenue you should seriously consider.”

As I essentially outright blackmailed them and answered their question, I simultaneously went through a few of the slides I’d prepared in advance for this question so it would really sink in. The slides really spoke for themselves and I didn’t need to add much more onto them.

“Mr. Genovese, we’ve heard enough. We’d like some time to organize our thoughts on the matter and discuss a few things. We’ll save any further questions for a later date. Should we decide to go forward with this proposal, we’ll discuss the nitty-gritty specifics at that time. We will be in contact. Please show yourselves out.”

I froze up a bit when they suddenly brought an abrupt end of the meeting out of nowhere. As I couldn’t see their facial expressions, I lacked greatly in terms of my ability to read the atmosphere. I wasn’t certain how things had actually gone due to the cold shoulder response I was suddenly given. Did I blow it?

The only person’s expression I saw the entire time was Val’s, but she was like an ice statue the entire time. Her face was practically a Noah mask right now and I was unable to read anything from her. Apart from the introduction at the beginning, she was silent and didn’t utter a single word after that.

She coolly stood up from her seat and exited the room without sparing me another glance. Sweat broke out from my forehead when I saw her response. Was it that bad? Had I screwed up horribly in the approach I”d taken? I had no idea what sort of hell was in store for me when I left the room. The anxiety and fear of not knowing how it went was the worst.