Unbeatable: The Legend of Vincent Scott – Chapter 7: Judgement Day

Tuesday, November 30, 2009

The alarm from the cellular phone on the nearby table sounds the James Bond theme, signaling daybreak. Vincent ends the riff with the press of a button, blinks a few times and basks in the silence for a moment. He focuses his eyes, looks toward and takes a framed picture of his 2-year-old daughter Elizabeth from the table. Vincent smiles before kissing it and tossing aside the blanket.

Aside from several pictures of Elizabeth, movie posters adorn the walls. The Color of Money, Cocktail, Rocky IV, Top Gun, The Dark Knight, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, and his favorite film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Vincent flips on the bathroom light and looks at his reflection in the mirror. The short blond hair is just slightly out of place; his face covered in the stubble of a few days’ growth. He sees the emotionless stare he has grown accustomed to seeing staring back.

The silenced cell phone already starts vibrating with incoming calls as soon as he nears the shower. These early morning calls are his managers running late, “sick,” hungover, pulled over, “in traffic” (behind a train – that was his favorite). It’s all just another metaphor for “I’m not at work when I’m supposed to be.”

The water pressure in the shower has never been enough, and the temperature fluctuates every time the faucet or toilet in the apartment above is touched. He hasn’t lodged a complaint.

The drive to work can be tedious through traffic and annoyingly long, but it is where some of the best ideas are born. Any time Vincent is left alone with his thoughts, his mind is aflutter with activity. The combination of music and ignoring most of the calls that keep his phone buzzing all morning are the only other constants.

Today is a critical day. Christmas comes once a year for the rest of the world, but the last day of any month is Vincent’s holiday. Not only that, but his department is caught up in a whirlwind of political chaos that only he can carry them through: the culmination of a huge ethics investigation of his current supervisor, Keith Dickhauser.

The drive to the Greenfield office was not all that bad in the wee hours of the day. Vincent made it a habit to get to work around 6:30 or 7 each morning, double-fisting a 24-ounce black coffee and 44-ounce Diet Coke. He was not a morning person but that combination could instill energy into a corpse. And the early hour meant little-to-no traffic as Vincent had little patience for it.

At 8 every morning, Vincent kicked off the day with a manager meeting. He used them to tout the prior day’s successes and follies and capitalize on the strategies for the day to come.

Any time prior to the meeting was spent getting work done in peace. When he is on the sales floor he is chased like a member of the Beatles; managers, reps, clerks alike ask him questions, seek his guidance on a number of items or just attempt small talk or flirtation with him. Before 8, none of these rampant distractions exist, hence his early arrival for the proverbial worm.

Vincent pulls into the dimly lit lot and heads to his parking spot. At this hour, the lot is barren. The next to arrive will be Scott Kinsey, the man responsible for the clerical and commission processes. He is another early riser, often compiling 60 work hours a given week. He has a penchant for guarding his job functions like a fortress and attempting to condescend to others like they are not remotely on his intellectual level. In Vincent’s case, that approach has led to some terse conversations between the two.

Vincent swipes his identification badge at the door, opens it and walks into the kingdom. He makes his way down the long corridor to the section of the building where his office resides.

Occasionally he will just stand quietly and still, gazing in wide wonder at what this represents: an office under primarily his jurisdiction that employed hundreds.

A department built on his considerable contributions, from hiring and training to coaching and developing and making decisions, writing processes and creating the structure that grew this division 450% in just a few short years.

No single person has more impact and influence on how the operations run than Vincent, for better or worse. His blood, sweat and tears have helped mold this into a top-flight arena for revenue.

That and the management team he has compiled. It feels like the Avengers or Justice League: the finest team of sales superheroes ever assembled. With the haphazard rule of the Keith Dickhauser administration, the team has seemingly held the ship together with rubber bands and duct tape. Time will soon tell if that ship will sink or sail in the aftermath of whatever outcome befalls their department.

Vincent sets his beverages on his secretary’s desk and retrieves his keys to unlock his door. Once open, he flips the switch and the light reveals an office showcasing little other than clutter and Elizabeth Scott. Between the walls and the desk, the office is adorned with 41 pictures of her in all.

Some say clutter is the sign of an ingenious mind. At least he knows where everything is. For everything he adds to the energy and sales arena, he lacks in patience or the ability to sit still. He has the hardest time forcing himself to sit down to put documents in a binder or organize a cabinet or do just about anything that takes time away from his passion of driving results.

Keith, quite the opposite, obsessed with tidiness, had finally given up on trying to get Vincent to conform to that organizational standard. Keith had abandoned getting Vincent to conform to a lot of things by this point. The confrontations those two had gone through over the 2 ½ years Vincent had worked directly for him had made one thing clear: Vincent had put himself in a position where he was so necessary to the operation that he could get away with things most people never could under Dickhauser’s rule.

While that was good for Vincent and allowed him wiggle room in fighting his many battles on his team’s behalf, it is not to say he can get away with anything. It was a delicate balance.

His first duties in the morning: creating the calling campaign schedule their auto-dialer will perform that day, compiling updated manager and rep sales reports with meticulous notes and recommendations and logging into the dialer to prepare the campaigns.

If either Vincent or Eric Aames, the IT guru who served as Vincent’s right-hand man were to depart, Greenfield’s advertising bureau as everyone knows it would be finished.

Vincent loved this part of his job. He enjoyed numbers and statistics and watching the “untouched” lead counts change and the close rates and answer rates.

He enjoyed making conclusions from the madness and utilizing the information to formulate a plan of attack – when to call which campaigns during a given day or month. He had created his own position through ingenuity and the fact Keith had no idea what it took to run the center only made the path to his rise more clear. Keith had no idea of everything Vincent did in a given day.

Vincent, now seated and mid dialer recycle to prep the leads for the day’s calling, clicked the button on his phone to begin play of his voicemails. The voice of Agnes Landry, the employee ethics investigator assigned the Dickhauser case, came on the speakerphone.

“Vincent, this is Agnes again. Lydia and I received the files you sent. We are getting ready to close out the case and have just a couple people left to call. You mentioned appraisals you were forced to change and documentation that Keith falsified in order to terminate an employee. Please send any supporting documents on that and anything else you may have pertinent to the case. And remember to keep this in strictest confidence. Thank you again for your help.”

Vincent sat in silence for a moment, thinking again about what he was caught up in. He opened his e-mail and located his personal folders, locating the files Agnes had requested on Dickhauser. With clinical detachment, he forwarded them.

Then, like clockwork, the cell phone rang—7:15 a.m. sharp. He stared at the caller ID and sighed. Of course.

“Hello?”

“What’s up?” came the familiar gravel of Keith Dickhauser, gruff and careless, emotionless until provoked.

“Prepping the dialer and running the reports,” Vincent said. “Today’s going to be big.”

“Good. I got #@$% up last night. Too much vodka. Did you go out?”

Vincent barely blinked. “No.” He’d grown numb to these openings—Keith’s conversational left hooks out of nowhere.

“Have you heard any more about the investigation?”

“No, nothing,” Vincent lied smoothly. “They probably don’t want to talk to me.”

He deflected with ease. Not just because he had to—being part of an active investigation came with strict silence—but because he had already committed to the course of action. There was no going back. The cards were in motion.

“Well, let me know if you hear anything,” Keith said, paranoia slipping through the cracks. “I can’t figure out which one of these #@$%! managers is trying to tear me down. There are enemies among us. We can’t trust anyone.”

“I understand. I’ll keep you posted.”

“I’ll be there a little before 8. Are you having a stand-up?”

“Yes.”

“You meeting with these idiot managers at 8?”

“Yeah. Going over the conversion rates and efficiency for November, and goals for December. Since it’s a short month, I’m opening the floodgates on the best leads tomorrow instead of waiting two weeks. I’m sure they’ll be pleased.”

“Good. Remember—our only problems are management problems. Don’t be too easy on them.”

And then—click. No goodbye. Never a goodbye.

Vincent sat for a second in silence. His phone still pressed to his ear even after the line went dead. The call, like Keith himself, always left a stain.

Dickhauser wasn’t all monster. He could be thoughtful in flashes—sending flowers for a funeral, footing the bill for team dinners, remembering obscure personal facts. But his time had come and gone. A dinosaur, wandering into a tech-fueled jungle with no map and no clue. He still believed in the sacred power of the print ad. Still believed sales happened over scotch at lunch. Still believed he could bark his way to loyalty.

But this division—this team—wasn’t following him. They were following Vincent.

It had started as a joke in 2005 to the old guard, this “cleanup crew” calling on dead accounts and rejected clients. There were zero expectations. But Vincent, through pure grit and methodical brilliance, had turned it into the company’s gold standard. He was a general who had built his own army and taught them to win.

He finished compiling his reports—color-coded, hyper-analyzed, drilled to surgical precision. To him, metrics weren’t just numbers. They were messages. They were maps. They were mirrors. His team didn’t just see where they stood—they saw what they were capable of.

That was the thrill. Not control, but clarity. Not orders, but insight. He didn’t scream or threaten. He sold. He sold the team on who they could be.

And it worked.

He prepared the leads for the day like a chef prepping a Michelin-star kitchen before dinner service. Each list was a curated masterpiece—optimized, cleansed, ready. It was science, art, instinct. The dialing machine purred like a dragon he had tamed. This was his domain.

As he loaded up the reports for his 8:00 a.m. meeting, he grabbed his old leather binder—the same one from his first day at ABM—and felt a rare flicker of nostalgia. The building had changed, the people had rotated out like cast members in a long-running soap opera, but the war was the same. Selling. Leading. Surviving.

He stepped into the conference room like a knight entering the court. At the round table sat lieutenants, rookies, skeptics, survivors. He took his seat at the head of it all—binder open, coffee steaming, gaze sharp.

This was his arena. His battlefield. His kingdom.

And it was game time.