Season Two · Part Two · Episode 10 of 24
The audit finds Jason’s number. Then it finds a worse one.
It took Priya, Margaret, and Susan nine days to properly build the PRIME audit. Susan said more than once that nine days was the “fast” version.
They pulled every client relationship with annual billings above two hundred thousand dollars. One hundred and forty of them. For each one, they asked a single question that proved harder to answer than anyone expected: if the responsible partner left tomorrow, is there a second person this client would call first?
Yes, counted only if the client had met that second person more than once in a context that wasn’t a passing introduction. A name on a distribution list did not count. A name the partner could produce from memory did not count either, unless the client could produce it in return.
By that standard, eighty-seven of the one hundred and forty relationships had no real answer at all.
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Jason’s twenty-two rows became the first page of a much longer document. Fourteen point one million dollars, the number he’d already sat with alone at night, was now printed in a firm document, with his name at the top of a list instead of buried in a file with no name at all.
He’d expected that part to feel worse than it did. What actually unsettled him was page 2.
Hal Smith. Twenty-three client relationships. Twenty-one with no second name the client had ever met.
Eleven point eight million dollars, more concentrated, proportionally, than Jason’s own number. Hal had built less in absolute terms over thirty years, but he had shared almost none of it with anyone, ever, and the audit did not care about intentions. It only cared about what would happen the day Hal Smith stopped coming to work.
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Jason brought him the page himself. He could have let it arrive through Margaret’s office, as most staffing memos did, quietly, without ceremony. He decided against it, for reasons he didn’t fully examine until he was already standing in Hal’s doorway.
“I wanted you to see this from me,” Jason said, sliding the page across the desk. “Not from a committee.”
Hal read it twice, the way Jason had read Sam’s resignation email at the start of all this, searching for the sentence that would let him set it aside. There wasn’t one.
“Twenty-one of twenty-three,” Hal said, mostly to himself.
“I know,” Jason said. “Mine’s not much better.”
“Yours is fourteen million on twenty-two relationships,” Hal said. “Mine is almost twelve on twenty-three, and I came up alongside you. I’ve always told myself I’m the one still doing it the right way.”
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He didn’t say anything for a while after that. Jason let the silence sit, because he’d learned over the past five weeks that silence usually did more work than anything either of them could say into it.
“I keep thinking about Whit,” Hal said finally, and Jason didn’t ask who that was because something in Hal’s voice made it clear it wasn’t really meant as an introduction. “He gave me everything I know how to do. He never once showed me how to give it to somebody else. I don’t think it occurred to him that it was a separate skill. I don’t think it occurred to me either, not until these past few weeks, and not really until right now.”
“What changed?” Jason asked.
Hal didn’t answer that directly. He looked at the page again instead, at his own name above a number that, by any measure that mattered to the firm, was worse than the one that had started all of this.
“Twenty-one of twenty-three,” he said again, quieter, and this time it didn’t sound like a man defending a number. It sounded like a man doing arithmetic he could no longer avoid.
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