When I was hired, Pops was having problems with the person who was his CFO at the time. Pops preferred a CFO who would nod his head up and down, not back and forth, and this CFO did not hesitate to argue with him. The individual also combined his work-hard with a play-hard lifestyle, which my father found distasteful.
The CFO’s second in command, Dave Feldman, was to be my teammate in the outdoor division, in addition to his responsibilities for my father’s real estate holdings. The first morning I reported for work, my father told me to pay a visit to Mr. Feldman’s office and “establish control.” In effect, I was to go down and blow him out, since Pops felt he was too close to the CFO who had hired him. It was the first time I had ever been told to blow out someone I hadn’t even met. But, I gave it a shot, and as Dave Feldman reports: “My first anticipated meeting with Roy was with a guarded sense that as the only son of the owner, he was brought back to Ithaca to eventually take over for his father. Although I had a great feeling of loyalty to the CFO who hired me, I realized that if I was going to work together with Roy in the outdoor division, I needed to dispel any trepidation or feeling of a lack of cooperation that Roy might have with me.
“Roy quickly learned that by working together we could overcome any negative aspects of the poorest part of his father’s holdings. Despite his father’s continual portrayal of Roy as merely a ‘creative, dreamer type,’ with no financial awareness, I quickly found that Roy indeed had a good feel for business and financial planning, as well as for organization. In fact, his creative ability combined with his business knowledge was a great combination, one that I envied and still do to this day.
“We made an excellent team, and I feel that we learned from each other. I also had learned that the best way to address his father’s timetable for delivering reports, budgets, and other operational demands was to politely, but firmly, tell him that we can’t have an answer on a request until we had time to research and then deliver. This was unlike other people on his management team, who out of fear promised that they could deliver right away, hoping Mr. Park would forget. That was their biggest mistake, since he forgot nothing.”
A second assignment I was given was longer-term: to learn as much as I could from the man who was supervising the outdoor division, and then to fire him when I was ready. That put me in a Judas position, knowing that the closer we worked together, and the quicker I learned, the sooner my teacher would lose his job.
The person I was to work with was a sly old fox. He was the only man I knew who could get credit four times for selling a single contract. Here’s how it worked. First he would get a call from longtime cronies in the advertising agencies and buying services in New York such as the National Outdoor Advertising Bureau saying they were about to issue some contracts for Park Outdoor.
Next he would tell the management committee that he needed to go down to New York City to see if he could bring in some national business. Already knowing what it entailed, he would spell out the contract dollars he “hoped” he could sell and bring back home. In the meantime, the contracts were already signed, but his buddies delayed mailing them so he could hand-carry them back to Ithaca and take full credit.
Later he would call from New York and say he was about to lock up the business after his sales presentation, that everything looked good and with some luck he would have the contracts in hand in a day or two. After a suitable interval, he would finally present the contracts at the management meeting, peeling them off one by one and laying them on the table to earn that fourth (self-satisfying) pat on the back. Despite everything, when I retired him, I felt terrible. The old fox got his gold watch, but I never collected my thirty pieces of silver.