Total pages in book: 18
Estimated words: 17220 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 86(@200wpm)___ 69(@250wpm)___ 57(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 17220 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 86(@200wpm)___ 69(@250wpm)___ 57(@300wpm)
Even without a business background, I’m confident that I can bring the company back to what it used to be: a small tech firm that excels at building custom phone apps. But my brother Jason’s car accident and subsequent brain injury have sent many aspects of the business off the rails. None of this is his fault, of course, and it kills me to see how devastated and worried it’s made him. It’s my hope that we can build everything back up and maybe even exceed what it once was.
But right now, our team is bare bones, and the people who are left—other than Adam, bless him—are young and green, albeit driven. We have plenty of programmers, but if we could just find someone with some marketing experience under their belt to get our ideas communicated clearly and with a punch, we can sign accounts that will get us back in the black for the foreseeable future.
Determined to figure this out, I turn back inside and sit at my desk, typing out an email and sending it before I have a chance to overthink it.
Why not? I have nothing to lose.
Email correspondence between Jude Tilde
Subject: Re: Consulting for Codeify
Date: January 19, 2026
Hi Veronica,
I appreciate your candor (again), and while I certainly am not owed an explanation for how you managed to find your way into our team meeting, nor am I owed a tax on your time in the form of a reply, the fact remains that our paths have crossed, and my company could use your help.
If you don’t mind my asking: What is underlying your reluctance? Perhaps there is something I can say to reassure you that your efforts will be greatly valued.
Best,
Jude
Jude,
I have no doubt that my efforts would be valued. I’m good at my job, and I could tell that your marketing plan needs work. My concern isn’t that I could be useful to you; my concern is that everyone in that Zoom meeting looked and sounded exactly like everyone at my past position, and I’m not keen to step back into that space again.
-Veronica
P.S. (I thought I was entering a job interview and somehow entered your meeting instead. It was a complete accident.)
Hi Veronica,
I’m sorry the experience at your past employer wasn’t positive.
I’d love to bring you in to meet my team; I assure you, they’re all incredible people. But we are currently operating with a skeleton crew, all of whom are trained in tech and programming; no one here is versed in marketing (perhaps obviously).
You mentioned a job interview in your postscript . . . let me be clear that while it is not in my budget to hire a full-time marketing executive, I would be paying you whatever your current freelance consulting rate is. Please consider?
Best,
Jude
Chapter Three
Veronica
Clara bends, inhaling her gin and tonic like it’s the first liquid she’s seen after forty days and forty nights of stumbling through the desert. She’ll allow herself one drink out tonight, and make it last the entire time we’re here.
Our best friend, Jordan, on the other hand, has already knocked back their first martini and is waving down the cute bartender for another as they say, “A thousand an hour.”
I cough out a wet “What?” and work to swallow my sip of beer. “Jordy, I can’t go back to this guy and be like, ‘1K an hour, sir.’”
“No, that’s true,” Clara says, and I think she’s agreeing with me, but then she adds, “You can’t call him sir.”
“A thousand dollars an hour is, like . . .” I shrug, thinking. “What a lawyer charges when their client asks the court if the jury takes Venmo. I did the math, and my rate at PitchSlapped was sixty-five an hour. What if I ask for a hundred?”
“No,” Jordan says emphatically. “Ronnie, this is your chance to take a step up in the income bracket. Imagine you made a million dollars a year.”
I laugh. “Sure. Easy.”
“That’s a million dollars, divided by fifty-two weeks in a year, divided by a forty-hour workweek.” They close their eyes, using their amazing finance brain to quickly inform me: “That’s about $480 an hour.”
This time, both Clara and I choke on a sip.
“So go back and ask him for five hundred dollars an hour,” Jordan says, and in the few seconds of silence that follow, I find I’m unable to immediately argue with this suggestion.
The three of us stare ahead at the jewel-toned bottles of spirits, cordials, and liqueurs lining the mirrored shelves of our neighborhood bar. I don’t know what Jordan and Clara are mulling over in the quiet, but for me it’s the rent bill I got today in an otherwise empty mailbox, with no sighting of Friday to ease the sting of the continued absence of my severance check. I’m mulling over how getting asked back for second and third interviews is great, but these companies taking their sweet time in the hiring process is not great. I’m mulling over my dead and empty fridge, and the fact that it’s a hassle to walk an hour to use the public computers at the library, and the daily sight of the corpse of my beloved office chair still lying prone in my bedroom.