Unbeatable: The Legend of Vincent Scott – Chapter 2: The Call-Up

There’s only so much that keeps a man sane when he knows he’s capable of more but forced to do the same thing every day. For Vincent Scott, that sanity was preserved first through dominance. Supremacy. Being the best rep on the floor.

And when that wasn’t enough, it was about setting new records—becoming the all-time leader in every statistical category he could find. He would master any metric where he wasn’t #1 until he was.

And he didn’t do it quietly.

Vincent turned the floor into a theater. He’d stand and point across cubicles like a showman, daring his peers to catch up. His energy lifted the whole office. Especially Bryant Edwards, his next-door cubicle neighbor, who went from a middling, checked-out rep to a top performer—driven not by process, but by proximity to someone burning with purpose. Vincent didn’t just compete; he inspired.

In April 2003, it finally shifted.

Shelly Cheekwood—his energetic but increasingly inconsistent Area Manager—pulled Vincent into her office. She gave him what he desperately needed: hope.

“Hang in there,” she said. “There’s an end in sight.”

Two weeks later, she delivered.

Two hundred and forty-eight sales days after Vincent was first told he might be manager material, the real interview came. And this time, Vincent wasn’t just speaking from ambition—he was selling her, hard.

“Shelly, I have a job to do. If this company is paying me to enforce its rules, that is my job. I see the manager as the ambassador of the company. I will be forthcoming with ideas, but my goal is to replicate what I do now—in 20 people. I’m here to support them and remove their blockers. But at the end of the day, it’s my responsibility to uphold policy and drive results. Would you rather have one Vincent or twenty?”

That was the closer.

And Shelly bought it.

Just days later, the promise was fulfilled: effective May 1, 2003, Vincent was promoted to Sales Manager.

Finally, the day had come.

But it came with a twist.

To avoid potential favoritism and proximity to his peers, Vincent was being relocated to Montrose. And not just to Montrose—but to take over the team previously managed by Ashley Flowers. The very woman who tried to write him up, who asked him to cheat, who held him back.

Now demoted back to a rep, she was heading back to Rockford.

Montrose was, as legend had it, a dump. Its carpets hadn’t been cleaned this millennium, and its windows looked like they had been cryogenically sealed in grime. It sat next to a pizza shop where someone had recently been shot. The call center was known as “The Dungeon.”

But Vincent didn’t flinch. This was the majors. His call-up. And he embraced it with open arms.

With pressure off and the future unlocked, Vincent returned to the floor for his final week as a rep with fire in his veins. He posted a one-day sales record that shattered every metric in the division. He went out on top.

The promotion was announced to the division the last selling day of April. Reactions were mixed. Bambi Jennings, once queen of the leaderboard, was inconsolable. Jake Stallings, another top dog, nodded in respect—he knew Vincent was the real deal.

Harriet Raines, a tenured manager and Vincent’s quiet supporter, would also return to Montrose to help train him during his early months. She’d grown tired of her one-trick Vincent pony team and had long admired his work ethic. This was her exit strategy—and Vincent’s entrance.

Vincent’s first team was just eight people.

Montrose was burnt out. Many of the reps had already resigned themselves to mediocrity. Harriet, Vincent, and a third manager—Lucy Hansen—would steer the site. Lucy was by-the-book, cold, obsessed with call grading, and terrible with morale. She rarely got along with anyone.

Vincent quickly learned just how bad things were. When he started monitoring calls, his jaw dropped. He heard sales reps destroy scripts, butcher brand promises, and flounder through objections with all the finesse of a toddler on roller skates. This was his new reality. His job now? To fix the chaos.

He began how he thought any good leader should—by building relationships.

He got to know everyone. Dick Knoll, a portly family man rumored for promotion. Terry, who tried to impress with bravado and jokes. Marcy, a beautiful expectant mother. Susie, surviving paycheck to paycheck after separating from her husband. Nancy, a frequent flyer on disability leave. Lacy, full of potential but emotionally drained from her custody battles and workplace drama. Anne, newlywed and full of optimism. Katrina, the most senior on the team and the one who tested him most.

Vincent sat right in the middle of the team, taking over the desk of a rep on extended leave. He played music. Made himself accessible. Jumped on calls. Played call recordings and broke down where reps could have risen instead of fallen. He drew conclusions from data. He listened. He acted. He coached.

Progress was slow, but it was real.

Dick Knoll was promoted two weeks in, taking Harriet’s old team back in Rockford—becoming Ashley’s boss, no less. In a stunning twist, he would eventually fire her after an investigation into allegations of having phone sex with a customer.

Vincent took it all in. But he never lost focus.

Shelly, for all her initial sparkle, began to show her cracks. She rarely showed up. When she did, she brought drama, yelling into her phone about her ex-husband-roommate-whatever. Rumors of drugs swirled. Vincent began to realize: she promoted him because she needed a workhorse.

He didn’t mind.

It gave him more space to grow.

He represented the market on district manager Max McKay’s daily calls. Max was old-school. Cool. All about balance, hustle, and making money. Vincent ate up his philosophy.

“What a customer experiences before they experience you is irrelevant,” Max once said. “While you have them, you are the center of their universe. Act like it.”

Vincent did.

He got his first real test when Katrina—queen of seniority—completely butchered a call. He wrote her up. She gave him the cold shoulder for days. Performance tanked. But Vincent didn’t flinch. He held the line. And just like that, she came back. They always did.

Respect was earned.

He was now guiding a team climbing into the top quartile of the division. Harriet remained at #1. Dick trailed Vincent. Lucy and Stacey? Back of the pack.

Vincent had arrived. The dungeon didn’t defeat him. It was his forge.

The road of Vincent Scott’s first management experience in the Residential Sales Division of ABM was a slow, churning unraveling of idealism.

In the early days, Vincent had arrived with fire. His presence alone had shifted tides, energized the floor, and injected a heartbeat into a division that had long been left for dead. He brought light into dark corners, belief into broken systems, and drive into dormant reps. For a time, his formula worked. But momentum, like motivation, has a shelf life.

The early spike flattened. The glow faded. The reps who had once stood on their feet cheering him began to slouch again. And as Harriet Raines had once told him in her hard-nosed yet prophetic way: “When your team is up, ride the wave. When they are down, make them behave.”

By late 2003, the decision was made to consolidate the Montrose and Rockford offices into a single location in Rockford. Montrose was closing. The dungeon was dying. And Vincent, at long last, was heading home.

It was a bittersweet transition. The Montrose reps had grown to revere him, not just for his sales acumen, but because he walked the talk. He had done the job, lived the grind, mastered every script and rebuttal, and carried a confidence so electric it ignited others. But the flame was flickering because at the end of the day, it was still brutal call center sales.

At the same time, the winds of corporate change blew cold. Max McKay—Vincent’s philosophical ally and quietly subversive mentor—was being pushed aside. “Special project” duty. The corporate retirement village for leaders who had overstayed their welcome. Max’s crime? Prioritizing people and sales over scripts and structure. Vincent would carry that torch, even if it burned his hands.

December 1, 2003: Vincent stepped into the Rockford office with the familiar crunch of snow beneath his boots. He was back. And he was ready. Montrose loyalists greeted him like a returning king. Old colleagues embraced him like a prodigal peer come full circle. For a moment, it felt like his territory again.

But comfort has a cruel expiration date. Weeks later, their mercurial manager Shelly Cheekwood dropped the bomb: she was pregnant.

As if on cue, the next shock came: Shelly’s new boss would be Dirk Slabor—a 32-year-old Napoleon complex personified, known less for his leadership and more for being married to the incentives program manager. Lacking empathy, overflowing with arrogance. The storm clouds were forming.

Vincent, ever the idealist with sharp edges, still believed in the benefit of the doubt. He gave it freely—perhaps too freely. Especially to reps like Barbara Allison, whom he had inherited from the reshuffling. A notorious problem-child. A disaster waiting to happen. But Barbara—like many under Vincent’s influence—promised redemption. And for a brief moment, she delivered. Strong numbers. Good call flow. It almost felt like a new beginning.

Until it wasn’t.

Weeks later, the facade crumbled. She was back to her old habits, and Vincent caught her in the act: avoiding calls, hanging up on customers. It was over. Vincent made the call. His first termination.

The room was quiet. Cold. Final. A necessary evil. He walked her to the conference room that had become the graveyard for underperformers, not with pride but with resolve. There would be more—many more—but none would sting like the first.

Vincent never wanted to become the executioner. But as a leader, he realized the weight of responsibility. He vowed to be the champion of the hard workers. But if you gave up, he gave up on you.

Barbara’s dismissal marked a pivot point. No more benefit of the doubt without merit. No more tolerating mediocrity under the guise of second chances.

But the problem with Vincent Scott was he didn’t want to default to writing up his people for a bad call here or there and moving them out of the company like they were being pressured to do by Dirk Slabor. Let’s be real: If you monitor someone enough, you can find enough calls to terminate anyone no matter how good they are.

Shelly showed up late, ducked out early, and wielded her motherhood tales and personal grievances as shields against accountability. When it came to performance, she deferred to emotion over metrics, gossip over data. She gravitated to sycophants like Dick—the eager bootlicker who mastered parroting leadership clichés—but brushed off Vincent’s actual, measurable results like lint on a blazer. She wasn’t impressed. She was threatened.

And when the insecure are threatened, they don’t elevate you. They erase you.

Vincent felt the heat rising long before the fire was lit beneath him. It wasn’t sudden. It was slow—a strategic bleed of recognition and resources. He was, ironically, performing at a historic level. Crushing goals. Elevating throwaways. Mentoring rising stars like Peter Swansea and Jeff Mason. Turning dust into diamonds. He read comp plans like sheet music and orchestrated symphonies of sales. He played the system without ever cheating it—exploiting loopholes like a cunning pitcher works the edges of the strike zone.

Minnesota? He conquered it. Company-wide? He dominated. His team’s commissions grew. Team dinners expanded. The Vincent Scott mystique multiplied.

He brought in his best friend, Ted Benton, who immediately rocketed to #1. He took castoffs like Jessie Stone and, through scripting and belief, transformed them into Top Guns. Meanwhile, Dick received all the blue-chippers—the already-polished, ready-made stars. Yet, somehow, Vincent still outshined him.

But results weren’t the currency of this court. Compliance was. And Vincent, well, he didn’t fit the mold. He wasn’t a soldier. He was a general.

Shelly and Dirk didn’t want greatness. They wanted subordination. And Vincent? He made them feel small. He was the living embodiment of everything they were not—passionate, relentless, adored. So they plotted his fall.

The verdict came in a room of glass and silence: The Aquarium Meeting.

Vincent stepped into the sterile, fishbowl conference room—his quarterly review already feeling like a sentencing. Dirk leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled.

“Your revenue numbers are impressive,” he admitted.

But. Always a “but.”

He cited vague grievances: “Insubordination.” “Internet plan volume.” “Aggressiveness.”

Vincent countered with facts, logic, and references to the very playbook they once praised. Dirk fumed. Shelly remained silent. The decision had already been made.

Dick would be interim manager during Shelly’s maternity leave instead of Vincent. Vincent would be “coached.” And just like that, mediocrity was rewarded. Mastery was punished.

Vincent left that room in a haze. No explosion. No confrontation. Just a quiet, calculated exile.

And it hurt.

Not just because he was passed over—but because it wasn’t based on merit. It was political, performative. This wasn’t a lesson in growth. It was a betrayal. A mugging of everything he’d bled for.

While Vincent had made his share of mistakes—some fueled by pride, others by passion—he wouldn’t erase a single one. Every misstep, every reaction to injustice, every moment of knee-jerk defiance had forged him. For better or worse, he lived out every silent rebellion his colleagues only dreamed about. He was Robin Hood in a headset, stealing recognition from the elite and giving belief to the forgotten.

Vincent couldn’t change the politics, but he could dominate the perception. He sent floor-wide reports, highlighting performance insights, scripting verbiage, exposing weaknesses in sales patterns. He made himself indispensable—again. And reps took notice.

They whispered. Asked who was really in charge—Dick or Vincent?

“Dick sends follow-up emails,” they laughed. “But Vincent’s the one who tells us how to win.”

Vincent smiled. He knew perception was power. And he wasn’t about to lose.

He leaned into his “floor general” role harder than ever. Created culture. Sparked change. He made himself the linchpin.

He pushed harder. Dug deeper. But every time he clawed back, there was just a little less gas in the tank.