CHANGES CONTINUE

The speed at which the changes were being made, and the clear and continuous success of each and every change we made, promptly gained for me the appreciation and the trust of the whole organization. As a result, everybody began to see me as the visible head of the company and appreciated that their requests and needs were promptly being minded and resolved. I can’t say I had a lot of help from the Managing Director (“MD”), however, it was clear for me that the man felt very comfortable and appreciated what I was doing, and was passing the relevant information along to Kansas City. In fact, as one of the top executives of Continental Grain visiting our operation once summarized it, “Rafael is doing all the managing work, and Stuart is communicating to Kansas City”.

It was by the end of 1984, that the company´s MD was elected as president of the Inter-American School´s (“IAA”) Board of Directors, this was in fact an act of gratitude from the Board due to the generosity of our company in its contributions to help finance the School´s budget (contributions which exceeded $30,000 in that year alone), more than a recognition for his merits as a parent. Immediately thereafter he came and begged me to “help” him from the position of treasurer of the Board, which I accepted. It was no surprise to me that my appointment to the position of treasurer had no other motivation than “using” me in the School Board just as he was using me at Molidor; - to do his job-. The guy was a master at manipulating and in these two cases; he had been very successful in manipulating me, or, to be more precise, he liked the way I was allowing him to manipulate me, first and above all, because I liked the way I was handling things, the way I was showing results, the way the people within the organization were appreciating the results of my work and the work of the team around me.

My work at The IAA started immediately. In terms of organization and handling of the accounting and finances, the school was a mini copy of what Molidor had been when I arrived in Guayaquil six months ago. They had no accounting books, they had no budgets, they had no payroll records, they didn´t have almost anything for my work to start from, and when we made the bookkeeper know that I was getting in to organize things, he just disappeared and was never seen again. I had to start from scratch, and again, thanks to the cooperation of the secretary, Ms Rosy Ibarra and the School Director Dr. Hudson, by mid February, we had a very comprehensive set of books, as I designed a very users´ friendly accounting system that allowed the Director and the Board to have a Monthly Financial Report, showing in a very simple but organized way, the financial situation of the School. I continued my cooperation with the School Board for the following 12 years, and, thanks to the enthusiastic support of the school parents and the companies they worked for, after two years, in 1987, the school was able to move from its small location at Las Lomas in URDESA, to the beautiful campus where it is today in Puerto Azul.

In mid July 1985, a year after I had taken over the position of Comptroller of Molidor, the first symptoms of the jealousy my continuous success had started to grow in the mind of the Managing Director appeared. He left the country on “a vacation of his permanent vacation” to the US and let me “officially in charge” of his responsibilities. In his absence, the green areas keeper, a very humble man who had been working for the company for many years on a very low wage, came to talk to Jorge Lazo and asked to let him talk to me. Jorge let me know and I said “of course, tell him to come in, I’ll talk to him”. The man’s problem was that his wage was so poor (about $3/day) that he said he was unable to live with it, and asked if I could give him a $1/day raise. The man also said he’s been working for the company for several years and had not been officially registered as a worker in the Social Security system (something that was a flagrant violation of the Labor Law). I told the man I was authorizing an immediate raise of $2/day to his wage and that upon the return of the managing director, I would talk to the MD and ask him to have this man registered as a worker in the Social Security as it was our legal obligation to do. That was the only one “executive order” I gave that year in the absence of the managing director, however, at his return, I was summoned to his office to be told by the man at the top, “that I had taken decisions in the payroll area that are only within his range of authority”.

I was appalled and I told him it was absolutely ridiculous for a man who was supposed to be the “important decisions maker” in the company to take such a minuscule fact as an example of what he said was “a serious breakage of the company’s policy regarding changes in employees’ salaries and wages”. At this point I had to remind him that up just until a few months ago, there wasn’t even such a policy or procedures related to payroll. I told the man that if he thought I was trying to step in his feet, he was welcome to fire me “on documented facts”. At the end of the discussion, the man apologized and understood that the whole incident had been caused by his secretary’s malicious intent to “divide and reign” because she was greatly jealous about the level of trust I had gotten from everyone in the company, including her boss. That was the first time I noticed the level of insecurity this man had. He had an inner feeling of guilt for he was drawing a salary (and a big one too) he did not deserve, in light of the little or no work he was doing on a daily basis. My firm response to his complaint was an insurmountable wall for this guy who was perfectly conscious of his many weaknesses and very few (if any) strengths.

After the above incident, I came out stronger than ever, the MD literally accepted the fact that I was the man on the wheel and our personal relationship got stronger and stronger. While he smartly kept the responsibility of all but a few financially related communications with Kansas City, I was in charge of managing the company, literally all the company. The man’s strongest point was his punctuality to get to the office, and leave as well. He was always seating in his office ten minutes before eight O’clock, at which time his secretary had piled up, in a very orderly way all the newspapers of the country so the man could start reading them for the rest of the morning. That was his job, reading newspapers all morning long. At noon, when he had finished reading all the newspapers, he literally locked his office’s door and ate the lunch he had brought in from his home, after which, he took a long nap. At about 1:30 PM he quietly opened his office door and allowed people to come in and talk to him. If it was an important matter, he would say “go talk to Rafael, he will take care of it”. In the afternoon, for the two hours remaining of the day, he would sign checks (something I had arranged for him to do, so he would have at least have an vague idea of who we were paying our checks to and what for), but the man would just sign anything that was put in front of him without even looking at the supporting papers behind the checks. When a few years later we were connected to internet and he learned the basics of it, and when his check book had gotten fat enough to invest in the N.Y. stock exchange market, he spent the afternoon time, literally, checking on his investments and looking for alternatives to invest, with time, he became an expert at it.

The MD was so happy with my work (which was, of course, doing most of his own work) that he even suggested and obtained approval from Kansas City to promote me to the position of Financial Director of the company (“FD”). His reports to Kansas City relating to my work were always excellent, to the point that very soon my salary and my yearly bonuses almost equalled his’.

Part of my compensation package was, of course, as an expatriate officer, the rent of the house were I lived with my family. By 1987, we lived in a very comfortable house in Urdesa Norte, right by the estuary, a place my family and I liked because it was only five minutes away from our children’s school, however, after discussing it with my wife and the children, we decided to build our own house, and therefore we requested and obtained approval from Kansas City to continue charging the company for the same amount of rent as we had been paying to the owner of the house we lived in. That was a no brainer for anyone, and the Managing Director wanted to do the same, but was flatly denied on the grounds that he was a foreigner (while I was an Ecuadorian). That fact resulted in something the MD did not like and soon he started to show his disgust with. The fact of the matter is that with the house rent I was receiving, my total compensation exceeded his and that, in his own mind was not fair. Regardless of the fact that I was the man doing all the management and he was the man doing all the newspaper reading, in his mind, he was the man to make the most money, whereas I was the man to get his appreciation for a work well done. Ever since, things never got to be the same between Stuart and I. He would leave, as a retiree, after 22 more years of newspaper reading, TV watching and personal handling of stock exchange transactions, waiting for an opportunity to get even, with the man who actually did all his work and allowed him to inflate his pocket with over five million dollars while sitting on his fat ass doing nothing. His handling of the relationship with the bosses in Kansas City was so masterly done during all those years that they never knew they had paid so much money to him for doing absolutely nothing.