Mergers and Acquisitions Read online

  Mergers & Acquisitions

  A.E. Radley

  Published by Heartsome Publishing

  Staffordshire

  United Kingdom

  www.heartsomebooks.com

  Also available in paperback.

  ISBN: 9781999702939

  First Heartsome edition: August 2017

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to action persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  A.E. Radley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Copyright © 2017 A.E. Radley

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Dedication

  For Emma.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  About the Author

  Also by A.E. Radley

  Also by A.E. Radley

  Also by A.E. Radley

  Available Now from Heartsome

  Coming Soon from Heartsome

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to the readers, without you this would be a very lonely pursuit.

  Chapter 1

  “A sports car?” Kate repeated. She furrowed her brow at the idea.

  “Yes, silver and red and really, really fast,” Yannis said.

  He stood up and paced excitedly around the meeting room. Yannis was tall, over six feet. His lanky frame seemed at odds with his constant need to bound around.

  Kate suppressed a chuckle as she watched him pace. She appreciated his enthusiasm, no one wanted to work with a miserable client. But Yannis was almost too enthusiastic. He switched from one major project to another without stopping to catch his breath.

  “Why a sports car?” Kate queried.

  “We build engines, sports cars need engines. This is fantastic,” he announced.

  Kate suspected that Yannis felt his high-intensity enthusiasm would wear off on those around him. Bouncing around meeting rooms with excitement and informing people that things were fantastic were his way of injecting passion into a project.

  Yannis was certainly a successful businessman, but he also was primarily an ideas man. Leaving the details to others. Like her.

  “It’s… different,” Kate allowed.

  “Different is good. Exciting.” Yannis paused in front of the windows that overlooked the sprawling City of London. “We need to be different. We need to move, grow, change, adapt.” He leaned closer to the glass and peered out of the window. “You can see my house from here.”

  Kate rolled her eyes good-naturedly. She stood up and walked around the meeting table to join him by the window. This wasn’t the first meeting she had spent chasing after the excitable man, and it probably wouldn’t be the last.

  “This is east, yes?” He pointed out of the window. Before she could reply, he was staring intently into the distance, looking for landmarks.

  “Yes,” she replied. “Yannis, let me just get this straight in my mind. Atrom are going to build a sports car—”

  “Ten,” he corrected, still gazing over the city to get his bearings.

  She felt her eyebrow raise. “Ten?”

  “Ten,” he repeated. “Selling for a million pounds. We’ll only sell ten. I’m having one, of course.”

  Kate looked skywards. “Right, okay. Atrom are going to build ten sports cars, each priced at one million pounds, and you will buy one for yourself?”

  Yannis looked at her. He smiled and nodded his head. “Yes, that’s it. And this is big news, so I need my favourite marketing guru to tell the world for me.”

  “And we’ll be more than happy to help,” Kate assured. “I assume you want the works? Press releases, websites, viral campaigns, video campaigns, news slots?”

  “Everything. International,” Yannis said. He looked at her seriously. “It is very important to me that this is international news.”

  “That’s definitely something we can do.” Kate mentally put together a quick marketing brief. While she considered Yannis an idiot for investing in a project that was a glorified toy for himself, she welcomed the money the project would bring.

  “It’s a big job,” he said.

  “It is,” Kate agreed. Huge, in fact. Atrom Engineering was by far their biggest client, in terms of size and profitability. The introduction of a new product, and all that went with it, meant a huge amount of income for Kate’s agency, Red Door.

  Yannis Papadakis was the kind of CEO that Kate adored. He was rich, eccentric, and didn’t think twice about spending a small fortune marketing his already successful engineering company.

  “I had lunch in New York last week,” Yannis continued. “With Georgina Masters, you know her?”

  Kate tried to control her grimace. “I’ve met her a couple of times. Award ceremonies, conferences. That kind of thing.”

  “Mastery is considered to be the best advertising agency in America.” Yannis walked back to the meeting table. He sat down and opened his MacBook. He hunched over the small machine and typed in his password. “Georgina really knows her stuff.”

  Kate hummed noncommittally at his mention of the woman. If life were a cartoon, Georgina Masters would be her arch nemesis. The two women were constantly compared within the industry and by the media. They were both businesswomen in their forties, give or take, who had set up successful marketing companies in a male-dominated sector. Of course they were often compared. But comparisons are rarely kind; they certainly hadn’t been between Kate and Georgina.

  Kate had come to loathe the very mention of Georgina Masters. She was sure Georgina felt the same way about her.

  “She is very interested in the sports car industry,” Yannis was saying. He turned his MacBook around so Kate could see the screen.

  She stepped away from the window and walked towards the table. She wasn’t particularly interested in whatever Yannis was about to show her, but she knew she had to make an effort.

  “This car was built by some guys in California, they are trying to go for the world land speed record. Georgina is representing them.”

  Kate picked her glasses up from the table and put them on. She peered at the website. It was garish. She had no doubt that many would think it was a fantastic example of modern web design. Flashing images, unclear navigation, lightboxes popping up. To Kate, it was gimmicky and crass. Just what she had come to expect from Mas
tery.

  “It’s a bit… flashy. Don’t you think?”

  Yannis grinned. “Yes,” he agreed.

  Kate removed her glasses and tapped the arm on her lip. “If this is the style you like, we can definitely follow this example. Maybe tweak it a little so there’s not quite so much… visual noise.”

  Yannis spun the MacBook around to face him again and started to type. “I want you and Georgina to work together on this. Red Door and Mastery working together. Hand in hand. Then, this project would have the best marketing minds in America and in Europe. Together, the three of us can make something really exciting.”

  Kate blinked. She stared at Yannis, but he was again lost in his computer screen and oblivious to her reaction.

  “You want us to work together?” Kate couldn’t shake the shock from her tone. “Georgina and me? Working together?”

  “Yes, isn’t it perfect?” He didn’t look up.

  “Perfect isn’t quite the word I’d use,” Kate confessed. The last thing she wanted was for Georgina Masters to swoop in and take all the glory. And, potentially, the entire Atrom contract. “Yannis, we’ve worked together for years. I like to think we have a good working relationship?”

  Yannis was focused on his screen. “Yes, yes, of course.”

  Kate knew he was only half-listening to her. “And Atrom and Red Door have always worked well together, haven’t we? We can directly attribute the twelve-percent sales growth Atrom experienced last year to Red Door’s advertising campaigns. Bringing in another voice, it could be tricky.”

  Yannis patted the seat next to him, still focused on his screen. “Look at this.”

  Kate rolled her eyes and shuffled around a couple of seats at the round meeting table. She put her glasses on again. Yannis gestured to a presentation chart on the screen.

  “We need to get more social,” he explained to her as if she were a child.

  The presentation bore the Mastery logo. Kate pursed her lips. Clearly Georgina had presented this to Yannis and convinced him to take a new direction. Upon closer examination, it was clear that Yannis had been enticed by pie charts and line graphs that showed upward trends.

  Competitor agencies pitching to existing clients wasn’t a new thing. Any marketing director worth their wage would use any opportunity to speak to decision-makers. Subjectivity was not just the beauty of the marketing industry; it was also its curse.

  In other businesses, a job may be a simple predefined product. The business makes widgets, a widget has set parameters. The business decides its success on widgets produced.

  But marketing involves so much more. Marketing can be good or bad, or good and bad at the same time. A logo can be loved and hated within one focus group.

  The individuality of marketing allowed seeds of doubt to be planted by competitors. A magic formula could be proposed, fancy charts could be distributed and buzzwords deployed. All business owners want to recreate the success of other businesses, so a marketing agency promising such success was a potent thing.

  Kate looked at the presentation with interest. As she thought, it contained all the generic statistics regarding social media success rates—the standard lure marketing agencies used to hook new prospective clients.

  “Engineering firms can only benefit from social media to a point,” Kate explained. It was a conversation they’d had several times before. Each time she explained it, Yannis agreed and understood. But within a few weeks, his flighty mind had forgotten and she was left to repeat herself. “The average person on the street doesn’t care that the engine on a train is made by Atrom.”

  “We need to be a part of the conversation,” Yannis insisted, clearly repeating the buzzwords he’d recently heard.

  “There is no conversation about your sector, Yannis,” Kate replied. She took off her glasses and let out a small sigh. Competitor interference in marketing was a common thing. One day a client would be happy, the next they would have read an article and would be explaining what they felt her agency needed to do.

  Kate spent most of her days explaining to clients that she knew their market better than the competition. The difficulty was, this was Yannis. The phrase bee in his bonnet might have been created specifically with him in mind. Once he had an idea, nothing could make him let it go.

  “Georgina has more information on this,” Yannis explained. He gestured to the screen. “You understand all of this better than I do, anyway. But the thing to take away here is that this is exciting! We are going to build sports cars, and I want everyone to know about them. We can work together and make this the best campaign ever. Between us, I’m positive that we can make The Bolt something that everyone is talking about.”

  “The Bolt?”

  “I’m thinking of calling it The Bolt.” Yannis closed the MacBook and placed his fingers on top of it, protecting the secrets within. He leaned close to Kate. “I am still working out all of the details, but I can feel this is going to be a huge success.” He smiled at her, willing her to join him in his excitement.

  While his passion for the project radiated from him, Kate felt utterly unable to join in. She didn’t want to work with Mastery. The whole point of running her own agency was that she didn’t have to work with anyone.

  “Yannis,” Kate said carefully, “while working with Mastery would be wonderful, I’m not sure how we can work out the logistics. They are based in New York. You and I are based in London. Trying to split the workload, coordinate the teams, that would be very difficult.”

  “We’re a modern world,” Yannis told her. “We have video conferencing, Internet, and airplanes.” He stood up and started to pack his belongings into his laptop bag. “I need the best, Kate. That’s you in Europe. But I need the American market. Do you know how many millionaires are in America?”

  “Not off the top of my head,” Kate admitted.

  “Me neither, but it’s a huge country, so there must be a lot. Picture it, my Bolt driving down Sunset Boulevard, maybe driven by a movie star or a pop singer. Who knows?”

  Kate knew when his mind was made up. In his head, he was already winning awards and being proclaimed the genius behind the sports car of the decade. Yannis had often explained that his success was borne entirely from his sheer willpower to make success happen. He was dogged in his approach, unwavering in his beliefs. If he wanted Kate and Georgina to work together, that is exactly what he would have.

  Any further argument from Kate would just make her sound awkward. As much as she hated the idea, her best course of action now was to play along.

  Georgina wasn’t a fool, she didn’t get to where she was by not spotting an opportunity. There was no way she’d just stumbled upon Yannis. She’d sought him out, presumably armed with enough statistical information on the car industry to put Jay Leno to shame.

  It was clear to Kate that Georgina was after the Atrom Engineering account. Now it was up to Kate to do everything she could to hang onto it.

  Chapter 2

  Sophie Young watched as Kate’s assistant Jonathan placed the flowers in the tall vase. He tilted his head to one side and adjusted the longest stem. He moved the vase a few millimetres to the right and then stood back. He regarded the vase with an approving nod before looking back up at her, the agency’s newest employee.

  “As I was saying, Atrom are our biggest client,” he continued. “Over the years, the work we have done for them has grown as they have become more and more successful. Now around two-thirds of the staff here work on the Atrom account. The monthly retainer from them alone pays for this building.”

  “Wow,” Sophie whispered.

  She peered through the glass wall into the main office. They were on the twelfth floor; all twelve floors were filled with Red Door staff, making them one of the biggest marketing agencies in London in terms of size and employee numbers. The cost of that much floor space in central London was enough to make Sophie’s head spin. She put her pen to her notepad to jot down the information.

&nbs
p; “Don’t write that down,” Jonathan said. “If you left your notepad on the train and someone found it, Kate would kill us both.”

  Sophie nodded and clipped her pen to the top of the pad. “And Yannis Papad…”

  “Papadakis, Yannis Papadakis is the CEO of Atrom.”

  Sophie looked at her notebook with uncertainty and then back up to Jonathan.

  He smiled at her. “That you can write down.”

  She felt herself blush and quickly snatched the pen up again. It was her first real day of work, finally moving from being an intern to a paid member of the staff. The nerves were really starting to kick in. Especially being in Kate Kennedy’s office, even if the woman wasn’t currently there.

  The number of photographs on display made it feel like she was, though. Sophie glanced over at the wall of framed images. There were photographs of Kate accepting awards, Kate generally socialising with London’s rich and famous. There were even some clippings from magazine articles. Kate hadn’t changed over the years: she looked the same at thirty, at forty, and even now at almost fifty. Her emerald green eyes sparkled mischievously, and her shoulder-length blonde hair was always styled to perfection.

  “Who were you working with before?” Jonathan asked. He had moved away from the flowers and was straightening items on Kate’s large glass desk.