Chapter 1 – Laid Off From His Own Company

Marcus Calloway was fifty-one years old when the HR director he’d hired himself, three years earlier, called him into a conference room and explained, with a rehearsed gentleness that made it worse, that his position was being “eliminated as part of a broader restructuring.”

He had co-founded Calloway-Vance Precision Components twenty-six years earlier, in a rented garage outside Flint, machining parts for the auto industry with a partner, Victor Vance, who had brought the capital while Marcus brought the engineering knowledge that actually made the parts worth buying.

“This comes from the board,” the HR director said, sliding a severance agreement across the table. “Victor felt it was important you hear it from HR rather than from him directly. He thought it would be less personal that way.”

Marcus almost laughed at that — less personal, from the man he’d built a company with for a quarter century, who apparently couldn’t be bothered to deliver the news himself. “Did the board actually vote on this,” he asked, “or did Victor simply tell you it was a board decision?”

The HR director’s hesitation answered the question more clearly than any words could have. Marcus signed nothing that day, walked out with his personal belongings in a single cardboard box, and drove home to tell his wife that after twenty-six years, he’d just been fired from the company that still had his last name on half its patents.

He was, for the first time since he was twenty-five, entirely unemployed.