The Phoenix Partners

Marty, Lucy and Dennis decided to forego fulltime security in the absence of overt signs of danger, but a new person was added to the Pathway security department and assigned to a station near the executive offices and the Armstrong and McCoy families "hired" a nanny who split her work day between the two families and drove all their children to and from school... because of how busy Lucy and Dennis were working out of their homes.

And I "hired" an executive assistant.

Rebecca Sullivan was a former Navy NCO who had been assigned to Naval Station Norfolk when a superior officer started making "inappropriate advances." She attempted to deal with the situation through channels, he attempted to "put her in her place," and she had put him in his place, which turned out to be a bed in the Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth. There was talk of a court-martial for assaulting a superior officer, which led to talk of press conferences and lawsuits for sexual harassment and attempted sexual assault, which led to two discharges. Hers had been honorable, his somewhat less than. Her slightly evil look of satisfaction when she recounted her story to Marty and me told us that we had similar attitudes about people who try to abuse positions of power.

"She's perfect for you," Marty told me after we had handed Rebecca off to Maureen, the executive admin we had been sharing since the Pathway takeover. "Did you see her eyes when she talked about putting that brass asshole on his back? That's exactly how you look when you talk about Tenneson." I had never had either a bodyguard or an "executive assistant" before, and didn't have the faintest idea what would constitute one who was "perfect" for me. But everyone who dealt with Rebecca was impressed by the way she handled the executive assistant part of her job; I wasn't especially eager to find out how good a bodyguard she was.

Rebecca and Dave Simpson, the new executive office guard, each moved into one bedroom condos, which they said were more than enough for their needs, in the same complex where Marty and I were each leasing a two bedroom unit. Marty and Dave "hung out" together a lot off hours and ride-shared to and from work, and while Rebecca and I didn't "pal around," outside of the office, we did also share rides... and yes, we told everyone it was to save on gas.

Rebecca's arrival also solved another staffing issue for us. Maureen, the executive admin who had been supporting both Marty and me, had previously worked for Pathway's harried General Manager, who had developed serious health issues fighting to keep Pathway from failing under Tenneson's destructive reign and had chosen to take pension rather than returning. Marty had been seeing a woman he'd met in Kelton for some time and was now calling Kelton home, and our consensus was that he should become the Pathway General Manager. So Maureen should rightly have been working solely for Marty, and I really did need someone to support me on the many cross-country expeditions that constituted more than two thirds of my duties as Managing Director of Phoenix Partners... and who knew what was really going on behind the scenes.

"How much do you know about what we do here?" I asked her.

"Not very much about Pathway," she replied. "About Phoenix, everything."

"Everything?"

"Greybear Security is a subsidiary of Global Maritime Protection Services," she explained. "Which is owned by the Soulis Shipping Group."

Of course. I should have seen that coming, shouldn't I?

The rest of Q1 2013 was uneventful. Financials continued to improve each month, and if we could maintain this pace we'd be a $10 million dollar company by the end of the year. That may sound like phenomenal growth, but you have to consider that the old Pathway had been a $10 million company before Tenneson destroyed it. So all we were really doing was a decent job of restoring what Tenneson had ruined. And we had spent some $60 million to get there. But as far as accomplishing our other mission, the biggest result we could point to so far was getting Troy Tenneson angry enough to enact a failed embargo on a Chinese restaurant in a small Oregon town. We would need to take things to a new level.

That opportunity was soon presented to us.

"Westover Foods, Inc.," Phil Barnes said as we looked at the slide he'd put up at our Q1 Phoenix meeting, "Maker of Marvel Bread and Happi Brand snack cakes. Its management has been sucking money out of it while staving off bankruptcy, mostly by squeezing concessions out of their employee union in exchange for promising to maintain the pension fund. This month, they reneged on the pension fund, which violates their contract. If the union refuses to accept contract changes, the company will go under but they'll have their pension fund. If they accept, the company will go under anyway and then they'll have no pension fund."

"Bankruptcy sounds inevitable," Lucy said.

"Union members voted down a new contract by 92% last week," Phil confirmed.

"There are two asset acquisition bids in, one on Happi and one on Marvel," Phil noted. "The Happi bidder is from a global conglomerate and is $680 million. That one's a done deal.

"The Marvel bid is $30 million. The sole bidder is Tenneson Equity Partners."

"Can't imagine the union will like that," Dennis said.

"They don't," Phil agreed, "Which is why they approached me with an overture to Phoenix." They like what you're doing with Pathway. If you do the same with Marvel, they'll make significant concessions on compensation until the new company's on its feet."

"And they'll have their pension fund money from Westover," Lucy added.

"Bidding against Tenneson would definitely take things to a new level," I commented.

"Do we know what it would take to outbid Tenneson?" Arnau asked.

"Tenneson's bid was presented as a take it or leave it offer," Phil replied. "He's made some loud public statements about Marvel being a 'piece of crap loser company' and how he's the only one who will ever bid on it because nobody else could ever fix it."

"So we make him look bad just by trying to buy Marvel after he predicted that nobody else would," I reasoned, "and even if we don't outbid him, we make him go back on his 'take it or leave it' ultimatum and spend more money to buy it.

"The question is, if we do buy it, are we positioned to 'save' another company?"

Phoenix Partners, LLC Purchases Assets of Marvel Bread from Westover Foods

Albuquerque, New Mexico, April 09, 2013 /Food Business News

Phoenix Partners, LLC, Albuquerque, NM, dba Pathway Bakeries of Kelton, IL, has emerged as the buyer for a number of the Marvel Bread Company assets of Westover Foods, Inc, according to a Jan. 28 filing in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.

Under the agreement, Phoenix will pay $43.85 million in cash for the Marvel Bread Company's, Marvel, Pioneer Trail, Montana Heritage and Sitka Sourdough brands, 4 baking plants, 11 depots and other assets. The five baking plants are located in Portland, Oregon; Spokane, Washington; Billings, Montana; and Anchorage, Alaska. The 11 depots are located in Portland, Oregon, Heyburn, Idaho Falls, Montpelier, Pocatello and Twin Falls, Idaho; Billings, Montana; Bismarck, North Dakota; and Spokane, Everett and Tacoma, Washington.

"The acquisition of Westover Foods' Marvel Bread Company assets will enable us to expand the distribution of Pathway Bakeries brand products into the Pacific Northwest, and to add new lines of fresh-baked products to the existing Pathway family of products and expand their current Northwest distribution to the Midwest region," Phoenix Managing Director Geoffrey Lee told Food Business News. "We welcome the employees of Marvel Bread to Phoenix."

A week after the Q1 Pathway meeting we flew into Portland to conduct the first all-employee meeting of the new Marvel Bread. Greybear Security made all our travel and hotel arrangements. There was some joking about the legend that certain executives of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company are not allowed to travel together in order to safeguard the secret Coca-Cola formula (it's not true, by the way), but a limo was more convenient than the five of us lugging our own baggage and hoping that a rental car company wouldn't lose our reservation. So when we deplaned and exited the security perimeter at Portland International we were met by a couple of "Men in Black" types. One of them collected our baggage claim stubs and went off with a skycap to collect our luggage while the other escorted us to a sinister looking black SUV that turned out to be rather luxuriously appointed inside, and once we and our bags had been loaded we were off to our hotel.

The Marvel meetings were a different affair from our dramatic Pathway debut. Westover had obtained permission from its bankruptcy court to liquidate assets without having to shut down all its plants, not because they cared a whit about their workers, but because the facilities and equipment would be worth more if maintained in good working order instead of being idled, and the unions had been the one to initiate our involvement in the first place, so they had a pretty good idea what we were going to say to them about the value of quality products and business integrity. They just wanted to look us in the eyes as we said it. Half of Marvel's 430 workers were able to do that in person in a meeting hall in Portland; the other half did it over videoconferencing in their workplaces in Alaska, Idaho, Montana and Washington. We delivered our prepared remarks and handily fielded questions about our current success with Pathway and our plans to have both Marvel and Pathway products being distributed in all the market areas served by both, but I think the thing that confirmed success in my mind was the reaction from the employees when I told them that the four of us had grown up in Oregon eating Marvel's Pioneer Trail Honey Butter bread and we were going to do everything humanly possible to make sure it never went away. We spent the rest of the day meeting with the department managers of the Portland plant. Then it was back into the air for a whirlwind tour of the Anchorage, Spokane and Billings plants to meet with their managers and staff.

Marty returned to Kelton at the end of the week and the rest of us flew back to Portland, where we were picked up again by our rolling palace for the trip south to Rose Valley. Lucy and Dennis telecommuted from Rose Valley, flying into Illinois for a few days every couple of weeks to meet with the Pathway managers who reported to them, and were happy to be going home. Me? Not so much. Mom and I talked just about every day over Skype, but my extended time out of state had made me realize that even before Pathway I had been spending as much time as I could on the road for our grain cooperative startup because whenever I was in Rose Valley I started to sink into my memories of all the bad things that had happened there. And every visit back seemed like another plunge into the abyss.

My hope for this visit was that bringing my executive assistant and a lot of Marvel-related work with me would keep my mind focused on the present. Spend time with family, work, keep busy. I wondered what Mom's reaction would be when Rebecca insisted on using the second bedroom in my apartment over the restaurant, but I guess Rebecca was sufficiently business-like that the idea of anything other than business happening never occurred to Mom. Or maybe Mom just decided that after what had happened with Kathy a new woman sharing my space might just be a good thing.

If you and my mother were thinking Rebecca and I were going to end up sleeping together you were right. But, as the saying goes, it wasn't what you were thinking.

I woke up to the unfamiliar feeling of a warm body pressed against mine. I sat up with a start, and realized Rebecca was lying next to me.

"Rebecca?!" I was under the covers, in my underwear. She was on top of the covers, fully dressed in a T-shirt and sweat pants.

"Morning," Rebecca said with a yawn.

"What are you doing here?!

"I heard you cry out during the night," she explained, shaking her head to get her hair out of her face. "You were shouting your daughter's name, then your ex-wife's name. I grabbed on and held you until it passed, then you did it all over again and I figured I should just stay with you." She motioned toward the nightstand on her side of the bed, where her holstered gun was resting.

I remembered. Rebecca was using my second bedroom so she could be close by. Just in case.

"I was back in the hospital," I explained. "My daughter was in a coma, surrounded by all those machines, with tubes in her arms and all over her face. Alarms kept going off, people kept running in and making me wait outside the room. It happened over and over again, and then the doctor came and told me she was gone..."

"Has this happened before?" she asked.

"The dream, yes," I admitted. "It happens a lot. Don't know about the shouting. There's never been anyone with me when it happened. The worst is when I'm..."

I couldn't say it.

"Here?" she asked.

I nodded.

"It wasn't just a dream," Rebecca said, "It was more like some kind of panic attack. You need to talk to someone about this. You may have PTSD."

We were sitting in the back of the dining room going over the notes from our Marvel meetings. Zhen makes these great soup dumplings, big, pillowy envelopes of chewy dough filled with meat, shrimp, cabbage and a spicy broth. Keep your oatmeal, your meatloaf and your mac and cheese, this is comfort food.

Rebecca looked across the table at me, as if she was trying to decide whether to say what was on her mind and just couldn't decide.

"How do you do this?" she finally asked.

"No idea," I said in between bites, "This is Zhen's recipe."

"No, I mean this." She said, gesturing at a video of one of the meetings that was playing on her laptop screen. "You find these people whose lives have been crushed, bring their jobs back from the dead, stand up in front of them, talk to them, and help them see a path to the future. You give them hope. And then you climb into your bed and relive the worst experience of your life, over and over again.

"Where is your hope?"

I didn't have an answer.

The rest of my visit to Rose Valley was... uncomfortable. Everywhere I looked, there was a bad memory. The house, where I had grown up and later lived with Kathy and Callie. The school, where I had dropped Callie off every day on my way to work. The park up the street, where we had taken Callie to play. The restaurant, where Rose and Callie met with Kathy that terrible day. And worst of all, the street outside the restaurant's front door, where Rose and Callie had been run down and killed by an enormous "New Maitland Mills" semi while Rose tried to stop Kathy from abducting Callie. When the limo returned to take us back to the airport Mom hugged me and cried. I think at that moment we both knew that no matter how many times I might come back to visit from now on, Rose Valley just wasn't "my home town" anymore

Rebecca was right. I needed to talk to someone.

When you're the Managing Director of a company that's made a big splash in the news and have gotten your face on the cover of Fortune, seeing a doctor for a possible traumatic stress-related condition is more complicated than just picking a name off your company health insurance plan's list of preferred providers and calling for an appointment. Never mind the fact that everything Phoenix did was the result of four people thrashing out ideas on an equal basis and I was just the front man; we had made me the public face of Phoenix. If word got out and caused me to be perceived as "unstable" it might have the potential to undermine our business endeavors, and it would certainly be a liability in our war of words with Troy Tenneson. Naturally, Arnau "knew somebody," some calls were made, and a few days after our return to Illinois I saw a doctor in Chicago who, by the look of the designer furniture in his rosewood-paneled waiting room, was probably not on any insurance company's list of preferred providers.

"The Holmes and Rahe stress scale measures an individual's level of stress by assigning points to "life events," the doctor explained. "It doesn't matter whether the events are good or bad, they're all stress elevators.

"A score of 300 points in a year puts a person at higher risk for stress-related illness. Based on your account of what you've experienced during the past year, your score is 848."

The doctor's diagnosis confirmed Rebecca's suspicion that I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, based on unresolved grief for my daughter and anger at my ex-wife, with the most serious episodes triggered by my visits to Rose Valley. But my PTSD paled by comparison to the chronic stress I was carrying from all the changes that my life had undergone, my workload, the responsibilities we had taken on for the jobs of hundreds of people, and the fact that my friends, family and I were all under the protection of bodyguards. And as if that wasn't enough, I was also showing indications of depression. I left the office with a prescription for some low-dose medications and a stress management plan, and I'd be going back again every other week. For the talking.

Saving another company wasn't actually mandatory to meet Sofie's condition that no innocent people suffer from our scheme; we really only had to save the jobs of the company's employees. The Marvel plants, depots and other facilities were refurbished; instead of "Marvel Bread, a Westover Foods Company," their signs now read, "Marvel Bread, a Phoenix LLC Company" and the employees got a new company name and logo on their paychecks.

Marvel proved to be easier to rebuild than Pathway had been. The equity group that owned Westover had sucked the life out of Happi Brands, but had pretty much ignored Marvel except for shifting revenue from Marvel around to make the entire company seem more profitable. Marvel's regional bread brands didn't have "legs" when it came to new markets, so we didn't ship much Sitka Sourdough to the Midwest, but existing market sales were growing with the population of the Pacific Northwest and Mountain regions, and that population was - and still is -growing pretty fast.

On the other hand, all the depots we had acquired made it possible to greatly widen the distribution of Pathway brands. We had garnered nationwide publicity from our acquisition of Pathway and the Christmas gift cards we handed out to its displaced workers, and in addition to the positive TV and business publication coverage, there was a lot of grassroots "Support American workers, go out and buy Pathway!" sentiment on social media. Wholesale orders for that year's Christmas cookies maxed out production the week after Halloween, and we ended up having to put extra shifts on to be able to meet the demand. It was the biggest Christmas Pathway had ever had, even in its pre-Tenneson days, and the overtime made for very, very happy workers.

The concessions the Marvel workers' union had offered to induce Phoenix to buy their company enabled us to bring Pathway workers up to equivalent pay levels after cost of living adjustments, and once we had pay and benefits equalized in all locations, we lifted the Marvel concessions and announced that all Phoenix divisions were now in synch. The unions that represented the Marvel/Westover and Pathway employees eventually decided to associate and negotiate with us together. Don't ask me how that happened, the unions did it themselves and we had no role in it. For our part, we were happy to be able to negotiate one nationwide contract.