for scheduling or capacity. He often didn't have the time which left me to make sense of the files I could only access from his secretary's computer in his New Bedford office.
Yeah, commuting between Boston and the southeast coast of Massachusetts whenever my father overbooked himself was fantastic. A really good time, ten out of ten, would recommend.
He loved to help out local businesses and I admired that, I really did, but the scope of work was limited to managing their books and filing tax returns. As far as my father was concerned, there was no reason to extend his scope beyond that narrow slice—and I wanted to do everything outside that slice. I wasn't looking to take over the world but I needed a job more challenging than repeatedly running the financial equivalent of an oil change to keep me going.
"You were in Colorado this week, right? Your mother mentioned something of that," he said after tucking away the folder in front of him. "What's doing there?"
"Fieldwork for the Thanapoulis LLC audit. Then, meeting with the CFO of Orculus Solutions about their upcoming audit which will require a good deal of time considering they've acquired nineteen entities in the past year. Last, I sat down with Shadyside Brewing about getting their expansion business. They're opening six beer gardens across the country."
His brows pinched together in his usual brand of confused contempt for my initiatives, he asked, "Why the devil would you want to do any of that?"
"Which part? I've been contracted for the Thanapoulis audits for three years. Orculus is an emerging biotech and conducting their audits will pay for my office space for the year. And Shadyside is interesting and fun for me, not to mention setting them up to do business in four new states over the next three years and training their teams how to run those systems and manage local requirements will be hugely profitable for us. It's the kind of work that will grow us from tax returns and P-and-Ls to an organization with multiple deep revenue streams which is the reason we're having this conversation. That's why we formed this partnership, Dad."
"You're getting carried away again," he argued, waving me off as if I pulled this stunt all the time. I did, if you considered a once-monthly revisit to this stalemate all the time. "We don't have the setup for that. We don't have the staff and it's not the kind of work we do."
"It can be," I boomed, too frustrated to temper myself. "And I am set up for it. I've been scaling up for this since the beginning. Remote staff, info tech resources, connections. Like I told you then, it's what we need to build the next generation of this business."
He stared at me for a long minute but I knew from the brackets around his mouth he was using this time to curse the day he sat me down to say he was making plans to step back, to transition into semi-retirement. He was cursing the assurances he'd made that I'd be able to bring his work up to the present century and court the kind of clients that interested me. He was cursing his promise to allow me to work as I saw fit and not exactly as he did because he respected my training and experience, and he didn't expect me to abandon that when I teamed up with him. He was cursing the whole damn relationship we'd brokered to bridge our worlds.
"We're not about to agree on this matter," he replied. "My priority is meeting the needs of my clients. I'd like it to be yours too though it's clear you find that boring."
This was how he played it every time. It was never about smart decisions but me rejecting his world, his clients. More to the point, it was about me rejecting his approach. In the beginning, I'd humored him on this. I'd allowed him to feel his feelings. But instead of him seeing my side of the argument, he leaned deeper into his. Another one of my madly successful strategies working out for the worst.
"It doesn't bore me." I glimpsed at my watch. This conversation was a terrible use of a billable hour. "It isn't what I signed on for. It's not the reason I opened an office in Boston and went after new business opportunities rather than spending time on your client roster."
"I don't know why you can't service my existing clients using the