Shiny Shoes

By Mark Coyer

A corporate CEO doesn't like where his company or his life is heading--cheating, manipulation, and just heading down the wrong path. As a young man, he saw this type of thing in his father's company and remembers that is exactly why he started his own business. He didn't like what it did to his father and definitely doesn't want the same thing for his family. He knows the finance field is tough, but there must be a way to run this business with ethics, values, and morals.

He notices one of his junior employees has something unique and interesting about the way he handles his challenges. He doesn't know much about the finance industry but is aware that problems exist within the company. Despite this, he seems happy, and it appears he handles things well, from the cheating salesmen to obnoxious customers.

The CEO devises a plan for them to meet, and they immediately become great friends. Together they develop solutions for the company's problems. However, the biggest problem is that the CEO realizes the reason for his personal unhappiness and doesn't like what faces him.

After asking his newfound friend for help to solve the problems with himself and his company, he finds himself in serious trouble. This trouble can only be handled by one source, and the new friend knows what it is.

The CEO goes down while the friend goes up. Now who works for whom?

That is the question for all of us.

The truth will surprise you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781639038220

Book preview

Chapter 1

How I Met Jack

Wow! How can life change so quickly? One moment I was bored at work pushing paper. The next thing I knew, I had an office right next to the CEO of a major financial company. I sometimes still awaken at night wondering how I got to be in this position. I thank God our CEO had a problem getting into his own building.

Let me explain…

I was employed by a high-pressure financial corporation in the middle of a major metropolitan area of Central California. My job was not what I envisioned when I graduated from business school. My position required me to deal with a great deal of paperwork and many customers who were unaware of how the financial market works. My position also consisted of dealing with a wide range of personalities in my department, from the most indescribable egotists to a few hardworking, honest individuals. It took a lot of patience and understanding, which I thankfully got from my thirty years in the AA program.

So you want to know how my circumstances and life changed? Only by the grace of God and lucky timing.

One day I awoke early, bright eyed and bushy tailed and full of energy. I decided to get out of bed and go to work early. When I arrived, I was surprised to find a parking spot close to the door. Surprising to me was another car, a nice limo type, parked by the curb near the front door. As I approached the door, a gentleman with very shiny shoes exited the car and followed me to the front door. Because it was early and before security arrived, I needed to unlock the door before entering. We both approached the door about the same time.

Then it turned weird.

Apparently, Mr. Shiny Shoes needed to be upstairs to lead a video conference but said he forgot his pass card and could I let him in. I didn’t know this guy, and company policy stated not to allow access to any unknown. I was aware this would be breaking policy and could cost me my position. He also offered to pay me to come in with me. He explained he was due to start the online meeting in ten minutes.

I will pay one of your monthly bills if you let me in now.

I thought he was kidding, so I agreed to have Shiny Shoes pay my home gas bill. I thought that was weird but let him through the door. He rushed in and disappeared up the elevator. I prayed he wasn’t using me and had a good reason for being there and I would not face any retribution for letting him in.

The remainder of my day went fine. Little did I know a great deal was going on upstairs that would change my life, where Shiny Shoes had an office.

Again the next day, I awoke early for the second day in a row. I didn’t worry about my normal routine because I had a class scheduled, so I didn’t need to go to the office. I attended a business development class to obtain a certificate to learn how to advance my career through financial awareness. This was a class on modern-day changes and how to integrate them into your business. There were people from other companies and other industries also attending. It was apparent some of them should not be dealing with customers but only wanted the certificate as they disgusted me with their attitudes toward their customers. I found this selfish attitude seemed to be everywhere lately.

Later in the day, when I arrived back at my desk, I once again found a stack of papers to go through, but also three checks. The first check I expected. It was my paycheck. The second was hard to read because of the terrible writing, but I knew it was from my techie friend. He must had taken something out of one of my home computers and was paying me for it. This was not uncommon as he had a computer business and sometimes needed material. It was fine with me if he didn’t mess with my work laptop.

It was the third check that caught my attention and floored me. The check was clean, and the note on it read, We agreed on the home gas bill. The check was made out to me for $500. Bring me the check and I will sign it.

I forgot why I had this check in my hand until I remembered the front-door interaction from the previous day. I was shocked when I saw that the upper left hand was stamped Jack Staton, CEO, CenCoast Financial. I worked for CenCoast Financial. I thought this was really funny, and it set me spinning. Shiny Shoes was serious!

I took the check home and spent all night contemplating what I should do. I did need the money, and I knew Mr. Staton could afford this small amount. I could have an extra $500, realistically only $450, because my gas bill was about $50.

I thought, Why didn’t I agree on one of my higher bills?

But I didn’t feel comfortable taking his money. What should I do? I talked to my wife, slept on it, and prayed for guidance.

The next morning, I knew what to do. The fact that I didn’t immediately open the door was enough torture for Mr. Staton. He didn’t need to pay m, nor could I, in good conscience, take the money. The first thing I did when I arrived at work was to go upstairs to return the check. I didn’t yet understand how important this check was to Mr. Staton.

Wow!

My plan was to wait for him to finish with a meeting or end a phone call, whatever he was doing, take three seconds to hand him back his check, thank him, and be on my way. I was correct about the wait because when I made it upstairs, his secretary, sorry…personal assistant, told me he was in a meeting on the phone. Instead of waiting, I handed her the check. The personal assistant’s composure instantly changed. She pushed a button on her phone.

He’s here, was all she said.

Little did I know my life was about to change.

She immediately ushered me into his office, and he ended his call and rose to shake my hand. I thought that was weird and unnerving, especially when he addressed me by my first name.

Hi, Peter. Hand me the check and I will sign it now.

He told me the reason he didn’t previously sign it was not because he didn’t trust me but because he wanted to meet me with time to talk. I thought this was getting weirder by the second. No chief executive officer of a major corporation wants to meet an employee so far down the ladder. I told him I did not want the check but also had an ulterior motive for bringing it back.

It was a relief to know, in today’s society, there are still honest people in the executive ranks of companies. It was especially nice to know one of them was at the top of the company who employed me. I wanted to say thank you.

Shiny Shoes had a second motive for bringing me up to his office. He told me he had been concerned about the morals and values of his employees and was looking for a new approach to this problem. He had been doing some investigation of me and was impressed with what he learned.

Again, he floored me. I am also proud to know there are honest employees under me, and I have something I want you to do. It’s a difficult position, but if you want it, you would be guaranteed the position as long as I am CEO.

He wanted me to take a position of being a good will representative by taking his thoughts and ideas to the employees but also bringing theirs back. At the same time, I would give input on how he could make changes to improve the company. I had a strange feeling that I had met my new best friend, Shiny Shoes, Mr. Jack Staton. Turned out we ended up more like brothers who agreed on some things, disagreed on others, and barely missed a fistfight on the big stuff.

Chapter 2

I Go to Work for Jack

Jack and I had similar personalities. We ignored our social differences and went straight to likes and dislikes. We could both ignore the other’s shortcomings and focus on our commonalities. We spent a great deal of time talking about a variety of issues. I knew he was not a hockey kind of guy and he knew I didn’t attend many symphonies. We had to find a balance. I’d always been interested in how executives of large corporations spent their day. He didn’t need to know how paper pushers spent their day. I began to see why I was called into his office. By listening to conversations with other top executives and board members, I could tell Jack had an anger problem, and possibly other problems as well.

I was told to keep my desk on the third floor, but I was also given an office on the bottom floor, in the basement. We spent many off-hours together in the basement. I felt the most comfortable in the basement.

But before I got too far ahead of myself, I needed to explain what happened next. Before I even went down to the basement, before I told Jack I would help him, I needed to talk to my wife, Abby. We had an agreement not to ever do anything too outrageous without talking to the other first.

After work, the day I handed Jack back his check, when I walked in the garage door of my house, I heard Abby shout for me to bring some veggies in from the garage freezer. She was cooking a pork roast and needed the veggies to complete the well-balanced meal. When I was growing up and still living with my parents, I hated peas. As it turned out, what I hated were canned peas. I love frozen peas.

Let me explain the difference and how I arrived at the conclusion. On many fall weekends, my sister would ask me to come over and help her husband with the yard work. She agreed to give me lunch and a little money. My brother-in-law loved college football, so we had to be done with the work by kickoff time. My sister made some great lunches, but the first one included, you guessed it, peas, frozen peas. My first taste of frozen peas. I loved them so much I insisted she had them every week of the football season. Now they were my favorite, so I grabbed a bag of frozen peas from the freezer and headed for the kitchen.

Abby noticed the happy look on my face when I entered as she told me to hand over the peas. She had no idea the real reason for the grin on my face was because of the offer. I decided to wait until after dinner to discuss what happened at work. I didn’t want her reaction to ruin my peas, because she might disagree with me on the job proposal.

In my mind, I had already accepted the job and was working out how to tell her. The meal was great, but the conversation after was even better. After I told her the news, the next few seconds felt like a lifetime. She stared at me with a blank look on her face. Then from deep inside her, she started to scream. With a huge smile on her face, she jumped on me and gave me a wonderful kiss.

I knew something like this was going to happen to us! She didn’t know why, but she knew.

We talked into the night about how the new job would affect our current lifestyle. It would mean missing meals, working on the weekends, buying new IT equipment allowing me to work from home, and a lot less time together. We weren’t thrilled about the less time. She stated her concern about what it might do to our marriage. In the end, we both agreed we were willing to sacrifice most of the list, but not the marriage. I would leave the job if it ever caused problems between us. So off I went to a new job and a new lifestyle—a lifestyle far from our current one. Little did we know how far.

The morning after talking to Jack, I was the last to arrive at the office, to my desk anyway, and the coffee was gone. I smiled with a morning grin to everyone on the way back to my current desk. My desk had a few tasks that needed attention. I took a different look around with the thought of how this will change things. I looked at the people working and concluded there should be a few immediate actions. Jim had to go. Bob wasn’t giving a hundred percent of his potential. Jeff, like myself, was having a hard time making the numbers. Finally, the one who was going to be the biggest challenge was Bill. Bill was the top producer. I could only describe him as sleazy. He was a great salesman, but I knew he contributed to the loss of some customers only to strengthen others in the meantime boosting his numbers. Jeff was the one I looked at for a while, wondering why he was having a hard time. I knew the reason I struggled was I could not misuse someone to boost my numbers. Jeff didn’t have enough time to learn the process. I wondered why he was placed on this floor so soon, with the responsibility of controlling someone else’s money.

I knew I was going to have some difficult times ahead. After the conversation with Jack in the early morning, we decided I would do my current job as normal as possible and work with him for a short time each day. We met in the morning at my basement desk. I did my existing job until 2:00 p.m. and headed upstairs to work with him for the remainder of the day. We needed to iron out the details of what we thought I would accomplish in my new role. We both concluded the transition was not going to be easy. We needed to think about the first step.

Chapter 3

The Families Meet

The first decision was to get to know each other on a more personal basis. I was to accompany him on some trips to other company sites for meetings with the executives. My cover would be to act as Jack’s new executive aide. The second decision was to get our families together. After all, there would be sacrifices all around. We would get together Sunday for a brunch at his home.

On our wedding day, Abby was the most nervous I had ever seen her, but with Jack’s invitation, she hit a new high. On Saturday, she went through her entire closet looking for something to wear Sunday. It was concluded she had nothing, so we went to Macy’s to find a new outfit. It was ironic how it worked out, but we would know better next time.

The house Jack lived in was not the mansion I envisioned for the owner of our company. There wasn’t a mile-long driveway with valet parking. There wasn’t a butler to open the door for us. It was an affluent neighborhood, and I wasn’t disappointed with a Porsche 911 Carrera in the driveway. The house was on a cul-de-sac and at least six thousand square feet. This was as far as it went with Jack’s egotism. Abby was dressed in her new $200 outfit, and I was in an ironed shirt with dress slacks.

We were surprised at what happened next.

Jack’s wife, Julie, answered the door in a T-shirt, nice comfortable jeans, and bare feet. She led us to the backyard where Jack was playing with the dog. Jack smiled and asked me if we had just come from church. I think he was asking me why we were dressed up but in a diplomatic way. After a few minutes of chitchat and getting rid of the nervousness, Jack asked me if we wanted to spend all afternoon dressed as if we were in church or change into something more comfortable. Julie told us they have closets for visitors so they will have something that fits us. Abby was hesitant until Julie grabbed her hand and led her off. Turned out they did have some nice visitor outfits. I put on a golf shirt and jeans.

Abby and Julie were gone at least an hour, and when they returned, it was like they knew each other from birth. They were just talking away. Amazing how easy this was going. After another hour, Jack told us the kids were here and we could start cooking the food.

It seemed the surprises and confusion were not going to stop. The young couple who walked in was his daughter Claudia and her husband Jeff. Yep, the same Jeff I was looking at earlier in the week. Jack told me later he did not believe in giving him a job because of Claudia, so Jeff needed to work his way up the ladder, but he added he wasn’t going to throw Jeff to the wolves either. Jack also pointed out that it was Jeff who brought me to his attention, with a suggestion of how this might work. It turned out Jeff was intelligent and quite an asset.

All afternoon we didn’t talk about the business. We talked about our past, our likes and dislikes, our children, and our goals. I found it interesting how all levels of society want mostly the same things in life: security for themselves, families, and friends. It also included trying to help others while going through life. We hung out and listened to music that first afternoon. Jack was a few years ahead of me, so he was more into fifties music. I loved the sixties and seventies, but we both could listen to either.

After being there for hours, we wished each other a good night.

Jack finished by saying to me, Son, I’m going on a trip. I will schedule some time with you through email. Do your regular job until I get back.

At first, the son referral didn’t hit me. When I thought back to that day, I remembered he also called Jeff son. I found out later he did look at us as his sons because once you’re in the family, however it occurred, we were all one family. I believed it because Jeff and I were brothers now. Jack was still like a brother to me, but a much older brother.

Abby and I floated around the remainder of the evening not believing this could be happening to us.

Chapter 4

The Work Starts

Monday was slow. The fact I went sleepless the night before didn’t help the day. One good thing was the lack of coffee at the counter no longer affected me. I must have been drinking too much coffee in the past.

The anticipation of Jack’s email did bother me, and not having it Monday or Tuesday bothered me a great deal. On Wednesday, I began to worry that the previous week and the offer were not going to stand. I wanted to talk to Jeff, but he hadn’t come to work for the past two days. I mentioned this to Abby, so she reassured me the deal with Jack was real, because she spent all day with Julie. Jack was on a business trip to Cleveland and told Julie I needed a briefing before I was ready to go with him on business trips.

When Jack returned, I was instructed to call Bill, my manager, and ask for a sick day. Bill said this was not a problem for him, and he added one of his digs by telling me to have a good time, thinking I was playing hooky. Jack laughed when I told him. We both knew Bill was on his way out. We couldn’t meet at the office, so we met at Jack’s house. One part of Jack’s place I didn’t see on Sunday was his home office. It was beautiful with oak furniture and oak walls, with a huge meeting table in the center of the room. Each chair had a place where you could plug your laptop into the network and have it appear on the main screen. I quickly concluded that he had already had many big-time meetings there and many big-time guests, hence the clothes we were given on that Sunday. It started to sink in the kind of friend I was getting. I still wasn’t sure why.

We started with detailing the organizational levels of management. Jack admitted he got the list from his assistant but didn’t know the duties of each level, which was why he created my new position. To be the CEO of a company and not know the duties for each position was unacceptable to him. We discussed some of the problems we might encounter with the employees before my position was accepted by them. He briefed me on the duties of the CEO in a company. Basically, everyone had a boss and his was the board of directors.

He told me, You are going to need this info when we go into some of the board meetings or high-level management meetings.

After a few hours of discussion, I felt a tingle in my stomach and dizziness in my brain, but we both thought I was as ready as I was going to be. I got butterflies in my stomach when he told me the first meeting was at 4:00 p.m., in two hours.

I called Abby and told her why I would be late for dinner. We both took a deep breath. She wanted to know if I wanted the new position and how much of a raise was included with these new responsibilities. That was when I came back to earth and realized we hadn’t discussed any compensation.

Once again, I wondered what the heck I was doing. This was way over my head. An anxious yet excited feeling came over me and put me back to high school when I raced my way into the state track and field competition. We had the fastest quarter-mile runner in the state on our team, and during the regionals, we ran the mile relay together. Halfway into my leg of the race, I came to believe the competition running next to me was not any faster or better than I was. So I took a deep breath and ran as fast as possible. I gave the baton to Tim in first place, and he ran us into the state competition. We didn’t do as well in the state meet, but I remembered the feeling just like now.

Jack told me earlier he would introduce me as his aide, but I guessed he changed his mind because the entire meeting was about my new position. Mostly discussed was how I was going to report my findings back to Jack. Jack was to inform the high-level managers what his plan for me would be and what my duties would be. This, by the way, was when I learned what some of my duties would be. I was to talk to every position in the company, and my first goal was to determine the general company attitude. Jack told me later this was the most energy he had seen in his board in quite a while. Almost every board member disagreed with my new position. There were objections, from me not being able to do the job to me not having an MBA from some fancy university. Jack had a rebuttal for all of them, and by the time the meeting was adjourned, every board member agreed this new strategy was just what the company needed. So off I went.

The next morning, my manager was informed of my services being used elsewhere in the company. Although he wasn’t totally a bad guy, he was an awful boss. It might have been my impression only because of the attitude he showed me. I was the weak link in the chain, bringing in some of the lowest numbers per month. From my new position, I could see the operation from a new angle. I realized it was why I had a pile of to-dos on my desk each morning. Oh well, it’s in the past now, but I needed to remind him of the decision Jack made to keep me working my old position for a short time. If anything, drastic changes with my job would cause suspicions, and we did not want people talking without knowing the facts.

One morning, I went to work to find an empty desk. I didn’t know what to do for the first hour of work because I had no to-dos or customer complaints.

Chapter 5

Are We Religious?

One Sunday, Jack invited us to his hous e for brunch. By now, we had been there a number of times, so we felt comfortable accepting the invitation. When I told Abby, the reaction was somewhat different than expected. She was again excited because she had nothing to wear, and since it was Friday, we had little time to shop for clothes. I thought, because it was the end of summer, she had a closet full of appropriate