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The price/ton for a custom crush client is highly variable: anywhere from $750-3000+/ton. That does not include aging. There is also a "LONG STORY SHORT" at the bottom of this answer.This isn't an easily answered question because the quality and kind of service you get at different facilities will be dramatically different. Before we get into a more thorough explanation as to why the price is so variable, let's establish a few industry standards here:Custom crushing costs usually only cover primary fermentation and getting the wine to barrel (even if it's not through M/L!). Most custom crush fees basically cover you until the end of November (IF THAT!), by which time you're expected to have removed the wine from the facility or start incurring gallon or barrel/month storage charges.The aging, racking, blending, and bottling costs are almost NEVER included in a custom crush tonnage price.The term "custom crush" means very different things to different people.There is no quality guarantee with most custom crush agreements. I've had to fix wines that came from custom crush houses where the sanitation/fermentation practices were downright scary.The custom crush fee and other expenses during primary and M/L fermentation are probably only 1/6 to 1/5 of your total expenses. Assuming that this is the number one cost you have to worry about is not realistic.The biggest reasons custom crushing fees vary is:Some custom crush houses will quote you as low as $350 or $500/ton. "But Luke! That's lower than the $750 you said above!" Yup, it is. The reason it's so low is because these facilities often nickel and dime you for every lab test and charge you per pound on all fermentation supplies used.Additionally, a lot of the big, factory style custom crush houses are only charging you for the bare minimum work. Meaning that if you then ask them to do extra pumpovers or anything not covered by the original contract, you're paying for labor hourly.The big custom crush factories are not really trying that hard to make really top-notch wine. They're focused on getting as much tonnage through the facility as possible.Sanitation concerns are a big deal, and you need to pay attention to them. A lot of bigger houses have fixed lines with non-dumping valves that are literally impossible to clean. A lot of wineries will run the same hoses/pump through all the tanks in a row without rinsing or cleaning in between (for the most part this is okay, but if your tank on AMH gets pumped over after a tank running UV43, within one day or two AMH might not be the primary yeast culture in that lot), which can lead to spoilage issues because a lot of must in a custom crush house might not be of the best quality, and you might be risking introduction of botrytis mold or spoilage organisms between tanks through contaminated hoses.Attention. Think about the kind of attention you get when you eat at McDonald's. Think about that compared to the kind of attention you get when you eat at a Michelin starred joint. That correlates directly to the kind of attention your fruit gets at different kinds of custom crush facilities. Most custom crush facilities are going to do a pretty decent job of getting a wine through primary fermentation. Some wineries that do custom crush on the side will treat your lot like one of their own. You pay for that. But it's totally worth it if you're trying to make high quality stuff.Winemaking Expertise. The head winemakers at custom crush factories are legit, real winemakers (most of them). But, they're not paid to make style decisions for you, they're paid to execute a specific service. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, if you custom crush with me, the first question I ask after you tell me tonnage and varietal is "what style of wine do you want to make?" You want a big, hyper-extracted fruit bomb Syrah like Mollydooker makes? If you bring me the right fruit, I can do that. You want a 13% old-world feeling Pinot that gets your DRC memories all vibing? Right fruit? I can do that. You want me to make your Napa cab just like how we make ours? No sweat, grab a beer. When I custom crush, you're paying for my execution and my consulting. That's a different service than a lot of bigger facilities.Quantity is king. Your question says 5-10 tons. That's not very much to most custom crush facilities that probably have an average small tank size of 2500-4000 gallons (those being the smallest tanks they have, going as big as 25k+ gallons). At some facilities, accepting your lot would be an inefficient use of space. Going to a winery that ferments lots of that size all the time, however, isn't going to be a problem.You get what you pay for. That's not to say there aren't some good values. I know for a fact that the kind of custom crush service we provide costs double at some of my friends' facilities. I could probably charge double. But a place that's $500/ton? Who knows what they might do or not do. These are things that are hard to assess without talking to somebody who has made wine there or knowing winemaking intricately enough to be able to smell bullshit/laziness/bad practices.CUSTOM CRUSH HORROR STORY:We have a grower from the Sierra Foothills who grows some above average Petite Sirah and Syrah. With the grape market being what it is, he's been unable to find homes for all his fruit for the past few years. In 2008 he ended up taking some of his Petite Sirah to a custom crush house near him. When he tasted the wine after a few months, he was shocked at how bad it was. He sent us some samples to do analysis. The VA was over the legal limit, the wine had not finished M/L fermentation, had not even finished primary fermentation completely dry, and in general just wasn't very good. He started pressuring them for answers, at which point they told him that they believed in "all natural" winemaking... which apparently meant that they never innoculated with chosen yeasts for primary fermentation and that they relied on wild M/L bacteria to finish M/L (which is a) a horrible idea and b) 99% guaranteed the reason he had a big VA problem). They only added 20 parts of SO2 at the crusher and hadn't added any SO2 after that. In essence, they didn't do shit except pump the wine over and stare at it. $500/ton.There is a difference between custom crushing at a custom crush house and at a winery that makes their own wines. Think about it like this: You have some exotic hardwood lumber, and you want a chair made. Are you going to take the lumber to a guy that mass produces crap for Pier 1 out of fiber board? Or are you going to take that lumber to a carpenter who gets $500/chair for the chairs he sells himself? Who do you think is going to deliver the product that you want?And that's the crux. If you're sitting on the fruit because you can't sell it and you just want it fermented and sold in bulk 20 minutes after harvest so that you can get some cash out of it, that's one thing. But if you want to make a wine that you might actually sell at $40/bottle, that's a whole different kettle of fish. You need to make sure you're going to the right kettle.Anyways, back to costs:You can look at a line by line budget kind of like this, and you need to ask these kinds of questions to get a real cost out of a facility.Custom Crush Tonnage Fee: $350-$3000+/ton.Does that include fermentation products and additions? If not, what products do you want to use and how much do they cost? Remember: SO2, tartaric acid, yeast nutrients, yeast(s), fermentation tannins, polysaccharides, enzymes, DAP, etc. This stuff ain't cheap, and can easily add up to hundreds of dollars/ton.Will your winemaking directions be completely covered by the service agreement in the contract? If you want more than 1 or 2 punchdowns/pumpovers per day, extra labwork, specific fermentation temperature, cold soak, extended maceration, M/L innoculation, etc. Is that all included in the price you were quoted? If not, what will that cost extra? What about racking after pressing, is that included? If you're paying hourly for one or two guys to do this stuff past the original fee, you're probably paying close to $20/hour for any of this additional labor, if not more. This could add up, depending on what's included in the up front price, real fast. Note: Some places even charge for the prepping and labor for pumping the wine into a truck for it to leave the facility. I'm not kidding when I said "nickel and dimed".Do you need to have someone on site to make sure all of your work gets done properly? Some facilities say that you can do whatever you want, but you have to do it. Do you trust these people to execute what you want? If you do need someone on site, how much do they cost? Probably not cheap.Will this include good expertise and advice in regards to quality, style, and best practices? If not, and you need to hire a consultant winemaker to oversee the process, you could be paying more per ton than we've even considered here just for the expertise... consulting fees with the big names are NOT CHEAP.What will it cost me to store the wine here if I don't have it out by deadline? $0.25/gallon per month? Or $2/gallon per month?Once again, none of this includes 24 months of aging at X price per month per gallon/barrel. You can get those costs pretty easily by calling wine storage warehouses throughout Sonoma and Napa. Check winesandvines.com for listings.Aging is going to cost you quite a bit. Plus you will be paying extra for racking, topping, lab work, SO2, etc. Some facilities fleece for those services. Others don't. For example: our very low storage charges (which we often waive if we like the people or they've done us a favor or something) include topping and SO2. Because we're nice like that. That's not standard. Aging can cost you as much or more than primary fermentation... and we're not even talking about new French Oak at over $20/gallon, which you will have to provide unless the facility says they have some used barrels lying around for you to fill up. Don't forget any above and beyond practices that you might want to do: fining, multiple rack and returns, Velcorin, or god forbid you have a problem crop up with Brett or anything else.LONG STORY SHORT: But at the end of the day, the custom crushing itself is really going to cost you $500-3000+/ton, not counting any exterior services. Aging is going to cost you between $0.50-2.00/gallon/month, not including extra services. What you get for these prices, however, can vary greatly.

This was over a decade ago……and you’ll see why Sage is my favorite X-Man…….The Set-UpI was working for a temp-long term consulting agency and they placed me at one of the NY offices of Williams Communications, a multinational telecommunication company. I often don’t talk extensively about my corporate history/experience because of what I was doing, what I was good at.I was a corporate spy.But I was a corporate spy FOR the corporations I was consulting for.So I’m placed in the Marketing and Engineering Dept., answering to two VPs—-Jack and Arthur. I was excited, they were both Black men who had worked their way up and worked for a Senior VP, Craig, another Black man. I was excited to learn and progress in all manner of corporate goodness, I thought they would be excellent business mentors.I would sit at my cubicle outside of Arthur and Jack’s offices and occasionally answer the phone and transfer calls a few times a day. I started bringing magazines (I used to always carry a Vanity Fair to temp assignments—-a good solid 8 hours of reading.) and then I start editing and revising manuscripts I was working on. Suit and tie, backpack, magazine, USB drive, attentively ready.Jack promises work is coming. Arthur is anxious and always bouncing around, talking too fast, too much. But okay….Finally, I go to Jack and explain I’ve been there 6 weeks and while I’m grateful for the non-stressed cash, but there’s got to be something I can do?Jack tells me to close his office door. He gives me an assignment that I can’t talk about with anyone in specifics.Now I Know The Skinny-Two AssignmentsI go back to my desk and the next day boxes of invoices of engineers, technicians, and work done by them come to my desk. Sift through them and prep them for payment. This means that I then have to engage their in-house financial/billing system——that no one is an expert on.Another assignment comes to me: educate the tri-state office entirety of employees. Hundreds. They are then to take a test for their job title/position to be comparable to their skill level in let’s say Level 1, Level 2 or Level 3. (Someone had read about my TAing experience on my resume and thought teaching! But it became a corporate teaching gig…sort of.)So now I have these two massive projects, just me, but what the projects do is they give me, and only me—-insight into EVERYONE. Their work, their skill levels, their billing, their vacation time (people had to sync into my Outlook for me to sync their training classes.) I’m also responsible for setting up remote online training for everyone to be able to access AND send them either the EBook training manual for their appropriate level OR a printed manuscript of the training materials.Ok, as the year of this is unraveling, Arthur quits and goes to the competition and then a year later quits there and comes back. This is important.My CoverMy two on the surface assignments were:Invoice/Work ReconciliationTraining of Tri-State Staff (hundreds of people)I was given Arthur’s corporate credit card often—-I eventually signed his name better than him—-to purchase IT equipment to set up a neighboring conference room for in-house Training of individuals and as my launch/storage space as my work was too much for my cubicle area. Sort of like an office. Sort of.I was also given perks like team dinners (I often would get an entire department certified and technically passed on the Training in a tight window of time) at Morton’s, a swanky steakhouse, when milestones were met AND near-unlimited billing as a Consultant because——wait for it….Arthur signed my billing invoice from the agency every week——and eventually it was a perfunctory matter that I put down my times.I routinely billed 100 hours a week.Arthur thought this was impossible and tried to surprise me by coming into the empty office building on a Saturday—-I was sitting there working.In a few months, I was an expert on their in-house system and clicking through it so well that when the coastal VP came out to scare Craig, Arthur, and Jack, she asked to meet me. Susan. Susan then tasks me with directly working with her, answering only to her and sending my invoices ready to pay only to her—-in California— through the system. We agree that I can get about $40k done a week though there are $2 million dollars or more of invoices to be paid after my forensic accounting.The Shady Truth of the CompanyOkay—-now the back door dish on this whole Invoice BS.There was embezzling going on. It seems that several of the Engineers and Technicians were in league with several Project Managers. The PMs would say send 4 Techs to the Acme Company Construction skyscraper on Broadway to build out a telecom system for the top 10 floors. The PM would invoice that it had taken 200 hours per Tech—-800 hours. However, it had taken only 500 hours. The PM would then kick back 50 hours to each Tech and keep 100 for himself.What I was tasked with doing was syncing up money to time to Tech. Bob couldn’t have been at Acme that week because he was in New Jersey at Orange Inc. And then backtrack that embezzlement to the original assigning, signing off PM. But it was complicated by the fact that Acme had had some work done. So I had to disentangle those 500 actual work hours from 800 padded ones.What the invoices actually were, was my correcting them and the companies being reimbursed what they’d paid for ghost time because there had been rumblings about a mass lawsuit if they weren’t rectified. Susan would then approve say 300 hours at $40,000 in total back to a check cut to Acme for Job # 15 in July 2XXX. They had originally paid maybe $60k in July. The further complication was Acme might have 8 offices throughout the tri-state area so each office’s working techs and PMs had to be scrutinized for overage against work history elsewhere.It gets uglier.It seems that a VP’s husband had made agreements with national Acme Construction for $5 million and they’d only gotten $2 million worth of work. But the VPs husband had used his private shell company. Essentially Acme Inc was getting royally ripped off from the bottom and the top.Susan knew all the details but didn’t have the forensic proof. Jack was her man on the inside. I was the spy given access to everything to proof, step by step, each hourly, daily, monthly rip off and directly tie it to names. I was also a non-Williams consultant. I held allegiance to the task and was “clean” of any wrongdoing or relationships to wrongdoers.When Jack first told me my assignment and my corporate accounting experience, finance experience, and computer experience was the real reason why I was hired and stuck in a corner to become invisible—-I told him from observation of the PMs, Techs, and Dispatchers (the Dispatchers had to be in on it to “fake” send someone somewhere but Dispatcher # 1 might bump John’s hours at Acme Site 3 to 60 hours in Week 19, however, Dispatcher #7 would have recorded his hours as 65 at Orange Inc Site 2 Week 19. The Dispatchers essentially data dumped into a person’s file but couldn’t alter it because the dump itself would create the payout. Within the embezzlers' network, not enough of them knew or had the clearance to alter multiple areas of the system to align time, accounting and presence to payment from the purchasing companies to avoid leaving a trail.)But just visually in the office, I’d spotted at least 4 people who were sporting more bling and expensive clothing than their salaries should’ve allowed.One guy I jokingly said, because he was bald, walked by and had the theme from Shaft played behind him—-I’d seen that cashmere jacket on Quincy Jones on Oprah, I went to Saks, gasped at the price —-there was no way in fuck a PM like Lance could afford it—he was the kingpin of embezzlement.Training? Not ExactlyMy second overlapping undercover assignment was this mass Training. This though was a roundabout thing that I knew held another nut. To do the training, for me to pull all of your information and assign a Level to you and then track you down throughout the tri-state, get you a digital or physical manual, set you up online for a test, broadcast tutorials from the conference room, receive your score and then data store and correlate it—-from my micro/macro beginning-deep insight-to-end perspective—— looked like something else the other side of my screens.I was profiling each and every employee. And using the data to create a measurement profile of them by an objective assessment.Hundreds of People Had to Be Trained Though….Here’s what I did—-On a Saturday and Sunday, I networked into every printer, on desks, and copiers in the entire 4 floors of offices and then queued up Level 1, 2 and 3 manuals and pressed print.40 printers would begin printing.I’d go to the movies. To Saks. To Barnes and Noble.Back in a few hours to change paper and toner, go have lunch on them at a nice restaurant. Return, replenish, go to dinner. Return, move everything to the conference room, fill out that 100-hour invoice and take a car service home. Monday morning I had dozens of manuals going out by office mail and Fed Ex to the tri-state employees.Depending on how well they knew their position/studied the manual the online Training could take 2–8 hours so it was a chore to get hundreds of people within a year to complete.A Stock Market Scandal and Employee ShakedownHere’s what happened:Arthur and the others start mocking me one day because Williams has made an offer to all the full-time employees—-focus your 401k cash into buying Williams Stock and when it hits $50, you could line up at HR for a brand new $50 bill. The current stock price was then maybe in the $20-$30 dollar range.I’m like this feels suspicious but my finance education was new then so I ask a coworker friend who’s BF owns a brokerage house—-I lay out the pieces to him on a conference call and I tell him what I think I’m seeing. He’s amazed that I’m a VPs assistant and asks if I want to work for him?I demure because I can’t explain to them why I’m so highly finance educated for seemingly such a low position. His GF was a Tech but not on the graft. In fact, she came in one Saturday and saw me pushing one of the giant, thousand-pound photocopiers from one side of the building to the other through the elevator lobby. (If I’d had the MSCE training I would’ve known easier how to reroute IP addresses…you’ll see what this digression is about.)The stock price hits $50.HR hands out 50s.Grown adults run through the building screeching like children.I tell them, something’s wrong here.TonyA new VP comes in-—Tony. Very cool, nice, charismatic in a low key way….but his job duties are vague. However, he’s close to Susan. He, Susan and I have closed-door conference calls about my Invoice AND Training process. $40k a week—-confirmed, emails and setups into the training computer system, results being tallied, checking off hundreds of employees with receipt of materials, instructional email, time to test, test results. They’re very interested in not my process but in the end, resulting data.I suggest to Arthur that what I’m doing, which he has a sense of but doesn’t understand, though he’s my supervisor, is the Okey-Doke. He’s a reasonably nice idiot so I’m trying to warn him.Tony fires a dozen Techs, half a dozen PMs and several Dispatchers on a random Monday.Craig the Senior VP, the King Henry of the office and NY offices/tri-state, is upset and promises to swiftly rectify Tony’s insanity. Big Boy (he was a large man) is summarily told to mind his business, Tony’s power comes from the Top—-Susan.Oh, snap.Tony tells me good work.I realize my Invoice work are the bullets.I Figure Out the $50sI suggest that the company is doing something, inflating the stock price by such an infusion of capital——from the employees 401ks; Susan is pushing me to reconcile Invoices to even out the books AND the training are to measure the entire population……for an extinction-level event.I can only tell my friend and her BF, who confirms that’s how you inflate a company for sale, as the buyer’s due diligence is going on: ”Hey, we’re worth $5 billion look at our stock price souring….” AND scoop back all of the employee's money that you’d have to payout.How I Got FiredArthur though jumps the shark——he’s afraid that I’m working too close with Tony. So to stab Tony—-he fires me at 9 am on a Friday——explaining that Williams, valued at well over $4–5 billion…. simply doesn’t have the cash anymore to justify an $80k+ a year consultant like me. I’m the only one on staff. Yes, yes, there are are other “temps”, dozens in fact, but MY check is sinking the company.This is several weeks after I figure out the Extinction Level Massacre about to happen.I say okay. Bye.(Never fire me. I don’t return. Okay, I returned once years later but I’d already been made another offer by a different side of a company for more money to go into effect when my crazy boss fired me…for the third time. She used to fire me on weekends for shits and giggles. Then I flew the coop. She started a corporate nuclear war over me, to get me permanently fired. And lost. Then she got fired a year later. They were so scared of what I would say at her going away party that they told me the wrong time so when I got upstairs it was over. I still got some cake though. :P My friends call me Olivia Pope! lol)I stroll out of Williams in jeans and Timberlands walk several blocks in Midtown to the consulting office and explain that I see every invoice, hell, I might even have signed several for Dispatchers and others (and myself). I am earning them back $250k a year I do so much time at Williams—-I want a new Monday assignment—-I’m not leaving the chair until I get it at a comparable price. I’m that valuable. They have one for me downtown in an hour. I go back to clean out my cubicle.It’s now noonish.Arthur, having received Susan’s invoice check-up call, says they’ve “found some money” and can keep me on.I tell him no thanks, I’ve already accepted another assignment. It would be unprofessional to have accepted and quit now. Sorry. (Not sorry.)I go to my desk and pack for 5 hours. (I FedExed home more office supplies than could fit…on a FedEx truck lol…..)Arthur’s in a panic, he goes back and forth with me. Finally, he calls the agency and they say: “You fired him. If he wants to move on, he can move on.”Tony calls me into his office and asks if I’m really going to go? I say yes. You can’t trust a married man who’s ready to slit your throat AND is having an affair with a married Dispatcher. (They used to make out in Grand Central Station. Eeeeeeww.) Plus, I tell Tony, I’ve assembled all the pieces (weapons)—- I can see what is about to happen. He grins.Susan calls me. I innocently tell her Arthur fired me BUT here are her week’s invoices, teed up, online.Tony prints out a thing for me, like an old-time transcript and picture of a “Rowan”, which is an old form of an Assistant who goes above and beyond, does and is more than his position. He tells me to frame it and he’s my reference, recommendation anywhere I want to go. And he winks, he’ll take care of Arthur.I leave. There are banker’s boxes of $1 million in Invoices left unresolved. Susan hits the roof…in California.Arthur calls me for weeks on end at my new job but I tell him I’m very happy there, can’t leave, it would be unprofessional. He then tricks-transfers me to the Dispatcher he’s wrangled into trying to reconcile the Invoices. I hang up. That was December.It seems that aside from their direct function no one else had developed the synergistic understanding that I had of their in-house computer system to weave my way through its byzantine networks and pull, link, check, verify and tee up from authorization data from Employee, Time, HR, Paychecks, Vendors, and Invoices, essentially like 6 “buildings” within the tri-state structure.I’d spent 18 months really just focused on this one system and then my learning was reinforced setting up the Training using some of the same data.The Invoices aren’t reconciled.January: Susan has to write a check for $2 million because no one knows the system well enough to bang out $1 million in Invoices to figure out the exact amount Acme was over-billed.Hell, I was the best in the country and I was doing only $40k and it took me a week for that.Real Truth (Like the part of the movie where they show you what really happened during the heist.)Actually, it took me about 30 minutes to bang out $40k. I used to do it on the morning of Fridays before Susan’s call. I knew to stretch it out for job security—-and I took the following year off to finish writing a book. I’d been planning on the sabbatical for over a year—-having to kick out a roommate October threw off my plan to exit directly in December/January.The $50 stock price was a sales shill. Williams sells off part of that company using the inflated stock price—-the stock price then drops to under $5. All of the bragging, screeching 401k/pensions are wiped out. Some people like Arthur, Craig, hundreds of others had been there 10–30 years. In many ways, Williams recouped all of that paid out employee invested cash that normally a company has on its books as a form of liability-debt. Williams tricked its employees into investing millions back into the company for $50 each.The Training I was doing was to assemble a Hit List. If you got below a certain number, say 70, on the test that was about your positions knowledge of the computer system, you were terminated.Tony terminated 200 people in that building by April. He kept 8. It was a desert, a cubicle desert when I visited a year later.I saw Arthur a couple of years later, ironically with his wife in Grand Central and he told me about the massacre—-I already knew from my friend who was one of the 8 Tony saved (and I had warned).Arthur had crawled back to another company and taken essentially a PM position at a quarter of his salary. Jack was kept. Craig was fired.Arthur asked what I was doing. I explained I was Senior VP of a telecom company, gave him the name and a business card told him to send me his resume.He plotzed.The Behind The Scenes of My ThinkingThis was not the first time my investigative, forensic, IT, financial and teaching skills have been harnessed to such a melee weapon. While it wasn’t my fault, and no, I don’t feel responsible for weeding out thieves and ill-trained, fake skilled folk—-I do feel like mythic Cassandra sometimes…..But no one EVER listens, which I find hilarious. And sobering. I generally look at my corporate work along those lines as not a warning bell but as an effort to see clearly.The Gallups Talents surveying assessment has Strategic, Ideation and Futuristic as three of my 5 Talents. I use all three—-I used them there (I didn’t discover Gallup for another decade when I went back to teaching and was working with adult students to help them find their Strengths.)Ideation allowed me to understand EVERYTHING as I was slowly sitting there just absorbing, playing with the in-house system, watching people. Most importantly their in-house system—-I could literally see it’s byzantine, massive warrens in my head and like a boy with a pet octopus, talk to it to perform multiple unified functions.Strategic helped me navigate on a micro-level through all the work itself and getting it effectively done and then on a macro level see the ramifications of my work as well as what one thing—-$50 bills, 401k investments, and Tony’s arrival could “mean”. It took me a while to understand that a tsunami was coming but all of the tide washing back, animals fleeing, air pressure changes allowed me to pack myself (and warn a friend) and make a plan to leave by the end of the year because I suspected there wouldn’t be much thereafter that. To that end, I was in my 20s, it was one of the first times I’ve had that Strength pressed from so many directions and levels.Futuristic allowed me to backward design and plot out outcomes and see pattern-based possibilities and what to do, not do, plot alongside, pocket resources and know when to leave. I was emotionally disappointed when I understood how all of these moving pieces, my work the generative engine would end because I did want to become a permanent employee—-a Tech, a PM maybe. Which is why Arthur’s limiting me and then firing me hurt so much. I would’ve stayed, Tony and Susan asked me too but I knew that it would mean Arthur, and a few others, got what they richly deserved if I left. I got out of the way realizing I was also Arthur’s shield as long as he was the supervisor , technically of me and my projects. I walked out of the factory but didn’t put the lead shield back down over the radioactive core.Why I Got FiredWhile Arthur was a fool, he wasn’t a complete villain ( but he was a jerk/asshole with malicious intentions), which is why I tried to “warn” him of my prescient pattern seeing. But an aspect I hadn’t considered that my friend who worked there brought up was that when she would come over to his office I’d be there, sometimes sitting at his desk while he talked to me—-and I’d be directing operational stuff through the computer, outlining plans, etc.She said there were times, with his credit card going around town to Best Buy and other places buying computer equipment for my conference room office/training studio, training programs (I had to learn and bring Techs in to set up essentially an online video training system that could be accessed 24/7—-this was in the early days of things like YouTube)—— that I was taking his place, directing him as the subordinate. He might have felt a certain way about that secretly—-been threatened, felt I was setting him up to take his job, so he tried to cut me first not knowing how thick my relationship/value with Tony and Susan was.Now from my perspective, I always think of my skills and abilities being to who I, a Rowan, am working for—-Arthur first. Then Jack. Then Tony. Then Susan. Jack stayed invisible, in the cut—-he eventually got Arthur’s job. But I had no designs on Arthur’s job.I’ll tell you when Arthur lost this Rowan’s fealty.MSCE Training—-Give a Nerd His CandyThe Techs had evening trainings where they trained each other or other staff. One Tech, who was also funny and cute, who was Microsoft System Engineer Certified, offered it as an in-house evening training. For any and everyone who signed up.I wanted it so badly, I’d already bought the books a year before. I’d been doing MS Office software certifications and gotten 7 of them. But MSCE was like $4000…and then it was FREE downstairs with the Techs in the later evenings. I had attended 3 of the sessions when Arthur kiboshed it to be ONLY Techs saying that it would overtax me to getting my Invoice & Training projects done. That was BS. That’s when I realized he was frightened of my getting too much training and wanted to reserve me to only service his light.See, if he’d let me get what I wanted, the option of maybe being a Tech or just having the knowledge, I would’ve protected him as a loyal Rowan should. I could have then gone into the company as Tech or a PM. Even if I remained under him, his department, I would have had the requisite experience and certifications to command a greater salary as a FT employee of the company. It was a heavy skill based tier system, of pay. I’d stayed away from taking a permanent position with them because I was making more as a consultant—-but I did want into this big company where I had skill/value. I just needed higher certifications. That was very expensive and close to my desk and work schedule.When he kiboshed me, I cut all loyalty strings. So when he fired me, I’d “left” months before——which is why I was drawing out the Invoices. My plan was to quit at the end of the year. He knew I’d had to kick out my roommate in October, pay $5000 in back rent, so I was suddenly in apparent need of the job and he fired me the first week of November.Which is why I left $1 million in Invoices in his lap.And Susan eviscerated him for it, through Tony—-who I immediately sensed was the guidance system to the “missiles” I was “building”.Tony was clearly the Hatchet Man but Arthur, Craig, and others didn’t sense that until he started cutting…….I saw them lining them up, fleecing them of their 401k cash—-quite a few of the FT employees were nasty to me—-treating me like ”the temp”, couple of sexuality digs, etc., etc.Even Arthur did me some to my face dirt, he had given me his Dispatcher girlfriend's paperwork in a FedEx packet to express to Texas—where HR processed hirings. No one ever knew that he hesitated to hand it to me, she was sitting there smirking in his office but I sealed it in front of them and went to mail it. I actually went to the men’s room on another floor and opened it to confirm where her position would be. If they’d been setting her up to come into his department—-I was his “department”—-I was going to trash the paperwork and quit, leaving the Invoices and Training high and dry.Luckily, he was simply making her permanent in the Dispatcher Dept. But as an FT company employee she had their Dispatcher certification would have made more than me if I became an Employee without certifications. He was setting her up lovely for her loyalty but not mine, while his wife and funny looking daughter sat at home and her husband sat in Iraq.Yeah, it was that kind of 48 Laws of Power (which I’d read) kind of place.That comeback dharma is a bitch. And I put the itch into bitch.What Arthur Should’ve DoneHe thought he was maintaining an In with Tony and Susan through me. He was. He should have never tried to weaponize me against them out of fear nor minimize me to neutralize me. He should have built me up, let me go to the classes and then brought in a couple of people to “help” me as he had done before to small Tech teams to get the video/training links set up and coordinated (which is when I would force him to come up off the corporate Visa and take us all out to dinner at Morton’s steakhouse.).He should have had me train others on what I was doing to minimize my value and/or breed more fealty into me by getting me into the company fold itself where he would’ve had more leverage over me. By still being with the agency I had that 1-Hour Option to take my hefty skill set and walk out the door and be employed an hour later.Technically speaking, I was the agency’s Rowan. Not Williams’, nor Arthur’s. I was bringing them $250k a year and getting less than half of that. He should’ve bumped me up slightly above my take-home from them with cash and benefits, but made me a Williams employee, under him. And surrounded me with lesser pawns of his design. He didn’t take advantage of time and my inability to say no to training others in what exactly I was doing so that he could control the process of the Invoices. He tried to control me instead of the ball itself—-the Invoices—-which would have given him leverage over Tony and Susan. The leverage move would then have been to take Craig’s place—-where he was aiming, Craig was talking retirement—-by consolidating his power, building his own X-Men.But Arthur was limited in several ways:He was charismatic, a natural salesman, which is how he’d been a Tech then, a PM but he wasn’t much of a VP strategist.He let his personal business become office scuttlebutt. As a married man schtupping a married Dispatcher (an office manager said I should talk to him about how indiscreet he was. I was like now I’m Betty Curry too?) It was too volatile of an office—-gossiping, backstabbing, embezzling—-to have a scarlet letter on your backs. Also, a man loses trust and a woman loses 50% of professional respect when an affair is office knowledge. Tony was (and still is) a seriously committed family man. He didn’t care about my sexuality, he cared about integrity. Arthur failed Tony’s personal assessment of him as well as professional.The Dispatcher goomah should’ve been his secret weapon to sidle up to me as my assistant. Get the skinny on the work process. He used her for temporary gain/she used him for temporary gain.It was wartime in the USA, she didn’t look “good” cheating on her soldier husband. It made people, particularly the women in the office (always the office moral backbone) feel a certain way about her. She was dismissed as a whore essentially. And unAmerican. Didn’t help she was Haitian with an accent. (No, she wasn’t that pretty.)When he’d quit and come back part of that was to tee him up to secede Craig. It was his job to lose, which he did. He should have just stayed in the cut, recognizing that Tony and Susan were using his resources (me) as their objective weapon. He was already in, which is what I was trying to tell him.Jack stayed in the cut after teeing me up to what my skillset had been hired for. He was often giving me behind the scenes skinny. I became his conduit and shield. He took a demotion to PM, stayed in the company and after a while filled the massive vacuum as a VP. He saw the coming culling/war and entrenched himself in good work and simply huddled out the bombings. He was one of the 8 left by an act of humility to allow himself to be demoted.Arthur was nervous, anxious, all the time, paranoid. I’ve noticed that the VPs I’ve worked for who don’t play to create value, every boat rising around them and long game, tend to burn out. They tend to believe that their position, title and mystique (there is none) of the VP title means they are a stone’s toss from the seat of power. When in fact, the title of VP, is often an ego bone tossed to managers.Tony’s title? Director of Special Projects.My title? Administrative/Executive Assistant.Power never lies in titles nor the most highly compensated.I waited and watched and then as a lynch-pin, accepted being fired and refused to return. Eventually, the agency threatened Arthur if he kept trying to contact me.As a Final, Final addendum: What I LearnedIt was after Williams that I started doing a Work Journal where I keep track ofwhat I did,what I learned,what I likedand what I didn’t like about particular jobs/assignments/projects.What I also learned to do and evaluate myself against was:Here’s what controls how much you earn:How good you are at what you do? (I am good at Working because of my Work Ethic. I can outwork you and damn near anyone else. You won’t hear me grumble until 100+ hours of work in a week. (And by then most people are gone anyway.))How high is the demand for what you can do?How valuable your work is to the marketplace?How easy it is to replace you (People with a Strong Work Ethic are taking over—-they’re called immigrants, why do you think there’s such foreigner fear?)How you get good/ahead:Be better at what you do (than those around you—-I purposefully go out of my way to get certifications, degrees and take skill builders that others can’t/won't. What I’d been doing before, during and after Williams was taking short evening computer classes so I was Advanced/Certification level (ironically a few years later I’d be tapped to train hundreds in the official certifications) for MS Office, web design, graphic design, programming. That continuous immersion in computers, programming, design etc is what made it so easy to understand William's byzantine system—-it was essentially several different kinds of software applications—-Dispatchers, PMs and Techs, tended to specialize in their “form” of software in the system. I was able to overview master it as an entirety because I was studying similar components. Which is what I found intellectually stimulating about the job. And why I was so interested in the MCSE training as a natural evolution of what I’d been doing but couldn’t immediately afford.))Be in an industry that is growing.Increase the value you are able to deliver.Be hard to replaceI try to teach my students these ideas/methodologies now. Often I find it’s knowledge most people who work at any level don’t know because they are unaware of how they are evaluated by the systems they’re in, by supervisors, and by what their overall thinking should be about the position/work. Most people go to work like a donkey to carrot and don’t think about the road or where all of the carrots are coming from or why they can’t reach the carrot.As a horrible hammer to point—-the employees who voluntarily shifted their 401k/life savings to Williams’ stock for a $50 bill—-donkeys to carrots who were tricked to trade their millions of stored, compound interest increasing carrots for 1 $50 dollar bill.#KylePhoenix#TheKylePhoenix